The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

So a few months back, I created a simple program in Visual Basic that runs in the background and shoots a random popup every couple of minutes and put it in my sister's startup folder. So my sister gets popups every once in a while when she's on her account.

This in itself isn't funny, it's a rather stupid joke. What's funny is how they've reacted to it.

First off, my sister hasn't even checked her Startup folder. She just chooses to ignore it and calls it a "bug" (of course, that is WAY inaccurate; malware would even be a more proper term, and that's not really accurate either). Similarly, my dad (who should know better since he works with computers) thinks it's a virus, and hasn't considered the fact that only my sister gets the popups (plus, it doesn't trigger Avast! antivirus, which is a really good virus protection).

Second, even funnier: One of the popups has a message somewhere along the lines of "Your desktop wallpaper is corrupt. Please change your desktop wallpaper." My brother actually takes these messages seriously and keeps changing my sister's background, much to my sister's annoyance.

This, my friends, proves how stupid some people can be when it comes to their computer. ::)

Your dad works with computers and hasn't checked the start-up folder? When you say he "works" with them, do you mean he knows how to make a spread sheet?

Maybe you should add some messages to stir the pot. See how silly you can make them before someone catches on.

I'm not sure exactly what he does, but it's in the area of programming.

Heh, maybe I'll do just that. ;) How about:

That'll seriously piss them off if they do it. How about:
"Your monitor angle is invalid. Please adjust your monitor angle."

Heh, monitor angle... I can imagine my brother constantly adjusting the monitor to validate the monitor angle. Too bad there isn't an lol smiley, I could use it right now!

Or how about this: "The fan which keeps this PC cool is overworked! Please give the fan a break by putting your computer in standby for at least 60 minutes."

"Bits getting stuck in monitor cable. Please straighten cable."

"The USB plug is malfunctioning. Please discontinue use of USB devices, such as the mouse and keyboard, for 15 minutes while Windows solves the problem."

"RAM buffer overflowing. Please shake central unit vigorously for 3 minutes, then reboot."

One of my favourite pranks of all time was telling a user that their AX CPU register was wearing out and that they'd have to install a new one. (This was back in the 16-bit days, all we had was AX.  :-[ )

So something like

Your AX register is about to fail. Please contact (insert help line number for some computer computer here).

Of course, once your family finds out this is all your doing, they are going to be sooooo mad at you.

"The music you are listening to stinks. Please stop listening to that music or a meltdown may occur."

I know a little about Visual Basic. Are you using a simple form with a message or an actual dialog box with button controls in which your victims have to click a choice? The latter could be interesting if you give them one of two "unthinkable" options.. Press OK to reformat HD or Cancel to Uninstall Windows from this PC..that sort of thing. ;)

``Warning: This computer has evolved sentience.

GIMME A HUG :-*"

Just simple dialogs.

I told my dad last week that it was me. He said he looked in the Startup folder, but didn't find the shortcut titled "System" to be suspicious. I had the popup joke disguised as something official; it was in my sister's Documents folder in a folder called "UCC", which had another folder "System". In other words, the application was in "...\My Documents\UCC\System\". I forget where I got "UCC" from, I guess I just made it up.

So yeah, it doesn't show up anymore. But it was pretty funny while it did.