Jokes - http://maxpages.com/state/Practical_Jokes

Recipe for LARGE quantities of soapsuds:

1. Fill a large bucket with hot water.

2. Empty contents of one bottle of dishwashing detergent into bucket (Ivory,
Joy, Dawn, or equivalent).

3. Drop in a few pounds of dry ice that has been crushed to small pieces.

4. STAND BACK!

Recipe will fill a phone booth, or a small room (or even a big one).
A friend and I once did this in the bed of his truck. While stopped at
traffic signals the whole bed would fill up to the rim with suds. Then,
as we would accelerate away from the light, large "chunks" would break loose
and waft lazily through the air, causing much consternation to the traffic
behind. On the freeway the result was much smaller pieces of suds billowing
out of the back of the truck. It looked like a snowstorm! It's funnier to
see than the description sounds. We were hysterical.

Also, the soap can be omitted from the above to obtain fog. A phone booth
that is opaque with dense fog looks pretty strange too.

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Okay, this is something me and my best friend did to our Comp. Sci.
teacher senior year of high school.

We started this joke by getting into heated arguments for a
week before the actual event and of course everything was building up
a big head of steam. By this time the other kids knew something was
up and we let them in on the joke, so now we have about 30 people
helping in our cause.
Anyway, on the day of the crime we went to the school's
dressing room and, since we were both active in the drama club, no one
asked what we were there for. So, I get ready for the fun by making
myself a nice layer of plasti-skin and filled it with stage blood.
Danny, my friend, obtained the services of a prop knife, you know one
of the ones that retract and we tested the depth of the cut with the
thickness of the skin, it was right, so now we are set.
We walk into class seperated by about a minute and we start
right where we had left off, teh name calling, the pushing and all the
other aspects of high schoolers that don't like each other. So Danny
pulls the knife out of his pocket and yells, "That's it Ray, you're
dead." So he swings at my neck and the knife cuts the plasti-skin and
the stage blood goes everywhere, I crumple in a gurgling heap and lay
prone under the table of trash80's. Mr. Waddington comes up and sees
Danny standing over me with a blood covered knife and sees me
apparently dead starts to roll me over. I flop over like any good
corpse and he dabs at the blood now covering my neck and says the line
I was waiting for, "My God you killed him!" At that moment, I opened
my eyes and asked him what he was doing. I have heard of peoples
faces going white and now I saw it.
After he relised what we had done, he congradulated us on a
job well done.

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Where I used to work, one of the group leaders used to have a
Playboy calender. One of the young ladies who objected to the posting
did a mastectomy \& placed the paper in the phone between the pickup
and the connection. The phone seemed to be complete, but did not work.

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One prank I haven't seen listed yet is the one I used to do at summer
camp and the college dorm. Take the top off the toilet tank. Inside,
there is usually a vertical plastic pipe about 1 inch in diameter.
Going into the top of this pipe is a little plastic tube. Turn the
tube outward and, if it is long enough, then put it toward the toilet
bowl with the end just sticking out. Replace the tank cover, making
sure that the little plastic tube is just sticking out. When someone
flushes, the tube will squirt water.

One time in Colorado I did this at 3:00am. The guy that got caught
must have flushed with his elbow while still seated. His back was
sprayed with ice cold water. His language was abominable, and made
funnier since this was a Christian camp. Oh well, we're all human.

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These are computer-related practical jokes played by an old
acquaintence years ago at a nameless university in Northern
California. He wisened up and stopped playing them when the
various administrations of the computer centers found out who
it was. Sometimes I simply could not believe that he would do
things like this.

The first one was probably the worst. The undergraduate computer
center was being connected to a large terminal lab across campus via
a long line across campus. This had taken the technical folks who
worked at the computer center months of planning, pulling cables,
attaching lines, reconfiguring the system, and so forth.

It was at about this time that Jack (not his real name), wrote a
program called "GARB" (short for "Garbage") This program sat in the
background running at low priority. It would choose a random interval,
sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes, sleep for that interval, and
then wakeup. At that point, it would choose a random ASCII character
and then choose a random terminal on that computer and send the character
to the terminal. Then it would loop back into its sleep mode until the
next time it woke up.

The administration and technical people spent weeks wondering why
their attempts at connecting cross-campus cables were causing spurious
data across existing lines, as well as the lines that had been connected.
They had people out there with the elaborate technical equipment trying
to trace down the source of the "noise" that was polluting the terminal
lines with stray characters.

Quite a while later, they did indeed discover the problem and confronted
Jack. I'm not sure what happened after that.

Another thing Jack did, before that, was write a program called "GOD".
It would patch the running monitor and actually insert a jump into the
code that performed the logout-job function within the monitor. The
jump simply took control of the monitor to a patch-area elsewhere
within memory where a simple comparison took place to see if the
logout being requested was of any jobs belonging to Jack. If so, it
simply did a no-op, with an appropriate return-condition indicating
success (so that the calling program which initiated the system call
would not know the job had not been logged out). This program, "GOD"
most came in handy to Jack during the wee morning hours when few
people used the system but the proverbial "wheel wars" occurred, in
which enabled superusers with privileges attempted to conquer each other
in various ways.

