Engineer was so sick of office pranks, he 'wiped' his antagonist's disk

Monday mornings are no joke, so The Register always tries to lighten them up with a new installment of "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace japes, mistakes, and escapes.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Joe" who told us that while studying for an electrical engineering degree in the late 1990s, he scored a gig in the messaging lab at an Australian mobile carrier.

"The office there was full of practical jokers," he wrote. "Boxes of confetti balanced on a door, a bag of prawn heads left under the carpet in one of the senior engineer's cars, hand cream on the phone earpieces... all the usual stuff."

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Joe told us that one colleague, whom he suggested we call "TF," took the pranks a little too far.

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"TF liked to sneak up behind me and ROAR in my ear to scare me in the hope I would jump," Joe wrote. "As this was not an especially clever tactic, I resolved to make my revenge a legendary once-and-for-all-time affair."

Joe couldn't find an opportunity until his last week in the job, which helpfully coincided with TF attending a conference.

"All the PCs had Borland C compilers installed," Joe explained. "I used it to write a completely harmless program that looked exactly like MS-DOS formatting a disk."

The program even wrote junk data to a temporary file so the PC's disk activity light would flash, making the fake formatting operation more convincing.

After a few minutes of blinkenlights faking the formatting, the program displayed a message revealing the prank.

Joe added the program to autoexec.bat so it would run whenever the PC booted, but set it to termintate immediately until a month after his departure.

"About five or six weeks later I got a phone call from one of the other guys," Joe recalled. "You're a bloody genius, TF just about shat himself this morning."

"Mission accomplished!" Joe declared. By then, he was safely out of the job.

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Have you pranked your way to revenge? Email Who, Me? and tell us how it went. ®