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Humor by Yuckitup! Click Here for more jokes, and funny stuff Practical Jokes PG2While in grad school, I was an "assistant" in a lab which contained two pdp-11/23's running UNIX System 2. Much of my education came from jokes played on me by my more knowledgeable friends. I'm sure I deserved them; I was into writing multi-player games, and I got a kick out of writing special caveats that only I knew about; these caveats could give other players invisible handicaps. (Don't ask me for the games; they're very terminal dependent and I don't even know where they are anymore.) We once wrote a multi-player version of Walter Bright's empire from scratch. I added H-bombs (like fighters, but when they hit a city it goes neutral, and when they hit a neutral city it goes away, etc) Only, the program was rigged so that when a certain friend completed an H-bomb, he got this dialogue that ended with the H-bomb developers testing the bomb in his own city! It was VERY funny. [1] The lab contained two kinds of terminals; Zenith-something-or-other for one pdp and TVI-something-or-other for the other. The console for each pdp was some other type (e.g., vt100 or somesuch). I normally logged in on a Zenith in a particular spot. One day my first attempt to login failed and my second succeeded. I thought nothing of it, and continued. Later, I happened to be on the console when I did a ps and noticed a program running in the background belonging to one of my friends, B. Although it was not uncommon for real work to be done this way (and the program had an innocent sounding name), I poked around in B's directory to see if I could figure out what it was doing (I was root; what a feeling of power!). An ls revealed a very strange directory name; under that directory lived some interesting looking programs and files. It turned out that B had written one of those password-catching programs, and had run it on my favorite terminal, apparently hoping that I'd login as root there. The directory name was an escape sequence that caused an "up-cursor, carriage-return", so an ls on a Zenith would overwrite the funny directory name with the next file/directory. I had done the ls on the console (different escape sequences) by pure luck. I figured out the file in which B was writing the login name and password, and replaced my login and password (yes, his program worked!) with: "B is a bad boy". Eventually he came in. I casually asked him about the background process, and he had a simple explanation ready. I then left him to the "Zenith" room, and went to the adjoining "console" room and waited. His reaction was quite rewarding. [2] B waited almost a year to try again, and this time he was nasty. I was working on a huge program, a dbms, for my Master's thesis. I was having some trouble debugging, and looking at the prospect of spending yet another semester finishing it. During a particularly frustrating session, another friend stopped in to mention that B had done something to my ..profile; I thanked him and checked it out. It was a very subtle change; I don't remember how I happened to notice it. My PATH was set with /usr/bin in front of /bin (default on our system was /bin in front of /usr/bin). I looked at /usr/bin, and found an executable cc, owned by B. Further exploration revealed that B had written new read() and write() primitives; his cc arranged that the resulting a.out would get the bogus primitives. These primitives read or wrote garbage about 1/6 of the time. Can you imagine debugging a dbms with this handicap? So, how to get back at him? I figured the first step was to pretend I hadn't discovered his little trick, so I modified my makefile to run /bin/cc directly. After a day or so, B stopped in to ask how I was doing, and I told him everything was going well. He happened to notice my /bin/cc lines, and asked why I did that. I told him I had some simple shell scripts named "cc" scattered about, and didn't want to accidentally pick one up (this was before aliases). He swallowed it. The next day, /usr/bin had an executable make to go with the cc. B's make made a backup copy of the makefile, changed all the /bin/cc's to /usr/bin/cc's, and ran the real make; when the make finished, it moved the original makefile back. I was amazed at the trouble he had gone to -- and got a good lesson in shell programming as well!
