Engineer Was So Sick of Office Pranks, He 'Wiped' His Antagonist's Disk
The Register, Monday, October 19th, 2026
Who, Me?: a student engineer's revenge on a serial prankster was a fake disk-format program timed to run weeks after he left.
In this week's Who, Me? column, a reader who worked in the messaging lab of an Australian mobile carrier in the late 1990s recalls an office full of practical jokers, and one colleague who kept sneaking up to roar in his ear.
In his last week, while the colleague was at a conference, he wrote a harmless Borland C program that mimicked MS-DOS formatting a disk, complete with a flashing disk light, before revealing the joke.
He added it to autoexec.bat, set to stay dormant until a month after his departure.
Five or six weeks later, a former coworker called to report the prank had landed.