USB PC Prankster: guaranteed to freak out, enrage your cubicle mates

Oh, brother. As we all know so well, the office can be a draining place. But devices such as these could make even the most burnt-out middle manager excited to clock in. The USB PC Prankster looks like a stock flash drive, but as you can clearly see above, a few toggle switches enable it to become quite the headache. Once plugged in, the unlucky PC that it's attached to will have its Caps Lock enabled and disabled at random, see garbled text splattered about quarterly reports and be victim to uncontrollable, erratic cursor movements. Thankfully, the drive will never activate the Enter key nor close or save documents, so you can rest assured that it's all in good fun. Turning your office up on its head costs just £19.99 ($33), but you'll have to wait a tick 'til it comes back in stock.

[Via Switched]

[horchata Posted Oct 18th 2009 7:38PM]

I love ThinkGeek

[Lowest Ranks Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:07PM]

bwahahahaha

[Lowest Ranks Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:57PM]

I've got another hoax coming

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:16PM]

19.99 GBP is not 33€, today it's 21.80€

[JoePalma Posted Oct 18th 2009 5:12PM]

Except the unit of measure was dollars not euros.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:12PM]

hahaha this is awesome

Worst computer prank I ever pulled on someone: I set their swap file to 5MB. I watched him try to fix it for like half an hour. I was going to tell him but he got so frustrated by it that I got kind of scared to tell him and fixed it while he wasn't looking. lol

[Lowest Ranks Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:19PM]

good thing your "friend" didn't call GeekSquad or else you'll stumped both of their "knowledge" lol

[Tommy Five Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:36PM]

Another good one: Throwing a shortcut to "Restart" in the Startup folder. That usually has them going red for a while.

[sweet greggo Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:44PM]

My favorite prank is snapshot their desktop, set it as the background, and stack all of their icons in the corner on top of each other.

[Funke Tobias Dr Posted Oct 18th 2009 5:04PM]

Nice one, Tommy Five.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 18th 2009 8:07PM]

I'm particularly fond of taking a screenshot of someone's desktop and then setting it as their wallpaper and turning off icons. >:D

[BetterThanBozo Posted Oct 19th 2009 5:24AM]

I did a simple prank a few years ago to a fellow worker. I stuck a small post-it note on the bottom of his mouse, so that the mouse ball wouldn't roll - I guess it could work with IR and laser mice. Took him 5 minutes to work out why his mouse wasn't responding.

[SkonOfVulcan Posted Oct 19th 2009 5:22PM]

@ sweet greggo When you take a snapshot of the desktop include the taskbar, then hide the taskbar to the side and flip the snapshot you use 180degrees when you make it the wallpaper...... they cant find the icons, the task bar etc AND everything is upside down. I've done that more times then I can count!

[collindow Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:13PM]

This is good...but thinkgeek has some WAY better things, like the annoy-a-tron.

[ericthebikeman Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:30PM]

I had some asshat install one of these at work about 2 months ago. He was summarily dismissed for wasting IT resources. Hope he thought it was worth losing his stupid ass device and his job.

[wvcaver Posted Oct 18th 2009 5:30PM]

That was no reason to fire the guy ! No sense of humor

[simbr Posted Oct 18th 2009 10:08PM]

@Greg if you have an external support contract that charges by the callout you might take a dim view of this sort of thing. If you have IT rules in place to avoid tampering and you break them, the consequence is the same whether prank or malicious damage.

[WmPenn Posted Oct 21st 2009 7:10AM]

Lets be real... who wants to work at a tight ass place like that anyway? They did him a favor letting him go. :)

[WmPenn Posted Oct 21st 2009 7:45AM]

While i'm at it... "Hope he thought it was worth losing his stupid ass device and his job." Ok, nobody wants to work at a dry humorless place like that anyway, let alone one were they will steal your stuff too! And tell me just how much precious IT resources were wasted before finding a gag device plugged into a USB port? Are we talking about minutes or hours here? LOL

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:32PM]

I need to get my hands on it!

[MrAffrox Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:33PM]

It looks like this thing can't be actually used as a flash drive.

[Anticrawl Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:44PM]

*downloads like an idiot because he wan'ts to be part of Enigma's botnet for his next DDOS attack*

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 18th 2009 4:53PM]

I would love to see this used by jim on a prank to dwight in a future office :)

[John Doe Posted Oct 18th 2009 5:02PM]

Hopefully the company doesn't have on call IT support. Yah know. The ones who get paid for each call out. I can easily see such a prank being reported to the prankster's manager for interfering in the operation of business systems and costing the company money.

[Hydra Posted Oct 18th 2009 5:05PM]

This is great for that lazy IT department at your job

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 18th 2009 5:35PM]

Features:
>> Looks like a USB Flash Drive
>> Takes over victim’s computer by typing gibberish and controlling mouse.
>> Time delay

With flashy marketing like this, they're bound to corner the market for stupid things that cost money. All five are currently sold out.