Needless to say, none of the above behavior is tolerated by the
administration any more, with good reason.

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Propose to the victim a co-ordination test, and tell him that it has been
taken by the brightest people around you (quote some scores!). You sit in
front of the victim and put your palms about twelve inches apart. The victims
task is very simple. With eyes closed, his palms clasped together, he should
cautiously take his palms between your palms, remove them, and repeat the
process. Of course he must not touch your palms otherwise he "looses". Each
cycle counts as one point and "any average person can get 100 points". As I
said, tell him the scores of some other people you know.

Let him paractice a little with his eyes open. Then blindfold him (to avoid
the "natural" temptation of cheating) and say START. After a while leave. it
is a hilarious sight to see a person rock his clasped palms back annd forth
for no obvious reason.

Be sure to invite many of your friends to witness this sight. You will find
that this co-ordination test really sounds sincere, and many innocent people
who listen to you explaining to the chosen victim, actually volunteer to take
the test before the victim. This gives you a choice of victims to choose from.

OK, OK... I insisted on taking this test too and made a fool of myself !!

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1. This one happened impromptu. A group of us were novice UNIX hacks working
for our department of computer science, all on similar terminals. I had
written a small program that would transmit a single character at a time to
another terminal. (No big deal, but no one else had tried it.) One guy was
typing away, and I was making his cursor "wiggle" by pressing the forward and
reverse arrow keys. He exclaimed that something was wrong with his cursor.
Another guy picked up on this, and explained that the cursor beam must be loose.
He gave the right side of the first guy's (John's) terminal a good hard whack,
I transmitted a carriage return. John laughed, but actually sat there typing
in (some text), and whacking the side of the terminal every time he needed a
carriage return, FOR SEVERAL MINUTES. Needless to say, we were hysterical.

The second guy, (Tim), says "John, watch this!" and put his hand under John's
desk and gave the underside of the desk another whack: I transmitted a "HOME"
character, moving the cursor to the top of the screen, again as if the whack
had moved the cursor. John continues typing, whacking the bottom and side of
the terminal whenever he needs cursor motion. Tim smacks the top of the
terminal and I transmit a CLEAR key: it looked as if the characters have been
"knocked off" the screen. John is just about the get the lab manager when
we clue him in.

2. I once had a job as a COBOL programmer. A particular program was to
input no more than 20 items from an operator, and them produce the appropriate
report from them. I asked my boss what the program should do if the
operator wanted more than 20 items to appear in the report. He said, oh,
that will never happen. But what if it does, I asked. Gruffly, he said,
have it notify the operator.

This particular machine had a seriously loud bell (control G) that sounded
like a real bell, plus it was fairly easy to make the screen flash off and on.
I coded it to flash and ring the alarm for a minute. I tried it once and
it was truly alarming. I never heard if anybody tried to enter more than
twenty items, but it is something I think about from time to time ...

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on the subject of practical jokes on the computer, i pulled the following
one. when i was in college at new mexico tech (located in socorro, which
is spanish for help!), i was a programmer for several departments. as a
result, i was setting up some user interfaces. the machine was a dec 20
(with tops20) and there was a central terminal room with about thirty adm 3s
(now, there is a terminal) in it. anyway, when this 20 went down in a
controled manner it would send out a warning "dec 20 going down", then
three dots at one second intervals, then a "p", then go down. when it came
up, it would send out a message "dec 20 coming up", then three dots at
one second intervals, then a "p", then the login header. anyway, the
victum sat down to use a statistical package (it is so much fun to play with
people whose use canned stat packages). after he had been on for ten
minutes, he received the dec 20 going down sequence and then his terminal
went dead. so he waited (about five minutes). however, all during this
time, everyone around him was typing away merrily. finally he asked if
the system had gone down. everyone said no. then he asked the operator.
again no. then the system manager. he finally brought back the user
servant (someone paid to answer user's questions) back to the terminal.
they played with the switches, then the user servant scratched his head
and said "beats me". about this time, the message "dec system 20
reengaged" appeared on his terminal, then the three dots, then the "p",
then the message "automatic login in effect, status at crash resumed"
and he was right where he left off! the program that caused this then
deleted (and expunged) itself. to this day, i don't think he knows what
happened to him.

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Another practical joke under the guise of a co-ordination test is the
following. Ask your victim to take a quarter and place it on a piece of
paper. Then ask him to take a pencil, and without removing his finger off
the quarter, to draw a circle around the quarter. Have him repeat the same
exercise with each of his fingers pressing on top of the quarter. Afterwards,
have him pick up the quarter and rub it along the bridge of his nose. It'll
then be really funny to watch him walk around with a black line on his face.

