January 22, 2010

Prank #5: Mutton but Trouble

I’ve talked about a few different pranks before. Now here’s one where I was on the receiving end.

Once upon a time, I was an undergrad at Georgia Tech. For a few quarters (we didn’t have semesters at the time) I lived in a house in Home Park just off campus with 4 other students: 2 girls, 2 guys. The guys, Jeff and Cory, were the ones that pranked me.

One day, I was working on a class project and needed some files that were located back on a computer lab at campus. I shut down my computer and left the house for a bit, then came back once I had the stuff I needed. I hit the power switch on my computer and waited for Windows95 to boot. After a few seconds, I realized something was going horribly, horribly wrong. A pastel pink color was loading as the background color of the desktop. Then a sheep in fishnet stockings appeared in the middle of the screen. Finally, I was greeted with a start-up sound of a sheep saying, “Ba-a-a-a-a! I love you, Jeffrey! Ba-a-a-a-a!” After Windows finished loading, all I could see were different shades of pink all over the place including the Start Menu, window frames, etc. To make matters worse, any time I moved the mouse cursor over anything I heard “Ba-a-a-a-a!!!”

Turns out, Cory and Jeff had discovered a website (that still exists to this day) called Mutton Bone that sells inflatable sheep. As poor college students, they couldn’t afford to actually buy one for a prank (thank goodness) but they could swipe the website graphics and reuse them. Once they had come up with the idea for the prank they covertly prepared all the content and then spied on me to see when I left the house and finally infiltrate my room and desecrate my computer.

Jeff has the uncanny “stupid human trick” of being able to not just Ba-a-a-a, but actually talk like a sheep. So that skill worked great for making all the sound effects with a microphone. When they actually did the prank, Cory and Jeff modified all the system theme colors to appropriate shades of pink, added the sheep sounds for all the different GUI and system events, and replaced my background image with the “Love Ewe.”

I quickly destroyed all digital evidence of the crime, but for your enjoyment I have recreated a visual of the prank as best I recall. If you want to hear the audio, be sure to ask Jeff to talk in his “sexy sheep voice” next time you see him. Oh, and I still owe those guys big time.