Pranks and other associated mischief

Over the years I have executed some good pranks and other prank-like activities. In this post I am going to share my favorites.

I also have executed some bad pranks. I'm just not going to talk about those here! So if you know me from college and are wondering where the lobster incident is, it's not here!

These should maybe be separate blog posts, but I think I'll probably just procrastinate if I don't get them all out right now, so here they are all in one long post!

Forged high school ID cards

My high school gave juniors in the National Honor Society (NHS) these stupid ID cards. As best I could tell, the ID cards served absolutely no purpose, so I decided not to stay after school and get my picture taken for it. No ID card for me.

Fast forward to senior year. The school implemented a draconian hall pass policy involving a large planner book that every student had to carry around and get signed+dated by teachers. Ridiculous. Except... kids with the NHS ID cards were exempt. The NHS ID cards were now treated as universal hall passes!

Naturally, I was not very happy about this development. I should have had an ID card, but I didn't. So I forged one. I scanned a friend's card, put my picture on it, and printed it out. The real trick was laminating it. Luckily, my sister had gotten a mini laminating machine as a present a few years back, which had never been used. I used it. The result was not a perfect forgery under close inspection, but good enough to fool unsuspecting hall monitors. I used it many times without getting caught.

When bragging to friends about my great achievement, I learned that some of them had the same issue. They were also NHS members who didn't go through the trouble of getting an ID card. I saw a business opportunity here. I decided to sell forged ID cards to my fellow classmates who had been similarly wronged. $5/card - I wasn't getting rich, but it was fun. I probably sold like 10 of these fake IDs, including to some kids who were not in the NHS, and nobody ever got caught.

Side note - this was back in 2003-2004 when digital cameras were not common, so getting a digital picture to use for the forged cards was the hardest part of the forgery process. Luckily, the previous year my friend found an unprotected network share containing a photo of every student used for normal student ID cards, so I used those for the forged NHS IDs. The existence of these pictures raises the question of why the school didn't use them to make the NHS ID cards, eliminating the need for kids to stay late after school and take new pictures, and thus preventing this story from ever happening.

My skill as a counterfeiter eventually spread through enough of the school that one time a couple kids asked if I could make them fake IDs so they could buy alcohol. They didn't know I only made shitty NHS IDs!

My English teacher's computer

High school health class was always really boring. We had to write a report on some boring topic, and the teacher took us to the library so we could work on our reports during class.

The Internet was down, so I had to go to the good old paper books. But of course all the books on my topic were checked out, since other classes were doing the same thing. So I had an entire period in the library with absolutely nothing to do.

With the Internet down, I decided to poke around the intranet and see if I could find anything interesting. (As mentioned in the previous story, sometimes there were interesting things there!)

I found all the teacher's computers on the network. Poking around there, I found some permissions dialog that seemed like it would let me change which users have access to the hard drive of each computer. I figured it was unlikely to work, since as a student my account should not have write access to something like that. But I decided to test it by revoking my English teacher's access to his computer's hard drive.

This was not an act of hatred, if anything it was the opposite. This teacher was one of the 3 teachers I really liked.

Later that day I was curious if it actually worked so I went to his classroom to see, and he was pissed! I didn't even say anything, but he knew I was a computer nerd, so me showing up there with a smile on my face after his computer was malfunctioning all day was evidence enough. This resulted in a trip to the vice principal's office, and then eventually I showed the IT guy what I did and he fixed the problem.

That would have been the end of the story from my perspective, except my dad was a teacher at another school in the district, and he heard some rumors about what happened behind the scenes. There were a lot of IT issues at my high school (such as the Internet being unreliable at the start of this story), the higher-ups were pissed, and the school administrators were under a lot of pressure to fix things. Or, maybe they could find a scapegoat? A student hacking their systems and causing all these problems? Maybe pinning the blame on the hacker would absolve them?

But ultimately nothing came of it, there was no further punishment or anything.

Fake email from the professor

Back in the old days email was incredibly insecure. Did you know you can just claim that you are any email address, and that will appear in the "Sender" field? Well these days it's not so simple, various things like SPF and DKIM have been added to email which makes it much more difficult to do these days. But back in the 2000s, it was trivial.

Freshmen engineers had to take an expository writing class. I was one of the rare engineers who APed out of it (I was not a good writer, but I was incredible at multiple choice tests, which somehow got me a 5 on the AP test), so I got some joy out of watching them all suffer. They would all wait until the last minute to write their essays and then scramble to finish before the deadline.

Then one night, a few hours before an assignment was due, they were all miserably writing and complaining... and their professor sent an email saying there was an extension of a couple days. Jubilation! Everyone was so happy!

So I spoofed an email from their professor saying that actually the extension was a mistake, and the original due date stands. People were so angry! How could she do this? It was the most unjust crime ever!

I let them seethe in anger for like 15 minutes before I told them it was me. Unfortunately in those 15 minutes some of them replied to the email and complained, and of course the replies went to the professor. She was not happy about this and wanted to figure out what happened. Thankfully my friends didn't turn me in, and I guess the professor never went to IT about it because if she did they probably would have been able to trace it back to me. So yet again I escaped a minor school "hacking" incident unscathed!

I used this same trick for a more benign purpose too. We had an annual Secret Santa in my friend group. I wrote a script to randomly assign who everyone needs to buy gifts for, and I had it communicate the assignments by sending emails from santa@rutgers.edu.

