Pranks

Timbeck2

Timbeck2

Final Approach
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Nov 4, 2015
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Timbeck2
We convinced a kid at work that Old Bay seasoning was great on everything especially ice cream. He tried it this morning on his favorite Ben and Jerry’s. The expression on his face was priceless
 
My favorite prank for co-workers who didn't lock their workstations when they went to lunch, was to take a screenshot of their desktop, then drag everything off into a folder somewhere else. Then set the screenshot as the background.

Much fun would ensue watching them try to click on folders and programs that weren't there.
 
In the vein of food...Last year we had a cookie exchange at Christmas time. I made some (upon request for the 3rd year in a row) almond sugar cookies. I set enough dough aside for 3 cookies out of 4 dozen. Those three I loaded up with mustard powder. I was just going to let people take them and they would just have a surprise when they got home. Well, a bunch of people couldn't make it, and it was just the hosts, their 12 year old and 8 or 9 year old, another couple, and me. I told the hosts and other couple my plan which now would not be implemented, but not the kids. Well the 12 year old boy (or at least he identifies as, looks like, and acts like a boy) was saying how he could eat whatever number of cookies he said. 10 maybe, I don't recall. So I lay the bait. "I bet you couldn't eat 10. I bet you couldn't even it five. Actually, I bet you couldn't even eat three cookies." He takes the bait. His mom and dad are trying not laugh. So I egg him on for a while about it during dinner, and say, that after dinner I get to pick the cookies. He doesn't hesitate at all because even the largest cookies weren't that big. I hand him the first one, and hilarity ensues when he reacts to the flavor. Mom and dad said it was a good lesson and told him that he needs to be careful about what sort of bets and challenges he makes.

Speaking of the dad...

I think I was 30 and in the years leading up to that I played in some really competitive flag football leagues with the dad (whom I've known since we were teens). Quite a few ex D-III, D-II players and even a few ex D-I guys. Since I was 2 years younger than everyone when I was in HS, I never played football in HS because I wasn't big enough to play until I was already out of college. But I played QB and more than held my own against all these college players. So the local arena league has a tryout, and I go to it. There's probably a hundred or so people at the tryout, and even though I played QB, I trying out as WR/DB. They keep cutting players, and by the time the end of the day rolls around there just a handful of us left. They tell 3 or 4 guys to hang around, and thank the other 5 or 6 of us for coming out. I had no expectations of making the team, it was just something to see where I stacked up. Had I tried out as QB I probably would have been one of the 4 or 4 invited, because frankly I was a better QB than what they demonstrated at tryouts and a few of the other wide out candidates I warmed up with said I should have tried out as QB.

Anyway, fast forward a couple months and the pro team hosts a flag football tourney. During the last game I point out to my teammates (including the dad) that the PR guy for the team along with the head coach is watching us. I don't think it's a big deal - they were watching all of us play, and we were in the championship game, so of course they would be. We win the championship game, get a big trophy, some handshakes and we go home. This was in January maybe? Fast forward to first thing in the morning April 1st and I get a phone call from the PR guy.

"Hey, this is the PR guy and we are hosting another tournament next month, do you guys want to defend your title?" I told him we didn't really like the format, they promised some things that didn't happen, and after verifying it was going to be the exact same setup, said I would check with the team and let him know later that day. I hang up the phone and a light bulb goes off. I call the dad, and say:
"I just got off the phone with the PR guy and he had two questions for me. The first was if we wanted to play in another tourney, but the setup was going to be the same, so I said would check and see with the rest of you. The second thing was if I was busy this afternoon."

"Oh? Why does he want to see you?"

"Remember when we were playing and I pointed out the HC and the PR guy watching us?"

"Yeah."

"Well, the coach remembered me from tryouts, and after seeing me play wondered why I didn't try out as a QB. Apparently the backup QB got hurt and they need someone quick. So they want me to come down at 3:00 this afternoon to run through with the team, see how quick I pick up the playbook, and if all goes well, it sounds like I'm basically on the team."

"Holy **** that's awesome! Can you get tickets?! How much will you get paid?! You know everyone is going to come down, and hope the starter gets hurt so we can watch you. Holy **** this is the coolest thing."

"OK, well, it's just a walk through, I might suck. But I'm gonna call your brother [my best friend from growing up] and let him know as well."

