Picking on people

This is a totally reminiscing entry. I remember about seven or eight years ago during some of my earliest coding days on Sloth MUD. I coded an effect that caused a player's words to come out completely jumbled. As expected, it is overly complicated code for a trivial thing, but in any case, I decided to test it out in the real game on a few unsuspecting players.

My first "victim" was at the time Toxis, played by a person who is well known as Brad. Brad is quite chatty on public channels so he was an obvious target. As I was doing this I was on the phone with another coder of old, known as Zarf. I told him what I was doing and we both sat back and watched (well, participated a little, too).

As I was snooping Brad I could see the commands that he was entering and then see the output. The situation when a little like this:

Toxis enters: gossip anyone want to help me pop some more equipement for my storage characters?
Toxis gossips -- 'fiweof sdfioj s osjso p jaoisdfj jiosdf sdfioj?f sdfio'
Clink gossips -- 'uh, Toxis, frustrated about something or you just like babbling?'
Toxis enters: gossip huh? what's going on?'
Toxis gossips -- 'viovj dfoiafjfj ss?? fisdflkjc'
Zarf gossips -- 'fiosjef soisf afeieoj right back at you'
Toxis enters: gossip wtf!
Toxis gossips -- 'wtf!'
Clink gossips -- 'that's what i said'
Toxis enters: gossip what i'm typing is getting screwed up
Toxis gossips -- 'fjisodf sofijlkje isj ssfl sfosijf sfkj s'
Zera gossips -- 'dude, something is wrong with you'
Toxis enters: gossip are you guys seeing this too?
Toxis gossips -- 'fiowefjk sfjsk fa fjs? sdfjfs'
Toxis enters: gossip my new computer is screwed!
Toxis gossips -- 'fiow fjkfj lfwehwnezc s! aosif'
Toxis enters: gossip dude
Toxis enters: gossip this isn't cool
Toxis gossips -- 'dude'
Toxis gossips -- 'llodc sdfi sujd'
Toxis enters: gossip wtf!
Toxis gossips -- 'wtf!'
Clink gossips -- 'take a chill pill, dude. are you drunk?'
Zarf gossips -- 'maybe he's let his cat walk across the keyboard'
Toxis enters: I'm rebooting, my keyboard is broken

The whole time Zarf and I are on the phone just laughing out loud. Five minutes later the effect had worn off his character and he came back.
Toxis gossips -- 'man, my keyboard was screwed, but seems to be better now'

Do you think I could resist applying the effect to him again? Of course I could not, but you can easily imagine another couple minutes of amusement at Brad's expense. Eventually we let the cat out of the bag and told him that it was an in game effect, but there were many more victims (with somewhat less amusing results) before word spread far enough and people stopped falling for it.

I was reminded of this today when someone else was affected with this condition. Perhaps I'll even call Zarf again to reminisce.