I also have heard of a practical joke that can be done to a person while
he/she is sleeping. If the person's hand is dipped in warm water, this
causes a subconscious relaxation of the bladder and causes the person to
wet his/her bed. I have never tried this, nor have I seen it tried, but I've
heard it from quite a few people. Has anyone out there ever tried it?

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This is true. It seems that a colleague and myself are scheduled to
present a paper next month at an AI conference. We've never heard of
the conference nor did we write a paper.

Also, just today I got a letter that begins "Thank you for agreeing to
serve as chairperson of the following session at ICASSP-87 in Dallas,
texas." I've never met nor spoke to the person sending the letter nor
did I agree to be a chairperson. Either someone is setting me (us) up
or this is a sneaky way to get volunteers.

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A computer related practical joke a played in my younger days
(2 years ago...) was to write an unstoppable program (disabled
break, CTRL-C, etc...) that would imitate the login procedure. I
would leave it running on a public terminal and whenever
somebody tried to logon, it would always print the message
'User validation error' (Or whatever message corresponding
to the operating system [that was VAX/VMS.] login error)
and loop back.

Meanwhile, the user ID and the password were written in a file
in my directory...

The only way to get out of the program was to turn off the
gandalf box.

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Back in the good old college days, when pulling all-nighters (sure, you must
have done some of those before!), at about 2 or 3am, try calling someone to
"remind" them to go to the bathroom (or do something). Wait for half-an-hour
or so, call again just to make sure s/he did what you asked them to do earlier!

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When I was out at Union College in Schenectady N.Y, we had a great college
radio station that would give away pizzas, movie passes, clothes, etc. for
answering trivia questions throughout the day. One day, my friend and I
recorded a trivia question on our tape deck and kept the tape in the deck.
A little later one of our good friends came over to visit and we were all
listening to the campus station. As soon as one of the songs ended, we turned
on the tape with out our friend noticeing and the D.J asked a trivia question
for a large pizza. Our friend knew the answer and since he was closed to the
phone, he immediatly picked it up and dialed the station. He was really excited
that he got through and started yelling the answer at the mystified D.J. He was
incredibly embarrased, we were trying so hard not to laugh it hurt.

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DEC 20 practical jokes were rampant at an undergraduate computer center
I once frequented. One practical joker, call him Jack (yes, the same
Jack mentioned in an earlier message on this list), wrote a program
that was really rather nasty.

This program maintained two tables or arrays of strings. The strings
would be things like:

[FROM TTY NN: HI SWEETIE, JUST CAUGHT YOU LOOKING AT ME]
or
[FROM TTY NN: HEY YOU GORGEOUS HUNK, COME OVER AND MEET ME]

The program would cycle through the system sending out these messages
occasionally to a random terminal, insuring that the terminal mentioned
in the terminal messages above would have an actual logged-in job.
The person who received the message would either be a) annoyed b)
flattered and want to meet their admirer or c) angry.

I heard that many meetings of users resulted from this program.

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Some friends of mine in high school used to turn in assignments from the old
IBM /370 with start of execution at 07:58:00 Dec 7 1941 (apologies about the
time if in error, but history is not my forte).

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The hardest to do/forget practical joke that I know is a variation on
the theme of dismantling something large and then reassembling it in
someone's office/apartment/dorm room.

Locally there was a VP who was a Volkswagen Beetle Fan, so for his
birthday, some of the people who work for him stuck one in his office.
It made the newspaper when the refused to take it apart.

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Allow me to be the first to recommend an excellent book of $really$
nasty revenge getters. It's called "Getting Even: the complete book
of Dirty Tricks" (in 2 volumes, I believe) Unfortunately, I don't
have my copy here, so I can't give the author's name, but I think
it (they?) was published by Paladin Press.

It contains real gems for all occasions. (mad at the landlord that
evicted you? seal the apartment after introducing 10-15 cats and
plenty of food/water)

Warning: most of these dirty tricks are $really$ nasty, don't use
these on people you might have to deal with in the future.

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In 1972 I was working at a very boring job in an aerospace factory.
There were three guys my age (early 20's) in the department and we
werw always playing what we saw as a joke on some poor unsuspecting
soul. I was also in the Navy Reserve at the time and had to take
two weeks off during the Summer to due my training. When I returned
from two weeks off, not yet bored enough yet to begin playing more
jokes, the other three guys went off their heads pulling any kind of
trivial, dangerous or otherwise obnoxious stunt they could think of.
At the end of the second day the supervisor called me into the office
and said:

"Jones, I don't know what's the matter with you but you better knock
it off. I've had two weeks of peace and quiet while you were gone
and now that you're back all hell's breaking loose. You go on back
out there and stop bothering people."

I knew that I hadn't done anything but I didn't bother to protest.
I could recognize a well executed joke when I saw one.

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