Speaking of fun practical jokes with a car, I have a couple of interesting ones.

1) Give the victims car an oil change, to 70 wieght oil. This should work very well in places where it gets cold because when it is cold enough, the oil should more resemble a brick the oil, and the car should be unable to crank. I wonder how long it would take even a good mechanic to figure out what has been done.

2) A Classic. Stones in the hubcaps. If done correctly, the driver will hear something rattling in the hupcaps and check to see if it is the wheel nuts, finding nothing, they will continue , only to hear the sound again.

3) When expressway driving becomes boring. This trick is been done with a radar detector and a very fast (looking) car. While driving on the expressway, look for a fast car that looks like it may not have a radar detector. Accelerate hard to about 70 and see if the other car follows. If it does, bring your car up as fast as you feel safe and pretend to be racing him. This should get the other car's driver to start going very fast. Continue this "race" until you come on a turn or hill. After going through the turn, hit your brakes hard and bring the car to exactly 55.00 mph. The effect is to make every one on the road start doing 55.00 because they assume that if you are going that fast, youmust have a radar detector, and it must have just gone off. (I hope I don't need to mention the illigalities with this joke, and the need for a radar detector.)

When my girlfriend and I were in our early teens (the age is important) we used to go to the local department store clock department. We would set all the clocks that had alarms to go off within minutes of each other a few minutes later. From a vantage point behind a rack of clothing we always got a chuckle when the alarms started going off and the poor sales clerk was trying to find out which ones were going off! (now, having been a sales clerk for a brief period during my college days, I don't think that would have been particularly funny!)

While in grad school, I was an "assistant" in a lab which contained two pdp-11/23's running UNIX System 3. Much of my education came from jokes played on me by my more knowledgeable friends. I'm sure I deserved them; I was into writing multi-player games, and I got a kick out of writing special caveats that only I knew about; these caveats could give other players invisible handicaps. (Don't ask me for the games; they're very terminal dependent and I don't even know where they are anymore.) We once wrote a multi-player version of Walter Bright's empire from scratch. I added H-bombs (like fighters, but when they hit a city it goes neutral, and when they hit a neutral city it goes away, etc) Only, the program was rigged so that when a certain friend completed an H-bomb, he got this dialogue that ended with the H-bomb developers testing the bomb in his own city! It was VERY funny.

[1] The lab contained two kinds of terminals; Zenith-something-or-other for one pdp and TVI-something-or-other for the other. The console for each pdp was some other type (e.g., vt100 or somesuch). I normally logged in on a Zenith in a particular spot. One day my first attempt to login failed and my second succeeded. I thought nothing of it, and continued. Later, I happened to be on the console when I did a ps and noticed a program running in the background belonging to one of my friends, B. Although it was not uncommon for real work to be done this way (and the program had an innocent sounding name), I poked around in B's directory to see if I could figure out what it was doing (I was root; what a feeling of power!). An ls revealed a very strange directory name; under that directory lived some interesting looking programs and files.

It turned out that B had written one of those password-catching programs, and had run it on my favorite terminal, apparently hoping that I'd login as root there. The directory name was an escape sequence that caused an "up-cursor, carriage-return", so an ls on a Zenith would overwrite the funny directory name with the next file/directory. I had done the ls on the console (different escape sequences) by pure luck.

I figured out the file in which B was writing the login name and password, and replaced my login and password (yes, his program worked!) with: "B is a bad boy". Eventually he came in. I casually asked him about the background process, and he had a simple explanation ready. I then left him to the "Zenith" room, and went to the adjoining "console" room and waited. His reaction was quite rewarding.

[2] B waited almost a year to try again, and this time he was nasty. I was working on a huge program, a dbms, for my Master's thesis. I was having some trouble debugging, and looking at the prospect of spending yet another semester finishing it. During a particularly frustrating session, another friend stopped in to mention that B had done something to my ..profile; I thanked him and checked it out.

It was a very subtle change; I don't remember how I happened to notice it. My PATH was set with /usr/bin in front of /bin (default on our system was /bin in front of /usr/bin). I looked at /usr/bin, and found an executable cc, owned by B. Further exploration revealed that B had written new read() and write() primitives; his cc arranged that the resulting a.out would get the bogus primitives. These primitives read or wrote garbage about 1/6 of the time. Can you imagine debugging a dbms with this handicap?

So, how to get back at him? I figured the first step was to pretend I hadn't discovered his little trick, so I modified my makefile to run /bin/cc directly. After a day or so, B stopped in to ask how I was doing, and I told him everything was going well. He happened to notice my /bin/cc lines, and asked why I did that. I told him I had some simple shell scripts named "cc" scattered about, and didn't want to accidentally pick one up (this was before aliases). He swallowed it.

The next day, /usr/bin had an executable make to go with the cc. B's make made a backup copy of the makefile, changed all the /bin/cc's to /usr/bin/cc's, and ran the real make; when the make finished, it moved the original makefile back. I was amazed at the trouble he had gone to -- and got a good lesson in shell programming as well!

Joke 1

It all started with a girlfriend's birthday party. Her boyfriend, who I had known since elementary school, wanted to give her a suprize party. So he asked me what should we do. I came up with a plan to kidnap her during dinner. But this wasn't any kidnapping. What we did was to get three people that she didn't know to arrive while we where having dinner. Of course all of these people were speaking a foreign language that she didn't understand. She was bound, gagged and blindfolded. Then while everyone drove to the resturant, she was driven around in a car with three people speaking a foreign language. BTW-she new something was up and wasn't scared, because she knew something was up. Anyway, they bring her into this very nice resturant. We're all waiting at the table, about 15 of us, and we proceed to start dinner. Her food was in front of her, but she was still bound gagged, and blindfolded. After a few moments we untied her, she was really embarrassed, because everyone in the place was staring at our table, which was in the middle of the room. She vowed revenge.

Joke 2 She wanted revenge. So I came up with the idea of getting a baby picture of my friend, her boyfriend, from his mother, and printing up posters of it and putting it up all over campus. Out side of his classes, labs, and work. His mother gave me the most adorable picture of him when he was a baby with his teddy bear. His features hadn't changed that much and the way the picture was set up he looked as though he was in a police line up. So we made it into a "Most Wanted" poster, with a concise discription, and his name across the top in 40 point type. I printed up about 150 posters which we put up all over campus. The next day every where he looked and turned there was a poster, even in some of the men's rooms around campus. It took him weeks to find all of the posters.

Joke 3

If you are wondering what all of this is building up to. Here is the ultimate joke that was pulled. After several more $practical$ jokes which I was the ring leader on. My friends realized that at the hub of each of the jokes I was the organizer and brains behind the opperation. So it was my turn.

I really liked this one upper division Economics class that I was taking that quarter. I was the VP of one of the Econ clubs on campus and everyone knew who I was including the professor. Well, one Friday afternoon while this class was meeting. One of those warm afternoons where everyone in the class is dozing, including the professor. All of a sudden three people enter the class in surgical grab, masks, protective gloves, boots, green suits, the works and a wheelchair.(I learned later that they had $borrowed$ all of these items from the medical school.) Anyway, the looked like the real thing. They went up to the professor and told him that they were looking for me because I had contracted a infectious disease, and needed to be removed from class immediately. They handed him a very official looking document and started for me with the wheel chair. You could have seen the people around me move, them my $friends$ wheeled me across the length of the campus screaming "out of the way infectious person."

When I went back to class the next week, the professor looked at me oddly and asked if I was OK to be out. He really believed the whole thing.