Pranking bosses, friends, and competitors.
Analog engineers are notorious for pranks they play on their bosses, their friends, and their competitors. Some pranks become legendary. In 1970, National Semiconductor announced that they were reducing the lawn maintenance in order to save money. Their famous IC designer Bob Widlar promptly bought a sheep from a local farmer, chained it to the front lawn of the building, and called the San Jose Mercury News.
This was just the most public prank Widlar pulled. Pierre Lamond was a National Semi executive who was a stickler about employees getting to work on time. This was a tall order for a bunch of analog guys. So Bob Dobkin and Bob Widlar came up with a circuit that would steal cycles from the 60 Hz wall socket that Pierre’s clock was plugged into, making it lose a few minutes every day. Widlar asked his brother James, who worked in the facilities department of National, to sneak into Lamond’s office and do the deed, cobbling the circuit into the socket. It drove Lamond nuts. He bought three new clocks before they tipped him off to the prank. IC designer Carl Nelson recalls, “I can still hear his screams echoing down the halls of National”.
When analog guru Bob Pease was at Philbrick he had a healthy competitive dislike for Analog Devices, who also operated out of Boston. So Bob took an old scrap op amp module and in an inspired move, he had his friends in the silkscreen department put a very professional label on the device, 4QAD. If say it out loud a few times Bob’s profane message to Analog Devices (AD) should become apparent. Bob made up several of these, one of which he sent to Dan Sheingold’s 34 years ago, so long ago Dan forgot about the prank and had to ask Pease just what that amplifier did.
Sheingold wasn’t the only ADI employee subject to practical jokes. Pease noted how Analog Devices was touting Paul Brokaw’s new CMOS circuits with a custom soup can. So Pease took the can of “CMOS DACs”, drilled a small hole in the bottom and back-filled it with sea moss. He managed to solder up the hole in the can and sent it to Brokaw. They hoped Brokaw would enjoy his “sea moss soup”. Apparently he Post Office did not cooperate. When recently told this story, Brokaw says that, “I never got the SeaMoss. I never even knew about it until now.”
Pease was not the only competitor to respond to the ADI CMOS DAC soup cans. Jim Williams and Jim Cecil bought a Big Mac, stuffed a bunch of National Semi CMOS DACs into the meat patty put the burger back in its original box and sent it to ADI’s Dan Sheingold with a note, “Enjoy your Big DAC attack”. Sheingold told Williams that the burger “was a bit green around the edges” by the time he got it.
There is sweet justice in some pranks. Years after Dobkin’s prank on Lamond, application engineer Jim Williams noted that Dobkin was making a few too many comments about the time employees were getting it to work. So rather than do a cycle-stealing circuit, Jim and co-worker Len Sherman took down Dobkin’s clock and put in a slower crystal. Dobkin bought a new clock. So then they put in a faster crystal. Dobkin bought a new clock. Then Jim used a file to reshape the pole pieces on the electric motor. “The hard thing was making his clock run backwards,” Jim confesses. When Dobkin saw his clock doing this, he knew that a perpetrator had been made a victim.
Williams didn’t just torment Dobkin with the clock. He put carefully cut pieces of electrical tape over the IR receivers on Dobkin’s new Mercedes Benz. That stopped the keyless entry working. It took several trips to the dealer before the service guys figured out what the problem was.
Years later, after they had left National and gone to Linear Technology, Carl Nelson pulled two pranks on Williams. In one, he put a small coil of wire inside the socket holding the true-RMS chip Jim was characterizing. It made the formerly fast part run inexplicably slower. Carl stopped by every hour and asked Jim how it was going, suggesting it might be a wiring problem. By the end of the day Williams was “really testy,” so Nelson admitted to the prank.
Nelson didn’t just sabotage Williams’s parts. He once sabotaged Williams’s office. Jim kept detailed cryptic outlines of his next article on the whiteboard. So Nelson snuck in, replaced Williams’ s whiteboard with an erased one that bore the note: “Please help keep this building looking clean and orderly,” signed, “janitor.” Nelson reports Williams came in the next day and just stood there, staring for a long time, finally saying, “This is just too awful to be true, so it can’t be”. Nelson brought Williams’s original whiteboard back after everyone stopped laughing.
