# Wanna mess with MicroSquish?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wanna-mess-with-microsquish/312769>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [July 16, 2005, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wanna-mess-with-microsquish/312769 "2005-07-16T04:49:32Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![lachesis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@lachesis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lachesis)\
**Post date:** [July 16, 2005, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wanna-mess-with-microsquish/312769/1 "2005-07-16T04:49:32Z")

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this didn’t strike me as being Cafe Society-worthy, but i still may have guessed wrong. mea culpa, mods, if that’s the case.

Husband Mine and i were talking after dinner today, and the conversation drifted from work to computer users to computers. somewhere along the line we started coming up with ridiculous things to do to the computer – or perhaps more accurately, ways to make the software do ridiculous things. some ideas that struck us as being pretty darn funny:

o when the **Help** button gets clicked, instead of an information screen you get the sounds of someone screaming for help.

o having Clippy morph from his obnoxious paperclip self into a tapeworm.

o clicking on **Help** get responded to with an R. Lee Ermey-esque bellow of “WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION?!?”

o the animated Clippy, while going through his usual obnoxious little schtick, will at random intervals subtly morph into a fanged, frightening creature that snarls at the user – but changes back so quickly that you may not be sure you actually saw it.

o (and for the uber-geeks) clicking on **Help** will bring up Tux the Unix penguin.

so. anybody else have some amusing ways to mess with the software (or even better, the user’s mind)?

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**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\
**Post date:** [July 16, 2005, 5:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wanna-mess-with-microsquish/312769/2 "2005-07-16T05:01:18Z")

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Well, I once set a copy of After Dark in a display model in a computer store to show only the “DOS Shell” screensaver.

Did I mention it was on a Mac? In an Apple-only store?

Well, by the look of the store guy who was perched over the computer when I left the store, he hadn’t seen that particular screen saver before.

On my next trip back, the screensavers were removed from all the computers. 😃

On a related note, I remember reading in one of Scott Adams’ books of a fellow who rigged every single event that could produce a sound in his cow-orker’s Windows laptop to play a long, high-volume sound clip of Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm scene from _When Harry Met Sally_. As I recall, the victim was so flustered that he couldn’t even remember how to turn down the manual volume control, and ended up shutting the laptop down by yanking the battery out, or somesuch.