I go for a variation of this if a coworker leaves their computer unlocked when they leave for lunch or the day.
Screenshot their whole desktop, hide all icons and the toolbar. Set the background to the screenshot. Boom a computer that looks exactly the same as before but doesn’t work.
Quick, non permanent, takes a few minutes to work out, lesson learned to not leave your machine unlocked.
That’s a classic. We did it for a while. We moved on to all out warfare.
We had a script that backed up the current desktop exactly the way it was then changed everything about it. It would change all system sounds to the original My Little Pony theme, change the background to a Friendship is Magic wallpaper, change the mouse pointer to a tiny pony with trailing sparkles, and remove edit rights to those files from the account using it. To get things back to normal you had to take ownership of the affected files.
One guy couldn’t figure it out and disconnected his internal speaker because someone had set up some policy deep in the system where he lost sound settings. I don’t know how that worked. Apparently neither did he.
Another guy worked remotely the next day so his computer just kept playing the song while he was gone.
The guy who created it didn’t get a normal birthday cake. The boss got him a My Little Pony birthday cake that year.
What a lot of folks didn’t realize and never asked about was that there was a reversal script in the user folder.
I go for a variation of this if a coworker leaves their computer unlocked when they leave for lunch or the day.
Screenshot their whole desktop, hide all icons and the toolbar. Set the background to the screenshot. Boom a computer that looks exactly the same as before but doesn’t work.
Quick, non permanent, takes a few minutes to work out, lesson learned to not leave your machine unlocked.
Putting a piece of tape over their mouse eye is good also.
That’s a classic. We did it for a while. We moved on to all out warfare.
We had a script that backed up the current desktop exactly the way it was then changed everything about it. It would change all system sounds to the original My Little Pony theme, change the background to a Friendship is Magic wallpaper, change the mouse pointer to a tiny pony with trailing sparkles, and remove edit rights to those files from the account using it. To get things back to normal you had to take ownership of the affected files.
One guy couldn’t figure it out and disconnected his internal speaker because someone had set up some policy deep in the system where he lost sound settings. I don’t know how that worked. Apparently neither did he.
Another guy worked remotely the next day so his computer just kept playing the song while he was gone.
The guy who created it didn’t get a normal birthday cake. The boss got him a My Little Pony birthday cake that year.
What a lot of folks didn’t realize and never asked about was that there was a reversal script in the user folder.