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Failed Troll

By zarathus (Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 07:13:23 AM EST) (all tags)

I try to troll my cow-orkers in real life and apparently no one takes the bait.

Two weeks ago, the same day I posted this diary, I decided to pull a little prank in my caffeine-induced state of giddyness.

One of the printers near my cube, a Lexmark MFP (scanner, fax, and printer) had a paper jam that hadn't been dealt with in several days. I took the time to replace the parts of the printer that had been haphazardly removed in the process of troubleshooting and then I simply power cycled the printer. After the power cycle, there were no more error messages on the console.

In order to test the printer, I sent a quick text document to it with the following content:

how to clearing teh paeper jam?

turn off.

turn on

I then posted this document to the wall behind the printer. It seems no one saw the document and I took it down just now.

Is it a sign that my attempted troll really wasn't very funny or is it that no one is very observant and a few lines of 10pt text at a distance of a few feet didn't catch their attention?

< School's out for summer | I need to get out of here. >

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Failed Troll | 9 comments (9 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback

120pt text is your friend by ReallyEvilCanine (4.00 / 2) #1 Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 08:21:19 AM EST

Some fuckwad keeps leaving an empty bottle of water in the stall near the door hinge. I printed a sign and hung it on the wall:

<-- Beginners (arrow towards porcelain)
Professionals --> (arrow towards bottle)

To properly troll printer users by georgeha (4.00 / 2) #2 Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 09:50:15 AM EST

you need to get into the printer software. In PostScript it wouldn't be hard to get behind the server loop and edit the banner pages, or print trollish stuff.

Sort of. by nightflameblue (4.00 / 2) #3 Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 10:37:03 AM EST

I find a nicely formatted "U FAIL IT" printed at a ridiculous font size sent to the printer they say isn't working is usually good enough, and no need to get into anything more than an application that can access the printer.

[ Parent ]

oh, you can do evil stuff in PCL too by clover kicker (4.00 / 2) #4 Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 10:38:05 AM EST

One time me and another sysadmin sat down with a PCL manual and tried to find the most heinous, hard-to-diagnose printer practical joke,

You can set everything to 50% grey, or rotate all the pages 7 degrees to the left, set a watermark image that looks like stripes left by a bad toner cartridge... Changing the default prompts or the language of the menus is positively benign in comparison.

We did a proof of concept of a couple of those, never had the guts to unleash it to the wild.

[ Parent ]

: I'd like to pretend PCL doesn't exist by georgeha (4.00 / 3) #5 Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 10:54:36 AM EST

I used to think it was cryptic but somewhat useful, until I saw people trying to use it for color.

[ Parent ]

Printer Fun by duxup (4.00 / 1) #6 Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 04:11:09 PM EST

We found some software that let us display whatever text we wanted to on the LCD display. By far the most popular was:

"PC LOAD LETTER WHAT THE #### DOES THAT MEAN?"
____

INSERT COIN by ReallyEvilCanine (4.00 / 1) #7 Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 10:53:31 PM EST

Clicky.

[ Parent ]

: gah by clover kicker (2.00 / 0) #8 Sat Jul 12, 2008 at 01:53:17 PM EST

I'm sure somewhere on every printer there's a slot big enough for some idiot to jam a coin into.

[ Parent ]
: I did it and it won't print now! by duxup (2.00 / 0) #9 Sat Jul 12, 2008 at 08:12:57 PM EST

n/t
____
[ Parent ]

Failed Troll | 9 comments (9 topical, 0 hidden) | Trackback