Gay porn catfishing

Okay the title sounds bad and maybe it was kind of bad, but hear me out!

Back in the 2000s at Rutgers there was a Direct Connect server on the campus network, so we could all pirate movies without going over the bandwidth limit. This was fantastic.

Browsing around to see what other people were sharing, I found a lot of other stuff. Such as porn. I had this great idea that I would download some gay porn, copy it to a friend's computer, and schedule it to start playing at full volume in the middle of the night. Great prank. But there's more!

Direct Connect had a messaging system, so you could send messages to other users. You could also see who was downloading files from you. The person I was downloading gay porn from sent me a message hitting on me. I thought this was brilliant! Obviously only a horny gay man would download gay porn, so if you were a horny gay man who wanted to meet other horny gay men, this was a perfect tactic.

Only problem was, I'm not gay, I was just downloading it for my prank.

I had another friend who was kind of homophobic, which I didn't like. I decided to turn this into a prank on him. I replied to the gay Direct Connect guy and pretended to be my homophobic friend, and I told him his name and to look it up on Facebook and we could continue the conversation there. Which he did, freaking out my homophobic friend that some random gay guy was hitting on him out of the blue.

I did not at the time consider that it was pretty bad to put some random gay guy in a situation like that. In retrospect, that was not cool and I feel bad about it. But it did at least have some elements of a good prank.

Dummpster diving donuts

This is another one that I am not entirely proud of.

A friend got a tip that the local Dunkin' Donuts would put a giant trash bag of the day's unsold donuts out on the curb every night at a specific time.

One night we went and snatched the bag.

It was truly an unfathomable amount of donuts, like 100 donuts. We ate a bunch, but there were still so many.

It'd be nice to share, right?

We were living in an on-campus apartment building that had 4 students per apartment. Next door were 4 girls who we were kind of friends with, but not very close. We decided we'd arrange a nice plate of donuts for them and pretend we bought them for them, and then before they actually eat them we'd say "just kidding, we stole these out of the trash, but they're actually fine and you can eat them if you still want to!"

That's a pretty benign prank. Harmless, right?

So we went over there. 3 of the girls were in the living room, and everything was going to plan. We were about to reveal the secret, and then the 4th girl busted out of her bedroom. She was a mess. It was like 3pm but she was still wearing pajamas and looked like she had been crying. She goes right to the donuts as she says like:

Oh my God you guys this is the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me, this is the only good thing that's happened to me all week, you guys are the best, thank you so much!

None of us were expecting this, and we all felt too awkward to say anything. So with a big smile on her face she ate a couple trash donuts while continuing to tell us how awesome we were.

We never told them where the donuts came from.

The HR poll incident

My last job was at a big corporate company. Naturally we had a fancy internal HR website where the HR people would post information for us workers.

For some reason, they put a monthly poll of some random topic on that website. And it was always something kind of generic and boring, like "What is your favorite genre of music?" or "What is your favorite type of vacation?" or whatever.

I figured, this looks completely useless and boring, so why don't we have some fun with it?

I decided to take the weirdest available poll option and rig the vote. I thought it would bring a tiny amount of fun to my coworkers' days. Like you go to the HR website, you see some boring poll like "What's your favorite musical instrument?" and when you look at the results you see that 99.999% of the company prefers the oboe. That at least gives you a slight smile, right?

Ah, but how to rig the vote? Turns out it was pretty easy, it let you vote as many times as you want. So I wrote a little script to vote a million times. The only tricky part was that the website itself was password protected, so I did have to make my script log in first. But no big deal. And that even made me feel better about it, because if someone in HR really wanted to stop me from doing this, they could just send me an email asking me not to do it, or block my account, or something. I mean even without the mandatory log in they could have done that, since I was doing this from my official work computer connected to the company's network, so they could have also blocked my IP address or figured out who I was from that.

So I was not really concerned that I was causing anyone any trouble. I thought it was just a funny little thing that other people would find mildly amusing.

Apparently HR thought otherwise! Turns out some higher-up in HR cared a great deal about the integrity of their polls. Sadly, no one in HR had the technical competence to associate my millions of votes with my logged-in user account or IP address, either of which would have identified me. Instead they went through a months-long investigation and ultimately wound up hiring some contractors to come in and figure out what was going on.

After spending so much money and effort to figure out why their polls were messed up, HR was very angry. So angry that they didn't even come talk to me about it, they went to my boss. They were out for blood. But they didn't realize that my boss was probably the one person in the entire company who was most similar to me, so he couldn't keep a straight face when they explained the situation to him and demanded some serious action be taken. (Also, my boss already knew I was rigging the polls because I had told him about it previously, since I thought it was funny!)

So they go to my boss's boss. He also already knew what I was doing and thought it was funny. He was better at keeping a straight face, but HR was still not satisfied that appropriate action would be taken.

Ultimately they went to my boss's boss's boss's boss, who was a quite high ranking person in the company, and told him that he should fire me. Unfortunately for HR, I had a good relationship with this entire chain of bosses, and they all thought the situation was kind of funny.

At the end of the day, I was not fired, I was just forced to apologize to HR. Which I did, because I never intended this to be such a big deal!

Now several years later I am really enjoying being self-employed, but sometimes I think it'd be nice to have coworkers to mess with...