In our office the latest trick is to bring up porn sites on someone's computer while they're away making coffee or whatever, and laugh at their horrified reaction when they come back. Today we did it to a guy called Ahmed, but he took slightly too long making the coffee and in the meantime his supervisor dropped by and saw the "Sh** Loving W*****" website we had put on his computer screen. The look on his face was priceless, but not as priceless as the look on Ahmed's face when he came back and saw his supervisor looking at porn on his computer!

Does anyone else have any funny stories of PhD life and the antics they get up to in their office?

We don't have any antics here, it's like a morgue. Plus all the porn sites are blocked by Websense... too bad huh?

Am I the only one who really doesn't think that's funny? How old are you - 12?

Same here, no antics- just very dull jokes.

Although i laughed when i read the first post, i would not be happy at all if that happened to me, expecially seeing that his supervisor saw it!

No Smilodon you are not the only one - my supervisors would probably drop dead if they saw that - I hope that Ahmed's supervisor has a sense of humour

In my office we play this game where you write something on a post-it like "bomb" or "cyanide" and stick it under a person's chair or under the phone or whatever. So if the person sits in their chair when there's a bomb under it they're out of the game, if they find the bomb before it can explode they're still in.

I can remember one time when a professor went past and asked why a student was on the floor, and he said without thinking "I'm checking to make sure that Mahmoud hasn't put a bomb under my chair again." The professor was horrified and the rest of us couldn't stop laughing.

I have known people swap the keyboard cables so two computers back to back are plugged together, and they can type on the other person's screen which completely mystifies them. A similar thing can be done with two telephones, swap the handsets and ring one, and the person answers but theres nobody there cos its the handset for the other phone.

My colleague once told me that Liz had called and left a phone number for me to call her back. When I rang the number it turned out to be the number for Buckingham Palace.

Lol now that is funny

Re: the original poster. I don't think that's funny at all. I think it's childish and stupid. But what makes it worse is that most universities have IT departments which monitor and record the viewed websites and report back to respective schools. So your friend Ahmed could get into serious trouble and even be evicted from the Ph.D programme.

Think about it

Yeah, I'd be pretty annoyed if someone did that to me. For the reasons Jouri says, and also cos I don't want to see that stuff.

Rigel's posts made me laugh though.

We once changed the start-up sound on our supervisor's PC: it was Christmas, so we set it to play a chorus of dogs barking "Jingle Bells". He nearly fell of his chair

Anyway, so I score my first gig teaching undergrads at a local university. Its temporary adjunct work, but it is paid okay if you work it out by the hour (not so great if you factor in prep time, but hey it beats Office Angels).

My lecture is 2nd year undergrad bio psych. Trying to make it interesting I factor in "discussion" points to try to get students to critically evaluate research.

Big mistake.

They want handouts, with EVERYTHING written out already. Any attempt at starting discussions are met with "Is this going to be on the exam?". The phrase "Any questions?" is met with blank stares. Also throughout the lecture, a back row parallel commentary about someone called Deano's birthday keeps going.

Either I must be the crappiest lecture ever or I have stepped into some twilight zone version of a lecture theatre. I give up halfway through, basically read through my notes, show some pretty slides and get the hell out of there.

Not sure if I want to go back...

Well, it sounds like a learning opportunity!

I saw experienced lecturers suffer from exactly the same things during my undergraduate degree.

Q&A sessions worked ok, volunteers were often in short supply, so some method of picking people was used. If you ask easy questions first, you will probably soon start getting volunteers. One lecturer used to go through the list of people that had missed his previous lecture 'to make sure that they weren't getting left behind', or some other such 'caring' reason.
I never saw 'Discussion times' work at all!
One of the methods for dealing with talkers was to say 'Sorry, but I can't concentrate on my lecture when other people are talking, so can you either stop your conversation or do it somewhere else?'
These sort of tactics shouldn't be necessary, but I'm afraid they are.

I must admit, that we had everything on handouts, but I know that differed by department.

"One of the methods for dealing with talkers was to say 'Sorry, but I can't concentrate on my lecture when other people are talking, so can you either stop your conversation or do it somewhere else?'"

Sounds like a waste of energy. Ever thought about a simple "shut up" in an unexcited calm voice?