randomwisdom.com

You know, sometimes there are moments in the staffroom when you're sitting around and there's no students to interact with and everyone is doing their best to look busy so the boss doesn't yell at them. It's moments like these that are just ripe for a good prank.

I've been recording my voice for a set of video tutorials and at one point in the middle I paused, sneezed loudly into the headset microphone, and then continued. I cut it out of the tutorial of course, but that same isolated sneeze was too perfect to just discard. I added about 7 seconds of silence to the beginning and saved it as an audio file. Then I walked over to one of the "public" staffroom computers and set that sound to pretty much every built-in Windows sound. I unmuted the volume control, fixed the speakers (which had been plugged into the wrong jack) and turned up the volume. I then walked back to my desk.

What I didn't expect was for some automated program to trigger the "exclamation" sound on its own about every hour or so. Every so often the computer would emit a quite convincing sneeze, at which point everyone looked around, and assumed it was someone else. It worked so well because the sound was so brief that nobody could tell where it was coming from. After several hours of this someone walked over and started using the computer, and the trap was sprung. A short while after a program was opened, the computer would sneeze. When a program was closed, the computer would wait and then sneeze. The sound was distant enough from the triggering event that nobody figured out they were associated, and in fact the poor sap using the computer was having a tough time convincing everyone else he wasn't actually sneezing. Eventually they figured out it was coming from the computer. As the murmuring in the staffroom grew and the resident computer expert fiddled through menus trying to figure out where the sound was coming from, the desktop went through a sort of digital hay fever; every 7 seconds a sneeze was heard. Finally a rather bright English teacher turned off the speakers, and the joke was played out.

Much better than taping aluminum foil to a cubicle.