It's like April anytime of the year

At this government agency's programming office, there's a legal requirement that a PC lock itself after 15 minutes of inactivity. And this pilot fish has found a way to enforce it. 

"We have taken to pranking any individual who leaves his desk without locking his desktop," fish says.

"If we find one of our co-workers' machines left open, we have a handy little program we coded that is always available on disk for the small pranks section of our team."

The program starts by flashing multiple warnings on screen that viruses have been found and the PC has been hacked.

Then it takes a screenshot of the desktop and pastes it in as the desktop background image.

Then it gathers all the desktop icons and puts them in a folder on the root drive.

Finally, it locks the workstation normally.

"If everything goes well -- our code is sometimes buggy -- a user goes to look at his screen again and he freaks," says fish. "He runs around thinking someone has hacked his box and then, of course, he can't click on anything on the desktop."

Eventually, the user calls desktop support -- which is in on the prank. The support guys pop in their own code that restores the icons and wallpaper.

Then they lecture the user on the importance of keeping his PC locked from now on, because that's how this sort of "hacker" gets access.

"We wanted to add a message about an e-mail that was sent to their boss, copying everyone," fish says. But we wouldn't want anyone rushing to apologize to his boss unnecessarily, would we?

"This is actually a learning experience every time -- for users because they learn a valuable habit, and for us because we keep getting new ideas to throw at this joke!"

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