It has been a long boring working day. All the projects has been finished and was really one of the day you don’t know what to do with yourself in the office. It was 2pm. I already checked all the news, mails and videos on the internet, did go to lunch with my teammates, had couple of coffee brakes, and still had 2 hours of ‘working ‘ in front of me. Bored, watching some computer prank videos I came to idea to do something similar.

My parents (especially mother) are not very skilled in using the computer. In fact they are little behind the time. Since they have a lot of problems and need my help quite often, I have installed application that allows me to remotely access the computer and help them fixing the thing –computer (unless the problem is related to internet connection – actually it happened to me once, when my mother asked me to remotely connect into the computer and check why Internet is not working, but this is another story).
Well, back to my boring day. I checked if parent’s computer is turned on. It was :). There was no movement, so it seems that nobody is playing with it. Ok… Because computer is actually notebook, it has internal web cam and speakers that can be turned in OS. So I’ve opened the program that records the video from the webcam and resized the window showing what is being recorded. All set… Now I just need to drag someone attention. So I have started music player, set volume to 100% and played some techno music … I waited for minute or two, when I saw her, my dear mother – disheveled and drowsy. When she looked into the computer, expression on her face was priceless (I saw her, because I remotely watched the desktop with application showing what is being recorded). She was surprised and terrified at the same time. After seeing herself she immediately closed the laptop. Game over…

Not exactly ;). She called me few minutes later and told that the computer is acting strange. “I was sleeping, when computer suddenly started playing some kind of music… I got out of the bed and went to see what is happening… I have looked around and realized that the sound is coming out of the thing (computer)… I wanted to stop it, but when i moved the mouse (screensaver), I saw myself in the monitor”. After that she immediately closed the computer and unplugged it from the electricity, but the computer was still playing the music for quite some time (I guess, until it successfully went into hibernate mode). “… It just didn’t want to stop”, she said.

I love my mother, but I just couldn’t stop myself saying “Mom, this is important. There is some huge computer virus that steels all the data from the computer, play some random songs, record videos and put the data on the internet. Probably this is why the computer is acting so strange. Please don’t touch anything and wait for dad to come home. Tell him to call me immediately, so we can solve the problem.” She was completely confused. When father came home, she did tell him to call me. When he did, I told him that all was a little joke and that there is no need to be worried. “I knew it all the time.” he said, but I could hear a big relief in his voice and mother laughing in the background :).

After all the conversations have been made, I realized that 8 hours of my work has ended half an hour ago. I sure did note 30min overtime in our internal timesheets and immediately went home.

by Jure