They didn’t stop at pranking co-workers. A friend had given Williams an egg-shaped piece of aluminum carbide. Williams took it into work and announced that he had an unbreakable egg. Most members of the engineering lab immediately stopped work, trying to break the egg. They put it in a huge vice and hit it with a hammer, to no avail. They lodged it in a crack in the sidewalk and hit it with a sledgehammer. Unfortunately, their aim was a little off, and the egg ricocheted off a car parked a hundred feet away. Having wasted hours of Linear Tech engineering time, Nelson then sent the egg to Maxim so they could waste a lot of their engineering time. The egg came back a week later, broken in half, with a note that read, “What’s the problem?” Recent investigations into the incident have been unsuccessful in uncovering the Maxim method, but it is rumored to involve hot oil and liquid nitrogen.
Maxim engineer Bruce Moore recalls another Bob Widlar prank from his National Semi days, the “hassler” circuit. Widlar grew tired of certain loud persons who came into his office. He built a little microphone-amplifier circuit to deter them. It detected loud sounds and amplified and frequency-shifted them upwards. This put an annoying tinny echo in the loud person’s ear. They soon left Widlar alone.
Moore also recalls a classic prank from his Raytheon Semi days in the 1980s. An IC designer had built a complex breadboard. It had four layers of kit-transistor parts with point-to-point air connections, all hooked up to a dozen power supplies. The moment of truth came when the designer turned on the power supplies for the first time. Paul Dixon had run a thin plastic tube hidden from the back of the breadboard to the end of the bench. Dixon was hiding there, 30 ft away, and blew cigarette smoke into the tube. The IC designer switched off all the power supplies and just sat there looking at the circuit. Dixon sauntered over and asked, “Hey, how’s it going?” The designer just said, “Fine, just fine.” He wouldn’t admit anything was wrong. Moore recalls laughing his butt off.
Be careful if you prank your boss. In 1975 National Semiconductor’s Dennis Monticelli worked on a team that developed a camera control chip. Kodak had traveled to Silicon Valley to review the project. Monticelli’s boss, IC designer Tom Frederiksen, was usually calm and collected. This day he was quite nervous, what with the customer visiting and all the top National bosses looking over his shoulder. It turned out there was only one good wafer of the new camera chip. So Frederiksen told Monticelli to get the sole good wafer to the packaging group right away, so the Kodak executives could take the parts back to Rochester. Instead, Monticelli grabbed a bad wafer from the lot with his tweezers and jogged down the hallway. As he approached Frederiksen’s desk he pretended to trip and the wafer flipped off the tweezers and struck the hard floor, breaking into a bunch of useless pieces. Monticelli feigned shock, but that was nothing compared to the look of horror on Frederiksen’s face. With a straight face Monticelli stammered, “I was rushing. I’m so sorry! What are you going to tell Kodak?” After the last shade of color had drained from Frederiksen’s face, Monticelli’s accomplice, technician Bob Sleeth, came up behind him, safely holding the real parts in a wafer carrier. Monticelli estimates that if prank had gone on for 11 seconds instead of 10, he might not have worked at National much longer.
You should beware of prank escalation. Len Sherman, application engineer at Maxim recalls a prank exchange with Jim Williams when they were at MIT. As he loves to do, Williams had bought an old broken oscilloscope and worked on it all day, bringing it back to life and perfect operation. After Williams went home for the night, Sherman put a piece of toilet paper under Jim’s oscilloscope graticule. The paper was unnoticeable, but made the scope trace fuzzy. It looked like a focus problem. Jim went crazy the next day trying to fix this problem. He had the covers off and was measuring all the high voltage circuits. It took a few hours before he found the paper.
To retaliate, Williams took the hinge pins out of the lab door and tied a rope to the doorknob that he pulled back into the room, threw over a beam in the ceiling, and tied to 100 pounds of ballast. The next morning Sherman put the key in the lock and turned the knob. The entire door left it hinges and glided, upright, back into the lab about 10 feet. It then stopped and fell over. “It looked like something out of a Stephen King movie,” recalls Sherman.