Joke 1 It all started with a girlfriend's birthday party. Her boyfriend, who I had known since elementary school, wanted to give her a suprize party. So he asked me what should we do. I came up with a plan to kidnap her during dinner. But this wasn't any kidnapping. What we did was to get three people that she didn't know to arrive while we where having dinner. Of course all of these people were speaking a foreign language that she didn't understand. She was bound, gagged and blindfolded. Then while everyone drove to the resturant, she was driven around in a car with three people speaking a foreign language. BTW-she new something was up and wasn't scared, because she knew something was up. Anyway, they bring her into this very nice resturant. We're all waiting at the table, about 15 of us, and we proceed to start dinner. Her food was in front of her, but she was still bound gagged, and blindfolded. After a few moments we untied her, she was really embarrassed, because everyone in the place was staring at our table, which was in the middle of the room. She vowed revenge. Joke 2 She wanted revenge. So I came up with the idea of getting a baby picture of my friend, her boyfriend, from his mother, and printing up posters of it and putting it up all over campus. Out side of his classes, labs, and work. His mother gave me the most adorable picture of him when he was a baby with his teddy bear. His features hadn't changed that much and the way the picture was set up he looked as though he was in a police line up. So we made it into a "Most Wanted" poster, with a concise discription, and his name across the top in 40 point type. I printed up about 150 posters which we put up all over campus. The next day every where he looked and turned there was a poster, even in some of the men's rooms around campus. It took him weeks to find all of the posters. Joke 3 If you are wondering what all of this is building up to. Here is the ultimate joke that was pulled. After several more *practical* jokes which I was the ring leader on. My friends realized that at the hub of each of the jokes I was the organizer and brains behind the opperation. So it was my turn. I really liked this one upper division Economics class that I was taking that quarter. I was the VP of one of the Econ clubs on campus and everyone knew who I was including the professor. Well, one Friday afternoon while this class was meeting. One of those warm afternoons where everyone in the class is dozing, including the professor. All of a sudden three people enter the class in surgical grab, masks, protective gloves, boots, green suits, the works and a wheelchair.(I learned later that they had borrowed* all of these items from the medical school.) Anyway, the looked like the real thing. They went up to the professor and told him that they were looking for me because I had contracted a infectious disease, and needed to be removed from class immediately. They handed him a very official looking document and started for me with the wheel chair. You could have seen the people around me move, them my *friends* wheeled me across the length of the campus screaming "out of the way infectious person." When I went back to class the next week, the professor looked at me oddly and asked if I was OK to be out. He really believed the whole thing.
Needed - Small wad of brillo pad. When friend is out sneek into his room. Take his lightbulb out (power off!). Stick brillo into socket. Leave. When friend switches on light the brillo acts like a fuse and blows up(small flash and quite loud noise). Be careful with this one, it has been known to knacker the odd light switch.
Needed - Cayenne Pepper. Electric Cooker. This is a very good one. Sprinkle a good dose of the pepper on the ring element. Turn the ring on and leave the room, shuting the door behind you with your friends in the kitchen not looking at the cooker (this is easy if you have a joint kitchen living room, wait till they are watching TV). This will result in the pepper burning into the air and your frends eyes streaming and throats burning.
In our student hall we had those cheapo carpet tiles. When a friend went away for a long weekend, his `drinking pals' broke in, flooded his carpet and spread about a sack full of cress seeds. One hour before he returned they `borrowed' a sheep (fromm agric. or vet. -- I can't remember) and put it in his room to grazed. The they then set up0 a camera to take a picture of the surrounding scene 3 seconds after the door was opened. You've never seen such a funny expression.
Needed - Small wad of brillo pad. When friend is out sneek into his room. Take his lightbulb out (power off!). Stick brillo into socket. Leave. When friend switches on light the brillo acts like a fuse and blows up(small flash and quite loud noise). Be careful with this one, it has been known to knacker the odd light switch.
Needed - Cayenne Pepper. Electric Cooker. This is a very good one. Sprinkle a good dose of the pepper on the ring element. Turn the ring on and leave the room, shuting the door behind you with your friends in the kitchen not looking at the cooker (this is easy if you have a joint kitchen living room, wait till they are watching TV). This will result in the pepper burning into the air and your frends eyes streaming and throats burning.
In our student hall we had those cheapo carpet tiles. When a friend went away for a long weekend, his `drinking pals' broke in, flooded his carpet and spread about a sack full of cress seeds. One hour before he returned they `borrowed' a sheep (fromm agric. or vet. -- I can't remember) and put it in his room to grazed. The they then set up0 a camera to take a picture of the surrounding scene 3 seconds after the door was opened. You've never seen such a funny expression.
