To me, the administration clearly screwed up. They were thinking about implementing something that was done as a prank. They could have just told everyone it was a prank and not to worry but instead, they reacted like the backlash was too bad and then told everyone we might be doing it anyway but not just now. This would have been an easy way for them to see the reaction and be thankful that they didn't do it and could just say it was a prank.

I learned of these in-band commands at Stanford and created a very short print file to be able to change the status message of any printer on campus. I couldn't push it centrally but I just queued the file into the global print queue and was able to change any printer by walking to it and asking for my print. To not be too disruptive and given the character limits I only ever put in something like "READY FOR CAL" in reference to the Bay area school rivalry. I don't think anyone was ever annoyed by it, or maybe even noticed it beyond the few people I showed it to, but hopefully the statute of limitations has also passed.

This reminds me of the time I just learned how to write .bat scripts for Windows, when I was a teenager.

The power of being able to send this file via msn to a friend, convince them to open it, and then get a full message in capitals of "YOU HACKED ME! MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN!" Before watching them go offline (the script shut down their computer after 30 seconds) was a real heart racer. I am sure it contributed to my interest in computers in the following years.

This was a lot of fun to read and really tells the story well. I am thoroughly amused. Thanks for sharing this!

somewhat unrelated to the topic, but I really liked this part of one of the sentences: “did not not only did not”. it does make sense in the sentence btw.

> Fortuitously I had learned Perl in, appropriately enough, a computational linguistics course

This sentence increases the likelihood that I have crossed paths with the author by something like a factor of a million, as I estimate that the number of people who have ever taken that class is certainly lower than 100k and quite likely lower than 10k.

As they say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Or in this case, with great printer access comes great pranking potential!

I changed the display on the printers in our office to read, "Needs Chocolate".

The most I've done, is sneak a mouse dongle into a neighbor/cube's computer... throughout the day I'd just move the mouse in one direction, frustrating the user across the partition.

Very tame in the scheme of things, but my go to prank was on a Windows machine, take a screenshot of the desktop with all of its icons, and then disable the icons. Doing it in a whole computer lab caught far more people double clicking in confusion than I expected.

The email was a bit much, just altering the ready message should have been sufficient.