One of my particular favourites at work is prying up a few letters from a keyboard and mixing them up and replacing them in random order. Your target should be, for maximum effectiveness, a non-touch typist (usually a male) and someone who you can see at their desk from your desk. You can peer at them over your divider, sniggering away as you see them tap a key, try to correct the error, gaze at the screen, then down at the keyboard and scratch their head. You watch this for a while until you see the dawning realisation come over their face, which is the appropriate time for you to duck back down behind the divider and pretend to be working your butt off.

Two comments - firstly, you bloody sexist!

But secondly - yeah, this is a great scam, especially when you luck on a key configuration that includes characters in their password but not in their username.

I lucked on this a few years ago now with this one guy we were always throwing jokes on. He typed his username - no problem. He then typed his password (which of course just appeared as *****) and it failed. He tried over and over.

He then got locked out for trying too much - he then asked the sysop to reset his password which also included characters in the “swapped set”, and he repeated the process.

Gold.

I placed a small movie file in his startup group and walked away. I guess I should have thought about it a bit before I had done it because…

A) The video had sound (I didn’t have a sound card in my computer way back when, but my manager did)
B) His speakers were turned up… way up.

So… on monday morning when he booted his computer, he was greeted by a short clip of someone clutching the earth on hands and knees, violently (and very LOUDLY) emptying the contents of his stomach onto the grass (which, in turn, splashed back up into his face).

Did I mention that his media player was set to loop?

Perhaps I also forgot to mention that he turned on his computer, then walked away for 10 minutes to get some coffee.

Of course, we worked in a cubicle farm with low cube walls, so everyone had to get up and see WTF was going on in his cube.

Of course, he just laughed when he saw it, then blamed someone else. No matter what I told him, he wouldn’t believe it was me.

It was probably better that way :-)