Sherman then rigged up a water nozzle to a photo-switch triggered by the lab lights. He rigged a soldering iron with coil of solder around it used as a fuse, to time out the prank. Sherman didn’t want to flood the lab, just run the water nozzle for a minute or so. Williams got wet.
So exercise caution if you don’t want to get caught in a prank backlash. It is much safer to do fun pranks like Analog Devices engineer Sandoe Thomsen did to a co-worker who was constantly bragging about the great mileage his VW Beetle was getting. Thomsen started adding gas to the tank. IDT analog IC designer Paul Brokaw worked with Thomsen at this unamed previous company at the time. Brokaw reminisces. “It was back in the 1950s when Beetles were rare. Sandoe began tracking this guy’s mileage and adding gas to his tank. Remember the old Beetle had no gas gauge, making this occasional fill-up pretty hard to notice. I don’t recall that they got it to 100mpg, but it was a big number. And then Thomsen cut him off, cold turkey. The guy went nuts and took the car in to get the mileage fixed. The VW mechanics confirmed to him that he was nuts.
National Semiconductor application manager Alan Martin pulled another delightful prank back when he worked at Linear Technology. LT vice president Steve Pietkiewicz was a design manager back then. Alan took a lithium coin cell and wired up a relaxation oscillator that flashed a blue LED once every 45 seconds. The flasher would run for months. Then Martin put the LED behind the hollow faceplate bolt of Pietkiewicz’s Tektronics 547 oscilloscope. You would only see the flashing if you were sitting directly in front of the ‘scope, and then only notice it out of the corner of your eye. Martin was worried about Pietkiewicz’s reaction. Messing with a man’s oscilloscope is as bad as dating his wife, a very sketchy proposition. It took Pietkiewicz six weeks to notice it, but he was delighted, perhaps since Martin used a LT1316 to make the relaxation oscillator. Pietkiewicz’s group had designed the part.
EDN is having trouble getting confirmation of a sample die with a middle finger salute on them that National Semi engineers would send to competitors asking for samples. Neither have we been able to confirm that engineers replaced National Semi VP Bob Swanson’s yellow Porsche with a wrecked one of the same year and color. We have learned that Bob Swanson warned all his employees to not park in visitor spots after he founded Linear Tech. Jim Williams and Carl Nelson waited until Swanson parked his red Porsche and then stenciled the parking spot with “visitor.” Swanson’s secretary found it quite mirthful. Mr. Swanson was not amused.
The beauty of these analog pranks is that they were not arbitrarily or cruel. They made a not-so-subtle comment about cost cutting, time management, personality quirks, and marketing campaigns. If you have pulled a good-natured prank on your boss, or a coworker, or a competitor, please add it to the comments on this article below. And no, charging up a capacitor to 200 volts and tossing it to the lab director is not good-natured.
cuttingedge commented:
I know this is late, but I just came across this posting.
Yes I was there at National to see many of pranks. The cycle stealing circuit was the one of the best. This is three pranks at Cadence.
One was a person had gone on a trip for some days. I had mention to facility what if his door disappear with some drywall. The next day it was dry-walled and taped. Note they were always adding subtracting office there. When the guy can back it took him a little while to determine the office was still there. It took about 30miin to reopen the office.
On another day when I was bored in the evening there was a office not being used with some misc furniture. When nobody was around I put all furniture sideways. The desk with chair and trash can next to it. Book case sideways with books in it. A sideways picture on the back wall. Put stuff on the desk like in-out box, papers, notepad, telephone, and stapler. I may have put a coffee mug on the desk. Some of the people would walk by and have to backup to do a double take.
Another prank I did on a friend Sun computer was a little program that when triggered jpg picture of a Sun computer when it crashes. When a Sun computer crashes has a weird screen. Then I would the rebooting message on screen and usual error message. The user got a clue that it was a prank when put the old TV off air cross and with the Indian with feathers test pattern.
