A reader known as "Joe" told The Register's Who, Me? column how he retaliated against a colleague's excessive pranks while working in a messaging lab at an Australian mobile carrier in the late 1990s. The office was full of practical jokers, but one colleague, "TF," crossed a line by sneaking up and roaring in Joe's ear. Joe decided to plan a revenge that would be remembered.
Using the Borland C compilers installed on all the office PCs, Joe wrote a program that looked exactly like MS-DOS formatting a disk. It even wrote junk data to a temporary file so the disk activity light would flash convincingly. After a few minutes, the program revealed it was a prank. Joe added the program to autoexec.bat, but set it to terminate immediately until a month after his departure.
About five or six weeks later, Joe got a call from a former coworker saying TF "just about shat himself" when the fake format ran. By then, Joe was safely out of the job. The story is a single anecdote, so there are no differing accounts to compare, but it offers a nostalgic look at how simple DOS-era tricks could deliver a delayed and memorable payload. The Register's Who, Me? column regularly shares such reader-submitted tales of workplace tech mishaps and revenge.