Yesterday was April 1st, also known as April Fool’s Day. In a 1001 day period there aren’t that many April 1st’s available, so I knew I needed to be a bit more organized than usual. So a few months ago I did a quick websearch on April fool’s jokes. I needed something that was practical, believable and that wasn’t going to have me laughing my head off during the act and thus ruining the whole thing.
I quickly settled on the trick of freezing someone’s desktop so that all the shortcuts were unusable. A brief glance at the instructions showed that this was a joke I could pull off and I was pretty sure it would be believable.

The Target
So yesterday morning I singled out the victim’s laptop as the target for my trick. First, I had to take a screenshot of their desktop, then I had to make that the desktop image and finally I then had to remove (or hide) the desktop shortcuts. The operation went smoothly and not even the fact that the laptop was in Dutch slowed me down. Then all I had to do was wait…oh and not laugh.

Before the Freeze
Eventually my victim opened the laptop and powered it up. He was on the phone to start with but I did see him frown as he attempted to use the web browser. A few minutes later when the telephone conversation had finished I heard:
Victim: There is something wrong with my laptop, the shortcuts aren’t working.
Me: Really?
Victim: Yeah, look they are doing nothing, crap do I have that virus?
Me: I heard the virus didn’t happen but that is weird, yeah.
Victim: Do your’s work? Maybe I need to restart.
Me: Yeah everything is fine with mine.
At this point he restarted the computer and of course it still wouldn’t work.
Victim: It still doesn’t work, what is going on?

Removing the Shortcuts
After a few more futile double clicks I burst out laughing and shouted ‘April Fool’s’ and showed what I had done. I even got a thumb’s up from him as he was impressed that I had managed to come up with something like that AND pulled it off without laughing.