[This is childish, but harmless] Leave a fake phone message pink slip to call a number. Give them the zoo's number, and ask for "Elli Fant" or "G. Raffe" etc... make sure it is a department in the zoo who won't answer "DC National Zoo" or something. BTW, the zoo gets tons of these calls every April 1st. My cousin told me about a practical joke some of his friends played where they had a white horse on the hill within view of their halls of residence (this is one of those large white horses done in chalk on hillsides - there are several in England) - they "painted" it with black stripes one night so the next day it was a Zebra. ( I think they actually used black plastic bags)
Years ago when I still lived (and went on my bike to work) in Bucharest, Romania, I was often sprayed with mud by car and bus drivers who felt a sadic pleasure by doing this. I used to note the license plates of the culprits and in four instances I spotted those cars parked on streets not too far from my home. I provided to their owners several mornings of hard work to remove newspapers stuck on their windshields with a very good glue. In one instance I filled the exhaust pipe with wet cement... In all cases I left a note with "thanks for the shower".
The best practical joke that we pulled was pulled on my friend's floor's busybody. I showed up at his dorm, went into his room, and proceeded to yell at him (my friend). He yessled back, and we got into a heated arguement. Eventually, I fired a few blanks, which this busybody was sure to hear. I then ran from the room, and when the busybody went to look, he saw my friend lying in a pool of blood (we used fake stuff). When he went to call security, my friend quickly changed his clothes and put a rug over the "blood" on the floor. When the cops and the campus rent-a-cops arrived, my friend was sitting quietly, studying. It was suggested to the busybody that he take a nice long break from college to let his nerves recover.
We were very proud of the following practical joke. When we were juniors at Williams, I lived in Agard House with three friends of mine. Several large and loud boors who lived there as well were always taking over the TV when we were watching it (to the point of them physically throwing one of us out of the TV room when he was in there watching something they didn't want to watch ... that is, something that wasn't a sporting event). They would sometimes call important house meetings without telling us, and so on. Suffice it to say, we didn't get along with them. Anyway, we got them back in the following way. The remote control in the TV room was usually ignored, because it was always getting lost. So a couple of weeks before the Super Bowl, we purloined it. We bought some supplies and set it up so that an infrared (?) emitting diode was behind a curtain in the back of the room, connected via wiring outside the house (which we strung) to the lounge next door, where we sat with the remote control. We listened to the game on a radio, and every time something dramatic would happen... "He's at the twenty! The fifteen! The ten! The ..." ZAP! Masterpiece Theater! They would all immediately charge down to the cable hookup in the basement, but no-one was there. They'd look in the lounge and there we were, studying quietly. Ah, it was great. (The remote control was discreetly hidden by a window-drape.) When they told us about this mysterious phenomenon, we said, "You know, the same thing was happening to us the other day. Hmm, I wonder what could be wrong." They were sure we had done it, but couldn't prove it. They kept trying to goad us into revealing it, for example: "No, they couldn't've done it; they're not smart enough". We kept our mouths shut and just grinned.
My undergraduate advisor told me that when he was an undergrad at MIT, he and his floormates performed this trick on a particularly obnoxious guy who lived there. The guy would regularly go down to the power box and kill everyone's power, just for jollies. Well, they papered his room one day, and when he opened the door, he calmly lit a match, threw it in, and left. The building did not burn down but the student was ejected. He had been failing out anyway.
This reminds me of another newspaper prank, which I heard of from an old friend who attended the U. of Rochester in NY. A guy who lived on their floor had the Wall Street Journal delivered to his door every day, and the others on the floor decided to poke fun at this upscale practice by sealing off his door (from the outside) with sheets of the Journal. Every morning, the guy would open his door, see the doorway blocked by the sheets, and leap through. This became a morning ritual. One day, somebody got the bright idea to put a Coke machine on the other side of the papers, and the guy got a concussion when he tried to go through.
Something similar happened to me. The phone rings at 3:30am the night before
my calculus exam, the following conversation takes place:
Hello
This can be taken to the extreme. Once at Carleton U. an entire floor received a "leaner" as we call it. There are three elevators, and late at night another held all three elevators, placed trash cans filled with water and leaning outward in each. Then they pressed 4 and slipped out. The result: a big mess on the 4th floor. Unfortunately the water also went pouring down the elevators and caused some damage. Housing was not amused.
A practical joke I was witness to at Lancaster involved moving the entire contents of some-one room. The peron concerned was taken out for the night by his 'mates', who duly got him very drunk. A few of his other mates moved the entire contents of his room from the top floor of the residential block to an identical room on the ground floor. At the end of the night, all the merry souls came back from the bar, carrying their, now ,very drunk friend. An arguement broke out, and the friends grabbed hold of the drunkard, opened the window and threw him out of the window. Imagine his alarm, he thought he was three floors up!
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