Going past the fact that this is sick and wrong for the moment, and what he'll do when he finds out what it is...

What's with the whitespace? You have lines 1, 4, 5, and 14 being nothing but whitespace for no discernable reason, but don't indent lines 16 and 18 to show that they're part of a loop.

You create a new LWP::UserAgent for every line in /home/steven/error-codes; it would have been much more efficent to do so once, outside of the loop.

You page him with the same sequence of error codes at the same time every night, which will probably be a bit suspicious after the first couple nights.

You're creating a lot of billable (likely at overtime) hours for your co, and management isn't going to be happy with that. Add that to the fact that the guy they apparently like quite a bit more then you is going to call for you to be fired, killed, and then sued, you likely won't work there anymore.

There's "practical joke" and then there's "being a frelling jerk who's likely to get the dren pounded out of them".

A couple of jobs back I set up something kinda similar which set the LCD job status line on the HP printers throughout the company to randomly display humorous messages and the company's stock price. But that didn't get anyone up at 0-dark-thirty and it didn't interfere with anyone's job responsibilities.

Well . . . I did finally shut it off after the IT people got tired of having to deal with people from the marketing department (and this is absolutely true :) calling that the printer "wasn't working" because PAPER TOO SPICY, or that the printer was experiencing a GRAPE JAM.

Now that's pretty funny; I don't know what I'd think if I ever saw a printer telling me that I was feeding it paper that was too spicy :) You've gotta wonder what the IT people thought, having someone on the phone telling them that their printer is having a spice problem!

.. and good luck with your upcoming job search!! :)

That said, when we were training our new person for on-call, I did arrange something like this to happen becuase we couldn't say when a real error would take place. Although after the first night and several legitimate errors, we stopped.

To be truely BOFH-ish, I suppose you could set it so that it would send the page out at random times each night, instead of the same time every night.

Several of us, in some capacity, have administrated in 24x7 environments and are too familiar with the piercing shriek of a pager during late/early hours.

We know how it obliterates any concept of free-time, and how it interrupts and contributes stress to our lives; and our families as well. None of us take it lightly, and tend not to wish it on anyone else.

Context is everything. If the target of the above prank is a good buddy and they have a history and an understanding about practical jokes, then , yeah, it's funny. If it's just an innocent colleague, then you've definitely crossed way over the line.