It would not be enjoyable if someone tampered with your laptop, as most people use it for work. It’s an expensive piece of machinery, and if someone plays around with it, it may cost hours of effort or possibly a few hundred dollars.
But if you’re feeling very defiant (or resentful), you may take your office prank battle to the next level by altering a few settings on your coworker’s computer. Remember that every advantage you have over them is usable against you.
Disclaimer: Use them at your own risk. If your friends and coworkers are funny, they’re fun, but tampering with business hardware might get you fired. Choose your targets wisely, and don’t be a jerk.
Table of Contents
Change Mouse and Keyboard Dongles
If you work with wireless mice and keyboards that plug into USB dongles, you can wreak havoc by switching up their receiver locations. Coworkers will be perplexed as to why their mice are moving on their own and emails are being sent by someone else on their computers while you sit back and chuckle.
Alter The Mouse Cursor
The presence of an icon next to the mouse usually indicates the presence of some hidden background activity. Can you imagine if it never ended? What if restarting the system doesn’t eliminate it? Keep the mouse pointer active and busy looking indefinitely.
Navigate to Appearance & Personalization > Personalization > Desktop Background in Windows. Simply relocating your mouse pointer will reveal new possibilities. A better choice might be “busy” or “working in the background.”
Rotate The Screen Display
Turning someone else’s screen around is a simple and fast process (and just as easy to fix). If you’re using Windows, you can invert the screen orientation by hitting Alt + Ctrl and the arrow keys, for example, to make your victim’s screen vertical. It should only be done on single screens or laptops, as any additional displays attached to the computer via a DisplayLink dock would be unaffected.
To change the screen orientation on a Mac, click System Preferences > Displays.
BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) Screen Saver
Related: How to Fix a Black Screen Issue
Windows Blue Screen of Death is the most iconic representation of the terrifying possibility that your computer is facing computer issues. A quick way to raise the blood pressure of a coworker is to switch their screensaver to the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). They will return thinking their computer is dead, only to discover it is still operational once they try moving the mouse.
