I think it is fair to say that anyone who works in a large office with a few employees has encountered these type of frolics before. Yes, i’m referring to hijacking MSN and causing havoc to their friends, work colleagues and bosses! This was rife at one of my previous places of employment, and no I didn’t get sacked for it - lololol.

There are three ways to hijack their MSN:

1. Clone your MSN so that your display name, avatar and even personal message of the day looks the same.
2. Use their password and simply use their MSN.

and my personal favourite:

3. Jumping on their station when they have left it unlocked and gone for their morning toilet trip

The fun that can be had is unparalelled! I know it’s a bit geeky but c’mon, have you never wanted to message your boss and tell him what you really think of his “comedy ties”?

When I used to work at tech-support for one of europe’s largest hosting companies we used to play a very cool trick on fellow members of staff, especially the people that we hated using the power of point 3 above.

When they left their desk and you noticed their station was unlocked you would simply jump on their MSN and change their display name to something offensive like “I like to touch children in their squishy places” and then log them out. And this is where the fun begins. Imagine if you will the victim returning from their toilet break and realising that his/her MSN has been logged out. Was it a network outage, did the connection randomly drop or had you just been hijacked? These prank’s were rife in our office so the answer was probably the latter.

For those that don’t use MSN (:s) it has an option by default that when a user logs in to their account and they are on your contact list a pop up window will display in the bottom right hand corner showing that they haved signed in. This shows their display name. So imagine if you will that you have all your work colleagues, including your bosses (since it’s an office requirement) on your MSN list and you sign in and this beauty of a message pops up on their screen:

At this point they realise that there is absolutely NOTHING that they can do about their display name before the boss sees it because the boss has already seen it, as well as their family, relations, friends and anybody else on their MSN contact list! It’s a comedy classic, you should try it! It had me creased for hours on end.

That’s a simple prank that you can make, but there are better ones.

Changing your MSN so that your Display name, Avatar and even your personal message of the day is exactly the same as your boss and then messaging another random person in the office, or even target them if you are so sinister and vindictive, with some random request can have some hilarious results! Obviously this will only work if they don’t spot your email address at the top of the chat window, so aim to dupe someone with a relatively non-technical personality or someone who is just plain dumb! Hell, if they are this dumb they probably deserve it. hehe.

At the same hosting company we once got one guy (Rob) with a request from our boss to goto the vending machine and get him a Kit-Kat chocolate bar on the sly because he was on a diet and didn’t want anyone to see him get it. Our boss didn’t the office to see him eat it also so the next time he was in the toilet could Rob go into the men’s toilets and slide the kit-kat under the cubicle door. Nothing more was to be said on the matter.

I should also point out that the very same boss is paranoid about what people think about his overly large fat weight problem. Hell He was obese! That’s the best way to describe it. He is constantly on a diet whilst still being the size of a whale and hate’s people tempting him with chocolate or anything that is a “weight-gainer”. So you can imagine his, Rob’s and then our reaction, when he walks into the tech room and bellows: “Who just slid this Kit-Kat under my toilet door?! Is someone being a smart alec?” and Rob stick’s his hand up and says: “You told me to get it for ya” and then continues to tell the office about the fake chatlog and continuing to show it to the boss.

It was a true sidesplitter! Could have been worse had we not reverted our MSN details back

Feel free to post any of your MSN Hijack stories; I might even make a top 10

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Ramblings of a northerner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.