During the late 1990s, while studying electrical engineering, a student named Joe secured a position in the messaging lab of an Australian mobile carrier. The workplace was notorious for its culture of practical jokes, with common pranks including confetti traps on doors, prawn heads left in colleagues’ vehicles, and hand cream applied to telephone earpieces.
One particular coworker, whom Joe pseudonymously referred to as TF, took the pranks to an excessive level by frequently sneaking up behind Joe and roaring loudly to startle him. Frustrated by this repetitive and unimaginative tactic, Joe resolved to orchestrate a definitive and memorable act of retribution.
The opportunity arose during Joe’s final week at the company, coinciding with TF’s attendance at a conference. Leveraging the Borland C compilers installed on all office PCs, Joe developed a benign program designed to convincingly simulate the MS-DOS disk formatting process. To enhance realism, the program generated junk data in a temporary file, causing the PC’s disk activity indicator to flash as if actual formatting were underway.
After a brief period of simulated activity, the program displayed a message revealing the prank. Joe integrated the software into the autoexec.bat file, configuring it to execute upon system boot but to terminate automatically until a month after his departure. Several weeks later, Joe received a call from a colleague reporting that TF had been thoroughly alarmed by the fake formatting sequence, prompting Joe to consider his revenge successful.