Well, I don’t know if this counts as a nerdy prank…maybe it does.

Years (and I mean YEARS ago - around 1980 or so), I worked as a dispatcher for city police department in N. CA (Sacramento). The dispatcher unit had 80% turnover at that time, and we were ALWAYS training new hires. We had one trainee who looked like a young version of Adolf Hitler, thought he was God’s gift to women, and generally, was a pain in the tukus.

One graveyard shift, it was REALLY slow (it was during the winter). We had four patrol radio channels, and each channel had a trainee with a trainer, plus the radio room supervisor, there were 9 of us in the radio room. All women.

Young Adolf was working at teletype in another area of the dispatch center, but we could clearly see him through the plate glass window that divided the radio room from the complaint desk area (and behind complaint desk area was the teletype area).

Now, one of us trainers had trained YA at teletype, and that trainer had NOT mentioned to YA that if you took the teletype machine (an ASR350) OFF LINE, and knew the direct dial phone of another ASR350 teletype machine (like the one we had in radio), you could send a teletype message to that machine — and completely bypass the official police teletype system.

So…we comprised a message that was disguised as an OFFICIAL WARNING from the California Dept. of Emergency Services, advising that a 8.9 earthquake had struck San Francisco, and that a tsunami was headed towards the Sacramento River, and that areas around the Sacramento River had 30 minutes or less to evacuate. We included special coding in the teletype message that would ring the message bell on the ASR350, and cause certain lines of the text to flash on and off in a brighter font.

We warned the Police Sgt. who was the Comm Ctr Supervisor what was going to happen…and sent the message. YA was standing with his back to the teletype machine when we sent the message to his machine, YA heard the bell dinging, turned around to see what was going on…and we could see his jaw drop down as he started to read the message.

Halfway through the message, he turned to complaint desk and yelled out “Earthquake,” and printed the message when it was completely received. He ran over to the Comm Ctr. Supervisor with the message — who read it, wadded it up, and said, “Oh, you can’t believe all these messages.”

I think that’s right about when YA knew he had been had.