A Little Joke To Liven Up Your Lives

                       by James Judge

Call me sadistic, but I find this joke extremely funny. Let me
regale about how I put it into action:

A friend (computer illiterate to the extreme) borrowed a laptop
from work to do some word processing on. After a couple of days he
was hankering to play a few PC games that I had been telling him
about (he had only had access to an ST beforehand), so he asked me
whether I would be able to anything for him.

Knowing his tastes in games I told him about Wolfenstein and wrote
him three little batch files and placed them onto a disk with the
Wolfenstein archive.

The first .BAT file was the longest as it set up a couple of
directories for the game and saved game positions to be stored in

as well as copying the archive and de-arcing it and then removing
it from the HDD as well as restoring any previously saved games.

The second .BAT file was to remove everything the first had
installed.

The third was a small one to copy saved games to the disk so that
when he ran the second .BAT his saved games wouldn't be wiped.

While writing the .BAT files this idea popped into my head and
(also knowing the friend's sense of humour) decided to implement
it into the first .BAT file.

All I did was to make the screen go blank and type up a few
computery terms incorporating the words 'FATAL', 'COMPUTER, and
'ERROR' when everything has been successfully installed. I then
gave the disk, plus instructions, to the friend and completely
forgot about it.


That evening I had a frantic 'phonecall from the friend telling me
what a terrible bar-steward I was. He did cotton onto the fact
that it was a joke (I did put HAHA, got ya!' at the end of the
message) but it sent him into shock for a few minutes.

How I laughed.

So, to all of you practical jokers out there - try this on a
friend and see what they say, as long as they will (in the end)
appreciate the joke, that is (oh and make sure they don't know
anything about computers, or else you'll just look daft!).








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