One I heard of at SLAC was two eng working on benches back to back. Like the resistor joke one person working on a project for about a week was getting ready to fire it up. Of course the other eng had run a tube between the two lab benches to his project. When the guy turn it on the other guy blew cigarette smoke into the tube. The other guy was running around turning off all the power supplies.
kdsch commented:
When I studied electronics at vo-tech school, I'd walk up to the soldering bench, start small-talking with a classmate who was completely absorbed with his work. I'd casually chat with them, and while their face was inches from the circuit board, I'd turn the soldering iron temp all the way down. Then I'd sigh and say, "Alright, I'd better get back to work," and walk back to my desk. I could then enjoy imagining their sensations, next their thought process, and their reaction. One guy flatly said, "Karl, TWO-HUNDRED degrees?" Maybe next time I'll make use of a hidden step-down transformer...
Dave Thomson commented:
When I worked at Harris in the 70's the photocopier in our building was constantly on the blink. Finally, late one weekend, we swapped the defective one with the one in front of the copy center in the adjacent building - they were identical models. It took about 20 minutes on Monday morning for the swap to be discovered. Management was irate that someone would have the audacity to exchange a broken copier for a working one. But we did get the defective one replaced after the swap.
Different story: My wife worked at Harris at the time and they were under the gun to develop a mil-qualified RF modem. They ended up working into the wee hours of the morning before a customer visit to get it up and running. While the project engineer was getting a couple hours sleep, the techs wired a flashcube into the 5V power supply.
The project engineer came in in the morning to do the customer demo and powered it up. The flashcube went off, he powered it down, and started walking out the door. The techs had to chase him down to let him know it was a prank.
Jerry Kroth commented:
Back in the '60s, I worked in a lab with several other technicians at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque.
One day one not so well liked tech was breadboarding a circuit. WWhile he was at lunch, one of the other techs took some of the guy's carbon resistors and painted new color stripes on them.
Well, it took the tech a while to figure it out as every time he changed out a resistor in the prototype circuit, totally unexpected results occurred. The guy was furious when he finally started measuring resistor values.The rest of us almost fell off our lab stools laughing.
robertnorris commented:
In the late 80's I think it was, Plessey Semiconductors designed a CCD delay line which used a serpentine structure and looked roughly like a train track under the microscope. The designer was a train fanatic so he thought it would be a good idea to design-in a train apparently chugging around the track. When seeing the silicon for the first time, his boss blew a fuse, and I think would have sacked the guy on the spot if only they had more than one designer!
Dar commented:
Back in the 90's (DOS days) we would prank our boss with lots of little programs that did things to his monitor, like letters falling and such. One day we found one that turned his entrie display upside down. we installed it and went home. It didnt work the way we planned, he was getting used to us doing stuff so when we all got there next morning, he was at his desk typing away like any normal day, with his monitor turned upside down. He was smiling!!
(from an Old GI)
Mugundhan commented:
Hello Mr. Pease,
I really enjoyed reading your troubleshooting analog circuits and World's best analog designs...
Mugundhan commented:
Looks like a load full of fun...too bad that analog has gone minimal these days:(
Airman ****** commented:
Back in the 60's things were slow in the teletype repair office on the midnight-8:30 shift, so I looked at the office clock and noticed that the motor field could be flipped over and turn the other way. So we set the clock to say 8:30 at 8:30 and left. The day shift guy took about a half hour to figure out he was being had.
deanosity commented:
The one about the 8 beeping watches that took 5 years for the non-founds to die cruelly tickled my funny bone. Reprogramming a guys ICONs? That is deliciously cruel, but effective considering the need for security.
Jim Handy commented:
I found that Bob Pease posted a scan of the Signetics Write-Only Memory which I was going to give the URL for, but this website doesn't let me put in a URL. (Interested people can find it by doing a search or by going to the Objective Analysis home page.) It's much cleaner than the nth-generation photocopy I have from pre-Internet days out in my garage!
Bob tried to undermine me once at a Field Application Engineer (FAE) conference in 1980, when he came by National's microprocessor group's display with a Jacob's Ladder on a cigarette tray. He'd lean over the demos we were showing to see if he could cause them to fail. God must have been on my side that day!
Objective Analysis issued an Alert on April 6 covering TI's takeover of NSC. We failed to mention Bob Dobkins when we were gushing about the genius "Bobs" who brought National to prominence. Sorry Bob! Dumb mistake!
spreadspcowboy commented:
Long ago, I worked for an outfit that had a telephone system where one dialed "191" and it sent the handset audio over the company wide paging system. A common prank with newbies was to page them with "(Newpersonsname) call 191" and then wait for the newbie to dial the paging extension. You would usually hear "hello?" and perhaps a few other choice words once they figured out they'd been fooled.
