A Collection of Easy Office Pranks

Step 4 Prank 4: What's wrong with this stupid computer?

This one is by far one of the most devious I have come across.  I imagine that IT professionals will curse the day this was discovered, as I can only imagine how many unnecessary tickets and frustrated calls this generates.

Step 1:  On the desktop, right click and choose "Create a shortcut".

Step 2:  Type the following:  shutdown -s -f -r -t 0 -c "message"   where "message" is anything you may want the computer to tell the individual as it's being shut down, such as "Virus Detected, Shut Down Initiated".  You have 127 characters max, and the quotation marks are required.  You may also delete that last section if you want it to seem normal (the entire -c "message" part.

Step 3:  Give it the name of a common program (like Internet Explorer) and hit OK to save your shortcut.  Now, that icon isn't fooling anyone, so right click it and choose properties.  Click on Change Icon, click the Browse button, and point it to C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer and chose iexplorer.exe to get a more appropriate list of icon choices.  Choose the appropriate one, hit Ok twice, and now you're set.  Delete their existing shortcut to Internet Explorer for good measure, and place your icon in it's place.

The Result:  Your mark tries to open Internet explorer, only to find their computer shutting down.  If you placed a message in the -c "message" portion, you can increase the hilarity by referencing virus or maybe something personal, like "Goodbye Bob...."

Comments

[lukeea]

You don't need both -r and -s commands. Keep -r if you want the computer to restart or -s if you want it to shutdown. This is pretty funny. I've had the shortcut link to something else such as paint or solitaire, but I never thought of using the shutdown command. Good work.