Want to add some atmosphere to the office to brighten up your working days? Play little jokes on your colleagues’ PC: it’s easy, safe, and you’ll have a good time hearing them curse.
Your working days follow one another and are similar, and you want to bring a little joy to the office by playing a little joke on your favorite colleagues? That’s good, computers are a very conducive playground for this kind of mischief. Don’t worry, none of these jokes are dangerous, you won’t destroy your colleagues’ valuable documents (well, probably) and you won’t jeopardize your company’s IT security. All you will need is to access your colleague’s PC for a few moments, while taking advantage of their toilet or cigarette break for example.
The first is a timeless classic: reverse mouse clicks. Simple and quick to set up, without any risk, and extremely effective if you like to hear a colleague curse out loud in their office. Here is the procedure: on Windows 11, go to Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Mouse and set Primary mouse button on RIGHT ; on Windows 10, open Settings > Devices > Mouse then put Choose the main button on RIGHT.
Second option: If you have a colleague who tends to fill their Windows desktop with lots and lots of icons, you can easily scare them… by making them all disappear. To do this, right-click on an empty area of the desktop, click Display in the context menu, then click Show desktop items. All icons, whether shortcuts, folders or documents, will then disappear. Rest assured, nothing is deleted or lost: the icons are simply not displayed. All you have to do is perform the procedure described again to instantly redisplay everything.
In the same kind of idea but a little more sophisticated, you can drive this same colleague crazy with his desktop full of icons. First open theScreenshot Tool and use it to save a complete image of the desktop, with all icons and the taskbar. Then, create a new folder in a safe place and move all the items on the desktop there (be careful to move them and not delete them!). Then go to Settings > Personalization > Background and replace your colleague’s wallpapers with the screenshot taken earlier.
To further perfect this stratagem, return to the menu Personalization of the Settingsthen in the section Taskbar. There, click on the banner Taskbar behavior and check the box Automatically hide the taskbar. After all these manipulations, your colleague’s Windows desktop will look perfectly normal… but none of the displayed elements will react when clicked, because it is only an image! The time and date frozen in the taskbar may alert your colleague, but he should complain a little before realizing it.
Last suggestion, to be implemented with caution: use the spelling correction of Microsoft Office applications to replace your colleague’s common or favorite expressions with others. In Outlook for example, open the Optionsgo to the section Verification then click on the button Autocorrect options. In the white box below Replacewrite for example “Sincerely”, and in the one just to its right, something like “Big kisses” (or any other polite expression that you find appropriate).
Be careful, however, not to make this joke to a colleague who sends his emails a little too quickly without rereading them. He might blame you if the malicious message was sent to his boss or an important client. To limit this risk, you can instead change the autocorrect in a less sensitive application, like Word or PowerPoint, for example by replacing words like “conf call”, “feedback” or “brainstorming” with “These expressions are ridiculous “. And to go back, you just need to go back to the Autocorrect options and remove your personal additions from the list!