Jim S commented:
In the early 70's as the venerable Mallory SonAlert became readily available we discovered that the 2600 Hz tone bounced off of every hard surface making it difficult to determine its origin. Well it wasn't long before a half second chirp every hundred seconds in a concealed sonalert would send every tech in the lab nuts trying to locate the source. The goal was to disquise it so well as to require days to locate it. Humurous at first it quickly became an all consuming hunt to turn that d*m thing off!
emc2 commented:
In the early days of switching power supply design it was tremendous fun to mount a 1 watt carbon-comp resistor under the bench of the power supply designer, and then run wires from that resistor several benches away to a bench supply set to run 2 watts through said resistor... only when the designer was at his bench working diligently, of course. :-) When that designer smelled smoke he shut everything down, and so did we. After checking carefully, finding nothing wrong and very gingerly repowering up, we would again turn on our power supply and a few minutes later the smell of smoking resistor would return. We got caught when we could not laugh quietly enough...
It was also a fortuitous discovery to learn that the fixer sponge containers from Polaroid scope film were gas-tight. Insert some freeze-spray and cap it off, wait about 2 minutes, and the cap would fly off (usually all the way to the ceiling!) along with a rather loud BANG. Really good for sending engineering comrades up to the ceiling as well...
Dobby commented:
The Darkness Emitting Arsinide Diodes (Dead's) written up by me when I was at National..
bcarso commented:
I was told a story about a pair of pranksters who built a little battery-powered RF transmitter, and would stand outside a man's house. They could see the TV set's screen and the armchair where the guy sat watching.
They would tune the transmitter to the carrier of the station and get the picture to lose sync and start rolling. As the guy got up to adjust the controls, as soon as he almost reached the set the one of them would clamp his hand on the tank coil and kill the oscillations, and of course the picture would stabilize. This jape was perpetrated for a sequence of days.
Finally one day as the picture was rolling, the man got up and instead of walking towards the set, left the room. Outside, they moved up a bit to better see into the house, and saw the man on hands and knees emerging from the kitchen and crawling back towards the set.
The following day the retailer's truck was in the driveway and the TV set was being carried away.
At this point, the pranksters decided that it might be advisable to stop the torments.
Richard Greene commented:
My first job was working for GTE research labs in Bayside NY in the early 60's. We (2 engineers and 2 techs)would take our coffee and lunch breaks in our lab. In those days the only adding machines were the loud noisy electro- mechanical ones. Invariably during lunch one particular scientist (we'll call him Bob)would come down to do his house check books and other "government" work during our "quiet time" lunch breaks. This, over time ended up really annoying our group. The circuit breaker which supplied power to the adding machine was located in an adjacent room. We decided to teach this guy a lesson. The next time the guy came in to disturb our quiet time one of us slipped out and flipped the circuit breaker which then froze up the adding machine right before he was to get his final result. After a few minutes of confusion Bob asked us if we knew what was wrong. One of us then sat down at the adding machine and hit one of the keys. Simultaneously the person at the breaker box flipped on the power and the machine came to life. We of course "could not understand his problem" so we shook our heads and walked away. This sequence happened three more times over the next 20 minutes. Each time Bob got more and more agitated. Finally, on the fourth "freeze-up" one of us walked over to the machine,raised his hands over it (like a priest might when giving a blessing) and uttered the phrase "HAZANGA" at which point the machine came back to life, Bob realized the errors of his ways and never disturbed our lunch again.
mathman commented:
Years ago, my job with a large telephone company was component-level repair of computer pc boards. We had one technician who seemed to constantly blow fuses. One day, I took a 3AG fuse apart and inserted a piece of 12 gauge wire. The technician was amazed when I presented him with the "30 amp no-blow" fuse. I think he took the hint.
