Archive for September, 2008

'Nuff said.

A couple of years ago, I played a joke on a new friend. Instead of laughing about it, she accused me of harassment and breaking and entering. Granted, it wasn't a very funny joke, but I wasn't aware the penalty for a comedian bombing was so severe. So I'd like to post a warning for any practical jokers out there: never, never play a joke involving somebody's car, house, or computer without getting notarized forms signed in triplicate that they're planning on getting the joke.

First, a little background. This was not the first time I planted a joke grenade on someone's computer. Allow me to describe just three prior offenses.

In college, back when "sound cards" were brand new and nobody but geeks like me knew how to record or play sound on computers, I changed my friend's computer startup sound. He was ahead of the technology curve himself and had managed to hook it up to his stereo, so the next time he booted his computer, he got blasted with a deep-voiced recording of God instructing him to fill his disk drive with potato chips. (For the record, he denies following the instructions.)

A couple years later, my girlfriend was running sound for a play that was being performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I'd rigged up a system for them to run the sound cues off of a laptop computer–way ahead of its time back in 1997! When she got to Scotland and booted it up, the joke grenade deployed and she got a very cute romantic animated message from me.

A few years after that, I installed a widget on my brother's computer so when he booted up, he got HAL9000's eerie red light on his desktop, reporting loudly that all systems were functioning perfectly.

If you haven't detected the pattern yet, let me describe it bluntly: these jokes are not very funny.

But they're kinda cute in their own way. They're just stupid little joke grenades. They're mildly subversive, in a spirit of fun, and you wouldn't think someone would respond to one by suggesting she might file a harassment suit. Right? Then keep reading.

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