A few months ago we decided to have some fun with our intern Scooter.
He’d been mocking us with a “Max Headroom” wallpaper. He’s too young to remember “Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes Into The Future”. And by “too young”, I mean “he wasn’t born yet.” He just didn’t realize how good that show was, at least to a teenaged geek.
So I decided to teach him a gentle lesson by changing his wallpaper. While I could have done something like copying all the files on his computer to his desktop, I wanted to be nice. Nice is just changing his wallpaper so that he isn’t looking at Max Headroom anymore.
A few simple changes to the WindowsXP graphic (to make it WinpwndXP) and a simple registry edit and we were all ready to go. Scooter came into work and fired up his PC. We watched anxiously, and….
Max Headroom showed up.
Puzzled, I dug into the registry. Everything looked fine. I changed it on mine, and the wallpaper changed, but it wasn’t working on his! Puzzled, my coworker and I decided to just berate Scooter instead. He has no relevant work experience and badly needed a haircut. That was enough to entertain us. The wallpaper change prank was forgotten.
Until today.
Another coworker mentioned someone with the same name as Scooter had issues with a wallpaper he couldn’t change. One that says “Winpwnd”, coincidentally enough. He thought another computer geek was pranking him, and was waiting for months for the other geek to say something.
At least now I know it worked. And that Max Headroom still rules.
