Engineer’s delayed computer prank startled former colleague years later

An engineering student working at an Australian mobile carrier in the late 1990s devised a delayed prank against a colleague who repeatedly startled him by roaring in his ear. The story shows how a workplace joke escalated into a carefully timed piece of payback.

The engineer wrote a harmless program that mimicked a disk format, including flashing the computer’s activity light, then arranged for it to run on the colleague’s computer several weeks after he left. Around five or six weeks later, another former colleague called to say the target had been badly startled; the program then revealed it was a prank.