[Hell Angel Posted Oct 18th 2009 6:04PM]

Imagine fooling some one to think that you could use this as a readyboost drive....

[RequiemOfLife Posted Oct 18th 2009 6:09PM]

In hindsight i realize the sketchy ness of my post, i also realize the lack of forsite of by just zipping the project folder as a way to be open...
I have uploaded all the source code as google doc and here is the code, don't trust the complied version? the compile the code ur self, u can compile each code indivudle of there results or complie the main code and have the option to enable time delay and choose which action...even someone with out programing knowledge can read the code and see they are safe, it is basic code,

http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B38Z4oqKZlAfMmU4ZDAxNWEtM2U2YS00MGE1LWI2YmEtZDFlNDU1YjRiY2Uw&hl=en

as a side note, the quacker, and screen assulter will not work unless there is media located in proper directory when it is complied, if u read the code and judge it is safe, please comment

@anticrawl, I understand where you are coming from and if you have a background in Coding please look at the code

P.S. I will update the code with comments to make it more readable later on tonight

[Dr Yusuf AlKindi Posted Oct 18th 2009 6:13PM]

We had a young fellow who connected one of these devices to one of our computers at Cern.

We discovered the device and he confessed. He thought he was being funny.

10 minutes in the particle accelerator made it hard for his parents back in Connecticutt to affirmatively identify the remains. Needless to say, his scholarship went to another young American desirous of understanding particle physics who had less of an MTC sense of humor.

[GoGoGadget Posted Oct 18th 2009 6:46PM]

in that case...
...Gordon Freeman to the rescue!!!

[va jj Posted Oct 18th 2009 6:16PM]

something like this would probably get someone fired.

[richb93 Posted Oct 18th 2009 6:26PM]

I too wrote a very sketchy program in VB Express that randomly pops up a box with a picture and flashing text while playing the WTFBOOM sound. It hides and goes off every 30 minutes. It hides in the steam folder so its quite hard to find One of my first apps; I'm a student that has only learn't VB for around 20 hours. Ovbiously not as good as this but good for laughs anyway

[RequiemOfLife Posted Oct 18th 2009 6:35PM]

mind doesnot hide itself, actually i am thinking about it place a text file explaining what happened and encouraging him to prank others...
but when it runs, it is ran through the java environment, which means if the user doesnot have java then it wont work. and by hiding setting the java windows to invisible it is virtually undetectable, a simple restart of the computer and it is disabled...that is unles you put it in the start up folder...i actually looked into it moving itself there, but for that you need authentication, which i dont feel is necessary for this kind of program

[teched Posted Oct 18th 2009 7:40PM]

this exact item almost got someone in our office fired. The random mouse movements is the culprit. Think if you click on a button by accident and up pops the dialog box asking if you want to delete or not...you hover the mouse over "no", but the random mouse movements, moves the mouse over to "yes" just before you click...In today's web based apps, this is a very possible scenario!
Two of the best tricks is to take a screen shot of the person's desktop and set that image as the screensaver. or if the user is a hunt and peck typist, swap the "m" and "n" keys. most people won't notice this until it is too late!
ed

[Namminamm Posted Oct 19th 2009 11:26AM]

ohh sorry i was replying to a spammer.

[Namminamm Posted Oct 19th 2009 11:29AM]

those spam comments just vanised for some reason after i commented and must have gone to you.

[whosdadog Posted Oct 18th 2009 7:54PM]

I got one of these when it first came out. It got me suspended from school, and lost me my job. Boy, was that fun.

[DoorsnotWindows Posted Oct 18th 2009 7:57PM]

I bet!

[lanboyo Posted Oct 18th 2009 9:20PM]

I would recommend putting it at the end of a long usb extender cable, tangle the extension up with the spaghetti mess under the desk and maybe put the device somewhere you can get to it without going into the target's cube. And then never owning up to it when the target explodes.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 18th 2009 9:52PM]

I HAVE this and we use docking stations @ my work -- punked my co-worker for a good hour and a half. He thought he had conficker or some virus so he went through and ran a bunch of scans. ;-)

[n230099 Posted Oct 18th 2009 11:05PM]

Still some of the old jokes are still the best. Used to love going into the secretary's MS Word options and fiddle with "auto correct" so that common words would be automatically changed. Like the boss' name etc. Also random expletives would just "show up".

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 18th 2009 11:23PM]

But .. will it blend ?

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 1:52AM]

these comments- thanks for the laughs- I sure did need them!

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 7:35AM]

My wife works for HP..................I'll take 2700 units please

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 19th 2009 7:59AM]

HAHAHA, I found one of these in my brother's storage compartment. The drawer was translucent and I grabbed it thinking it was a thumb drive. At second glance I thought it was a keylogger or something. Then I figured out what it did and I laughed.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 20th 2009 6:17AM]

Why the eff do you want to spend 19 Pounds for a prank?