April fools day is gone, but you just can’t stop pulling some good pranks on your buddies and co-workers, can you? No longer is playing prank on your friends is considered a childish act since tech giant like Google and others come up with some creative new ideas to fool the people who use their services. Gone are the days where dropping a creepy crawler / critter on your victim’s desk when they are away from their place to grab a quick snack is considered creative. The conventional pranks are not bad, but as technology evolves you need to keep up with the trend.
Below are some geeky ways to fool people by using a printer. Your hapless victim can be your school mate, co-worker or your neighbor.
Wireless Mayhem
Wireless printers are widely used in offices, schools and homes these days. It’s very likely that you have access to wireless printers at your office and school. If you are lucky, you may even have access to your neighbor’s wireless printer. With a lot of people using smart phones nowadays, one can easily hook-up with any wireless printer in their access range with just a small application that you can download.
Anthropomorphic Machine
This will work wonders to fool your neighbor or piteous victim in your office when they are alone. If you are in your office, take cover and make sure you are in the wireless printer’s range. This will work best, when someone stays back late in the office to finish some work. Before you play this trick, you should make sure that an ink toner cartridge on the wireless printer is good and it would be great if your “victim” is near printer.
The whole point of the prank is to create an impression that some dead spirit is hidden in the machine or using the printer. When your victim is at the printer, send a file to be printed with something like the following. Start by printing some random roman or unicode and slowly start printing, phrases like, “Hi, [victim’s name]! I was killed in a car accident just outside this building. I would like to live again, please help.” Be creative and spice it up by adding some factual details about your victim to make it appear real. See him/her bolt out of the room in terror.
Optional: you can record the instance to share it with others.
Say ‘Hi’ to your neighbor
Send a creepy/spooky picture from your mobile phone or laptop to be printed on your neighbor’s wireless printer. You can send the famous Jigsaw’s face from the thriller Saw.
If you want to make it funny rather than spooky, try sending one of those priceless smiles of Ainsley Harriott with a “Hi.”
Prerequisite: You can’t obviously know the ink toner cartridge level in your neighbor’s printer, so at least make sure, he/she uses the machine often so that your mission won’t fail.
Bonus
If you want to play a subtle prank or put a smile on someone’s face, this will work for you. A lot of printers nowadays come with a console. In many printers you can actually edit the console message to whatever you want. For instance in HP laser printer, you can edit the console message by means of “HP Printer Job Language (HPPJL)” setting. Change the default message to something like “INSERT COIN.”
Use your creativity and come up with new ways to spook your friends. However, don’t go over board or do something that will offend others.
