Welcome Home Prank

While I was at work on Friday, I thought that it would be nice to play a joke on a coworker who was returning from Las Vegas. I wanted to be sure that she had something nice to welcome her back after a few days out of the office, and it just so happened that there were thunderstorms coming into the area.

I called her up on her cell phone and told her that we needed to get all the machines in the building shut down in case of lightning. Before I even had the statement out of my mouth, she was trying to give me her password. Sometimes it’s just too easy. Armed with her password, I logged in as her.

After logging in, I closed all of the open applications on her machine, moved the mouse pointer down to the bottom left corner (so it was all but invisible) and took a screen shot of her computer at rest. Then I hid all of the desktop icons (pretty easy in Windows XP – you just right click on the desktop and uncheck the “show desktop icons” option under “arrange icons”) and I set the taskbar to auto-hide. Finally, I changed her desktop wallpaper to the screenshot that I had taken of what her desktop looked like before I messed with it.

If you’re following all of those steps then you realize that at this point her screen looks just like her normal desktop complete with icons and a taskbar, but it’s just a picture of that stuff. It’s not actually icons and a taskbar. Nothing is really going to work unless she happens to pull the mouse all the way to bottom of the screen and bring up the real taskbar.

You should have been here this morning. It was really great! She was having a time trying to figure out why her application icons didn’t work. Why the right click menus didn’t work. When she finally did something running, why it kept disappearing from the taskbar. It was classic.

Now my only fear is what she might think up when I’m gone to Connecticut in a couple of weeks.