Punk’d: The Nerd Edition
September 6, 2006 – 2:36 pmI totally punk’d one of my labmates this afternoon. As I’ve mentioned before, I do computational research, and as such, the lab in which I work is basically just a computer lab. Seven of us work in there at various points throughout the day.
I just learned of the wall command this morning. It allows a single user to send a message that gets printed on all open terminals of a given machine. The traditional usage of this command is to send a message letting all active users know that you’re about to shut a machine down for maintenance purposes. Or maybe you would use it to notify everyone of a small change they should make in one of their personal configuration files.
I walked home with Ariele to eat lunch there today, and before we walked back to campus, I decided to log on to a computer that is primarily used by one of the other guys in the lab. Let’s say the guy’s username is “jdoe”. I switched over to the root user and issued the following command:
wall Be afraid, jdoe. Be very, very afraid.
I quickly logged out, and Ariele and I began to make our way to campus. We hadn’t even made it back to our buildings yet before I got a call on my cell phone originating from the lab. The first thing out of this guy’s mouth was, “Hey, you don’t happen to be playing a trick on me, do you?” And of course I just started laughing. I could hear a few people in the background in the lab laughing too once they figured out what was happening. I got to the lab, and this guy had a printout of one of his terminals with the “Be afraid” text on it.
Needless to say, the prank worked. Everyone seems to have got a kick out of it. I suppose that’s one of the perks of being a grad student; there really isn’t anyone around that would openly frown on that kind of thing or to whom I could be reported and face some sort of reprimand. Good times.
4 Responses to “Punk’d: The Nerd Edition”
Stuff like this isn’t restricted to grad school. I seem to recall my dad telling stories about an ongoing rubber band war that he had with his coworkers at one of the government labs in Oak Ridge. Also, one summer when I was working at ORNL, my office mates all showed up with Nerf guns and big grins. Shortly thereafter there was much running in the hall and foam darts were flying all over the place.
By Adam on Sep 7, 2006 at 12:16 am
Oh, I meant to tell the story about how when a friend and I were graduating high school, our last day of class we made use of a similar feature to message everyone in the school. The librarian, who was inexplicably in charge of technology, recommended that we shouldn’t be able to graduate. Luckily, the principal had a sense of humor.
By gv on Sep 8, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Yeah, high school is about the time I should have expected to outgrow this stuff. It hasn’t happened yet, and I have to admit I don’t see it happening in the near future either.
By jjk on Sep 8, 2006 at 3:03 pm