Engineer Takes Revenge on Office Prankster by Wiping Hard Drive

In a humorous twist on workplace pranks, an engineer known as “Joe” recounted how he sought revenge on a colleague who relentlessly tormented him with practical jokes. This incident occurred while Joe was studying electrical engineering in the late 1990s at an Australian mobile carrier.

The office environment was rife with pranks, including confetti traps and hidden items meant to surprise unsuspecting colleagues. However, one employee, referred to as “TF,” escalated the antics by startling Joe with loud roars from behind, prompting Joe to plan a more elaborate retaliation.

As Joe’s time at the company drew to a close, he devised a plan to prank TF during a conference TF was attending. He utilized the Borland C compiler installed on the office PCs to create a harmless program that mimicked the MS-DOS disk formatting process.

This program was designed to display fake disk activity by writing junk data to a temporary file, making the formatting operation appear genuine. Joe cleverly added the program to the autoexec.bat file, ensuring it would execute each time the PC booted, but set it to terminate immediately until a month after his departure.

Weeks later, Joe received a call from a colleague informing him that TF had panicked upon seeing the fake formatting message. “You’re a bloody genius, TF just about shat himself this morning,” the colleague exclaimed. Joe felt a sense of satisfaction, knowing his prank had succeeded without any repercussions for him.

This lighthearted story highlights the lengths some will go to for revenge in the workplace, especially in environments filled with practical jokes. Joe’s experience serves as a reminder of the playful yet sometimes chaotic nature of office dynamics.

Source: The Register Software