The Blue Screen of Death

Speaking of my freshman IT days (which is what I was doing in my last post), here’s another prank that we pulled back in the day.

Todd, our department lead, was a complete prankster. However, he was also the most dedicated person in that entire office. He took his job as seriously as it gets, and I will be the first to admit that he was darn good at it, too.

Which is exactly what made pranking him so much fun.

Believe it or not, we got the idea for the stunt we pulled from none other than Microsoft. (And they say that geeks have no sense of humor. HA!)

We had heard that Mr. Gates’ team had come up with a screen saver that was nothing less than a complete mimic of the Blue Screen of Death. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the BSOD, it’s the bright blue screen that appears when your system has encountered a major problem. It usually means that a major system wipe down is about to ensue.

What was even more awesome was that the simulated Blue Screen even used your computer’s real info to customize the screen saver and progress bar. (This was back during Windows XP days, but I’m pretty sure you can probably find a version to match whichever version you’re running. There’s no way that something this cool has been discontinued)

Anyway, it took us but a few moments to install the screensaver on Todd’s computer while he was in a meeting one day. By the time he returned to his desk, he was just about ready to flip out at the sight of the screen.
He began doing all those fun things that IT people do when something goes seriously wrong—muttering to himself, shaking his mouse, and finally shouting angrily at his screen.

It wasn’t long before our laughter gave us away…