Len Sherman commented:
The stories in the comments are as good as the article. I remember the Write Only Memory data sheet. Paul, maybe your next article should run down prank parts. Besides the WOM, I remember National issued a data sheet for the "BD1" on April Fools. It BD1 stood for "Battery Discharger". The imaginary part was a TO3 can with all the pins shorted together. It had some great specs, like REALLY low resistance between Pins 1 and 2. The really funny part of this was that we got REAL calls inquiring about the BD1. We didn't know it at the time, but there were starting to be people who needed controlled battery discharging.
Meredith Poor commented:
I have a specification from an unnamed vendor for a Li-ion powered portable e-sized plotter. It unfolds from a laptop carrying case and is then suspended from the chair backs of the forward airline seats. IF is IR. Full plot takes five hours on battery power.
Mike O'Dorney commented:
One of my earliest contract jobs was for Analogic. I was hired to make some automated test equipment for their digital panel meters, so they stuck me on the line to learn the meter. I immediately got to work, troubleshooting the 4 3/4 digit critters, and came up the learning curve rapidly. My supervisor liked that and tried to get as much out of me, before engineering stole me back. We had a good collection of scopes, meters, pulse generators, and they got passed around, and nobody seemed to mind if you mooched one and brought it over to your bench. One day, my supervisor told me to get the Elgar and test some odd Japanese meters at 100 volts, 50 hertz. We had a heavy mains simulator that would run from 16 hertz to 800, and 60 volts to 440. We kept it parked on a heavy luggage cart, right next to the timeclock. I went over and got it, and tested out the dozen meters, and brought them to my boss. He thanked me and told me to put the Elgar back. I went back to regular meters and forgot about the Elgar. About half an hour later, he walks by and starts chewing me out for not putting the Elgar back. Surprised (since we never put the common test equipment "back", and he was such a mellow guy), I hopped to it and put it back.
A week later, he asked me if I wanted to work Saturday. I said yes, and came in, and couldn't find my timecard. My supervisor had it and told me it was OK, and I got to work. At the end of the day, they shooed us out, and went looking for my card, and it was still missing. Monday came, and I noticed a few extra hours. That explained the Elgar episode - it turned out that the bosses gave everyone a "bonus" by running the timeclock at 70 hertz, then slowing it down to 50 for a while, to get it back on time.
The best digital prank I ever heard was at Infoton. This company made terminals, and was a sloppy outfit, with numerous accidents and deaths. One guy had a PC board jam in a wavesolder machine, pouring a gallon of solder on the floor (and a little on him). A couple of old ladies keeled over on the assembly line. One of the techs brought in a picture of an old factory with the famous sign - "This factory has worked xxx days without a lost time accident". He immediately modified it to "xxx seconds". And a bunch of us started cobbling up LED displays that would count up to 8 or 9, then reset to zero. Initially, it took about five chips to do this, but we soon had an informal contest to see who could make a counter with the fewest chips. One clever guy did it with one chip, but had a colossal array of diodes, resistors and capacitors, since he was driving the segments individually (as opposed to decoding a number into segments). He instantly became a legend, and he told us of a tale he played on a slumlord.
In those days, if you dialed a certain number, and hung up, your phone would ring. It was a test code for the phone company, and the actual number (each central office had a different one) was well guarded. But the number was usually a five digit number like 22445 - something easy for the phone guys to remember, and small numbers, rarely anything more than a 6, plus repeats. He quickly learned the number and made a tiny circuit. The circuit had a photocell, so it could count days. After the sun rose on the fourth day, it started counting seconds, for 18 hours, or so. (Between 1 and 4 AM, depending on the season) That triggered the oscillator to speed up by twenty, and dial (by shorting the phone line) the test number. Since it hung across the phone line, it made the phone ring.
He hid this in the woodwork, a la Hogan's Heroes, and every fourth day it would annoy the former slumlord. Some nights, he would park outside and hear the ring - the device was not found for six months!
Rubberman commented:
I still have a scan of the timeless data sheet some engineers at Signetics published in 1972 for a "Fully Encoded, 9046xN, Random Access Write-Only-Memory" chip... I still ROFL when I read it!
