Engineer was so sick of office pranks, he 'wiped' his antagonist's disk

Joe, a frustrated electrical engineering student, grew weary of the office pranks at the Australian mobile carrier where he worked in the messaging lab during the late 1990s. Characters, like boxes of confetti, hand cream, and even prawn heads, were used by his colleagues to inflict laughter and chaos. One prankster, known as TF, took the antics too far. He would sneak up behind Joe and roar in his ear to scare him, hoping to elicit a jump.

Fed up with the daily torment, Joe devised a plan for sweet, sweet revenge. Realizing that every PC in the office had a Borland C compiler installed, Joe crafted a harmless program that mimicked MS-DOS formatting a disk. The program would write junk data to a temporary file, causing the PC's disk activity light to flash, making the fake formatting operation seem authentic.

Joe cleverly added the program to the autoexec.bat file, ensuring it would run every time the PC booted. However, he set the program to terminate immediately after a month.

Joe's cunning trick came into play a month after his departure from the company. On the first day back at work after his conference, TF was the first to arrive. The first thing he did was turn on his computer. As the program began to execute, the disk activity light blinked and blipped, giving the impression that the PC was formatting its disk.

Suddenly, a message appeared, revealing the prank. Joe's plan had worked perfectly. When one of the other employees called Joe to report his success, TF was left in shock and disbelief. Joe had finally put an end to the torment, all while maintaining his employment.