4 ms·

This reminds me of an old practical joke gone wrong. Back around 1990 we had a college lab full of PC XT clones on an early Novell network on 'thinnet' (shared

by mutagen 10y ago

This reminds me of an old practical joke gone wrong. Back around 1990 we had a college lab full of PC XT clones on an early Novell network on 'thinnet' (shared coax cable instead of star topology twisted pair to a switch). Some of the games floating around relied on the original PC's 4.77 MHz clock and ran too quickly on our 'turbo' 10 MHz machines so there was a slowdown utility that generated regular interrupts looping over a NOP to allow the games to run. I thought it would be a great prank to put this slowdown utility on the boot floppies and AUTOEXEC.BAT of half the machines in the room and watch my classmates scratch their heads over some slow computers. Instead, it messed with the CSMA/CD (collision handling) on the network cards and essentially brought that portion of the network down. I showed up to a very angry network admin who had spent hours troubleshooting network cards and cable before finally finding one of the affected boot floppies. Fortunately (for me) he blamed another group and I escaped the full brunt of his wrath. Shared medium, wired or wireless, always offers some extra fun.

sheepleherd 10y ago
pranks that surprise people, ok. pranks that waste somebody's time, not ok. I never want my time wasted, and I know that I can be fooled, there is no real challenge to wasting my time.
- glial 10y ago
  It's been 25 years, forgive the poor soul.
  - sheepleherd 10y ago
    ha ha, good one! :) but my personal peeve is actually a little different: regardless of whether I'm part of a unique group or it works this way for everybody, the different parts of my brain remember the prank differently and at different rates of speed, so even after the prank is revealed/resolved, the part of my brain that flinches keeps remembering the lie, not the truth. Like, my gf recently April fools' pranked me that my favorite restaurant was going to close soon. Now, every time I pass the place or think of it it, I immediately think "and I've got to go there soon before it closes" even though immediately after that I think "oh, no, that was a prank" I still have the surge of emotion. In terms of the prank, I get it, my reaction was funny. But in terms of time wasted, it's worse because it's Attention Deficit time, and I know I continue to find it sooo irritating well beyond the momentary pleasure she got out of it.

by mutagen 10y ago

sheepleherd 10y ago

pranks that surprise people, ok. pranks that waste somebody's time, not ok. I never want my time wasted, and I know that I can be fooled, there is no real challenge to wasting my time.

glial 10y ago
It's been 25 years, forgive the poor soul.
- sheepleherd 10y ago
  ha ha, good one! :) but my personal peeve is actually a little different: regardless of whether I'm part of a unique group or it works this way for everybody, the different parts of my brain remember the prank differently and at different rates of speed, so even after the prank is revealed/resolved, the part of my brain that flinches keeps remembering the lie, not the truth. Like, my gf recently April fools' pranked me that my favorite restaurant was going to close soon. Now, every time I pass the place or think of it it, I immediately think "and I've got to go there soon before it closes" even though immediately after that I think "oh, no, that was a prank" I still have the surge of emotion. In terms of the prank, I get it, my reaction was funny. But in terms of time wasted, it's worse because it's Attention Deficit time, and I know I continue to find it sooo irritating well beyond the momentary pleasure she got out of it.