Rubberman commented:
A very bright, but young engineer I was mentoring was shipped off to Korea for a site visit shortly after he got married. We hadn't had time for the obligatory "newly-wed" prank, so we decided to get him upon his return. After some brainstorming and head scratching, another engineer (young female) and I (old bald dude) decided to give his office cube a gender change. Since his name was Paul, we changed his name plaque to Pauline (as in The Perils of), replaced all his stuff with female stuff, including high-heel pumps where his sneakers were, a lighted cosmetic mirror, girl books, etc. All very much feminine (which Paul was definitely NOT). Then we hid a webcam in one of the bookcases with a motion sensor, and a big pink banner over the door to the building - "Welcome back Paul! We hope Korea didn't change you too much!". The webcam was set to broadcast to the entire company (on 3 continents and almost a dozen countries). Needless to say, his double take on walking into his office was priceless! We got a lot of compliments on the prank from all over afterward. I still have a copy of the video.
adip commented:
Back in 84 most high voltage capacitors were Mica capacitors -tubular- and half an inch long. When I joined the R&D of a defense lab - the boss had only one comment for malfunctioning boards "dry solder". this drove the technicians to tears, ultimately we took one terminal off the capacitor, drilled a small hole and a used epoxy to glue an aluminum wire in place. The Boss came to see the fault and noticed the loose end of the capacitor. To show how it should be done he applied the soldering iron himself.after a frustrating minute he told his secretary to send a note to the capacitor manufacture and left the room. He came to know about the prank -we were however astonished that the epoxy held up to the heat for so long.Dry solder was always a problem -but from that that day not the only one.
LaserDudePhil commented:
Hey Bob,
How about that time you rode a giant cannon around through the halls at National?
adip commented:
Back in 84 most high voltage capacitors were Mica capacitors -tubular- and half an inch long. When I joined the R
Lyn Heiges commented:
I recall the super mileage VW trick being done at CBS in New York! The siphoning of fuel to make the guy think something happened to his VW was the stellar part! After the bragging he ate a lot of crow! Enjoyed the whole article! Thanks and God Bless You ALL!! (Especially ENGINEERS!)
jed martin commented:
that reminds me, i'm still looking for two old prank data sheets...
TI's Dark Emitting Diode and National's Polish op amp (POP amp).
Tenderman commented:
While working as an intern in 1987, I set up a camera in a mail cubicle so it was aimed at the boss's desk, then ran the cables to a VBCR in the storage room. I then put a whoopie cushion under his office chair. He prided himself on knowing knowing everything that went on in 'his' facility. It worked perfectly. He sat down, looked at his secretary and said "Joyce, I think I need a new chair. Joyce was in on it, and said "No, your chair is fine. They went back and forth about needing a new chair as he bounced up and down, exhausting the last of the air. He went around the facility with it, exhausting it everywhere, and asking who did it. At the end of the day Wednesday) was their weekly staff meeting. When he asked if there were any staff comments, I said I had a video I thought was very pertinent for the staff. They showed it. He knew he had been had.
It was April 1, 1987
Andrew Mark commented:
fun...thanks.
UIdahoProfessor commented:
The analog engineers of the future can match and update the pranks of the engineers of the past. I'm a professor who teaches analog design and runs a university lab that employs and graduates some excellent analog engineers. As a retired Army Reserve colonel, I emphasize security for computers and offices/labs. We were doing some unclassified analog design for the military a few years ago, so computer security became even more important than usual. One of the students, an Air Force veteran who was known to be very careful about security and operated a tidy lab, found another student's computer logged into the network and unsecured. The second student, a superb designer, was constantly breaching security by his absent-mindedness. The Air Force guy and his office mate reprogrammed all the icons on the offender's desktop. For example, the next time that he wanted to use his email, the icon sent him to MATLAB. They completely scrambled everything, even programming his LabView icon to send a message to me and to cc both the offender and the prankster. They reprogrammed an icon that he used often to log him out of the network and then reset his password to the name of the Air Force guy, so he would know who did the deed. The offender guessed the password rather quickly, but it was a couple days before he succeeded in untangling his desktop icons. As far as I know, he never messed up security again and neither did anyone else in that lab.
Rich commented:
Back when I was a lowly supervisor, I had a thirty-something boss who had fallen in love with his future 3rd wife. She had given this tough guy a furry little stuffed bunny for Easter. We were shocked to see it proudly displayed in his office. One day one of the guys "kidnapped" the bunny. Well, the boss went ballistic! We were shocked and the kidnapper, by now too scared to confess, figured he better let the boss know that it was a joke. So the next morning when the boss came in there was a ransom note made from cut-out magazine letters and a rabbit ear (from a different bunny, we weren't THAT stupid!) with smears of red paint on it to resemble blood. Wrong move: he went from ballistic to nuclear. Anyway, eventually we had to sneak in during the dead of night and return the bunny unharmed. We only confessed after he fell in love with his future 4th wife.
Dave Richard commented:
One year at Easter time a number of us found beautifully decorated Easter eggs on our desks. I asked around about who brought them in and found out it was our document control lady "Mara". Warning flags! I immediately checked out my egg by spinning it on its end. It immediately fell over indicating it was a fresh egg. I checked out another egg she brought in and it spun ok, indicating it was hard broiled. So I swapped my egg with the egg on her boyfriend's desk. You can guess what happened. It was kinda messy.
Doug commented:
My first job (in 1964) was on the Surveyor Spacecraft (first unmanned soft lunar lander). The television camera had failed vibration tests several times and we were up against the "schedule wall." We finally were ready to test the "final" design with all the big-wigs from Hughes Aircraft Co and JPL observing. As the vibration tool ramped up a lab technician dropped a metal trash can lid on the cement floor of the lab, making a terrific crashing sound. "Laugh," he said afterwords. "I thought they'd never start."
SS commented:
We pulled several pranks on our boss in the early 90's. The first one was that out boss took great exception if someone forgot the original document in a photo copier, as the copier had a very annoying synthesized voice that would say "Please remove the original"... and the copier was next to our bosses office and so he would get irked when this would happen... so we would periodically increase the volume level of the photocopier any chance we could. Our boss seeing what was happening literally destroyed the copier's speaker and so we went in after hours and hard wired a new speaker into his office and into his telephone. I did feel sorry for the next person who mistakenly left the original, as our boss then went over the edge and started kicking beating up the copier... We stopped after that, as our boss was starting to get that scary nervous twitch :) ...
Steveo commented:
Paul,
One time Jim Williams broke into my home while i was on vacation and he and Dobkin blew up weather balloons inside the house. Pretty funny trying to open the front door. They could only be removed by popping them and all the powder in the balloons covered every inch of the house.
To get back I bought 8 watches that beeped only once every 24 hours, they were expertly installed in his walls, bed, heating ducts and on his dog. He never found all of them.... they beeped for 5 years until the batteries died.
Dave Richard commented:
Many years ago, 1970's, at Digital(DEC) wafer operation we had a number of practical jokers in the tech shop. The first shift techs rigged up a wall phone so when you took the receiver off the hook you got squirted with a stream of water. I had heard about the setup and I was in the area at the start of second shift to watch the fun. Well, the phone rang, dialed by one of the first shift pranksters and nobody was there to answer it. So I picked up the phone and said "Dick Plutnicki" and then "Oh S**t". Dick was our plant manager. Let me tell you, the next day the first shift guys were tip toeing around the place! I let them stew for a good half day before telling them how they got pranked!
Dave Jones commented:
Looks like Hans Camenzind added a hidden easter egg in the 555 timer:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ4r8Rc5aus
Bob Colwell commented:
After laughing my head off at this column, I realize it confirms what I already knew. DON'T TICK OFF THE ANALOG GUYS. :-)
BillSacks commented:
In the early 80's, I had samples of a now obsolete NSC lamp flasher IC meant for airline flashlights that could flash an LED once per second on a single cell. I put one in a box being shipped to my friend Bob with a small speaker wired in serries with the LED. I put the LED through the shippng label in an O in the person's name. I affixed a peal off sticker to box instructing the freight carrier that the ticking box was a harmless practical joke. The label requested that the last person in the shipping chain remove it. They did so. The ticking box was placed on Bob's desk. I called his business partner, John; to be sure the box had been placed and John remarked the box was ticking. I could visualize John's head just shaking as he reported on the ticking box... I do not think that joke would go over so well in today's climate, but 30 years ago, it was quite funny.
Glen Brisebois commented:
A riot Paul. Thanks.
Bob Pease commented:
LOVELY.
I'm working on the follow-up batch. / rap