I let him get way way way more excited than I thought he would, and I said I'd call him back and he'd be the first to know what happened. I knew I couldn't say the starter got hurt, that would have made local news. Backup, not so much. And he bought it. Before I called him back he told EVERYONE he knew, coworkers, family, mutual friends, other friends, everyone except his brother. I had an AF joke for his brother as well, and after I suckered him, I told him what I did to the dad. Well later in the day those two talked because when I called the dad back to ask for some "technical support" on a computer issue I was having with my calendar and asked him what day his calendar said.

"Ed's A Bastard Day."

The aftermath from it was a-ma-zing. For months, people were asking him in earnest if his friend made the team, etc... and he had to hang his head in shame and say "It was an April Fools prank."

As an aside, at the tryout we worked with some of the pros. These pros were levels above the D-I guys, and these were guys not good enough to be in the NFL, so there's a huge gap in talent between your average D-I player and the guys that play on Sunday, and Monday, and Thursday.
 
Go to someone's computer and and switch the m and n keys. Works great on people that aren't great typers. I watched a man struggle with this for a very funny few hours until the company IT guy came and I had to tell them what I did. The IT guy was the boss' brother and I didn't want to waste his time like I had my coworker.

A guy used to get me good. He had shoes especially good at building up static electricity. He would shuffle his feet all the way to my office and sneak in shock the crap out of my ear, it was very jarring. I had this huge desk that literally would only fit in my office one way, that way being with my back to my door, so he probably got me hundreds of times.
 
Walking to my lab with my young niece and nephew, I said "do you see that big building up ahead?". "Yes". "I own it".

Bad on me, little kids are easy. They believe everything. Still fun though.
 
Caramon13 said:
My favorite prank for co-workers who didn't lock their workstations when they went to lunch, was to take a screenshot of their desktop, then drag everything off into a folder somewhere else. Then set the screenshot as the background.

Much fun would ensue watching them try to click on folders and programs that weren't there.
Click to expand...
We had a guy who would find unlocked computers and write love emails to other coworkers. I was the recipient of one of these. It was awkward. Oh, and this was the director of HR. Not really sure to this day how he kept his job.
 
Every day since my birthday, a new statue of a bird has shown up at my desk.
I have 2 wooden eagles and a wicker chicken on my desk as I am typing this.

I am curious to see how far it will go.
 
We had this guy who used to put hand lotion on drawer pulls, all the time. So one of the production guys got a long thin tube, snaked it through the suspended ceiling, poked it through a tile over his desk chair and painted it white to match the tile with correction fluid. On the other end he put a big syringe filled with water. About three times a day the production guy would give him a squirt while he was sitting in his chair. Nothing excessive, just enough, it would land on his head. Drawer pull guy puts up with it for a day or two, not wanting to give any one the satisfaction, but finally he comes to me and tells me we have a leak in the roof and I need to get it fixed. So I told him it hadn't rained in weeks and he is on the first floor, no roof above him. They kept him going for months. He'd move his chair, they would move the tube. He'd look in the ceiling for the tube, he couldn't see it, something about being color blind. The guy deserved every bit of it.
 
-tape an air horn under their chair so when they sit down the air horn goes off

-put a very small piece of tape on the bottom of the laser thing on the mouse so the mouse doesn't "quite" work right

-turn the sensitive on their mouse pointer up to maximum and turn off "enhance pointer precision"

-change auto correct to change their first name to the last and last name to their first

-change the mouse pointer to the hour glass

-and for people with messy desktops.. get creative with prnt scrn and paint and watch madness unfold as they struggle with their icons

-print a piece of paper that strictly says "DO NOT DISCARD THIS SHEET OF PAPER" and absolutely nothing else.. watch it sit in the printer tray for months
 
Back when I had an employee who rode an old Harley to work, we put a puddle of oil under it. Because Harley. He went out at lunchtime, put his finger in the puddle, smiled at us and said, "This oil ain't from my bike! It's too clean!"
 
Kenny Phillips said:
Back when I had an employee who rode an old Harley to work, we put a puddle of oil under it. Because Harley. He went out at lunchtime, put his finger in the puddle, smiled at us and said, "This oil ain't from my bike! It's too clean!"
Click to expand...

I may have read it on this board, but someone did something similar. They kept adding gas to this guys new vehicle, and he constantly bragged about how great his mileage was for a long time. Then after a while, they removed the gas from his tank, and he couldn't figure out why he was getting such crappy mileage.
 
Girl signed into her Netflix account on the computer at work and forgot to sign out. She was not a happy camper when she found out she had ordered porn. Got a guys confirmation number who was making a long distance flight. Called and ordered the ‘bland’ meal. Guy had bypass surgery. When he got home called Dominos and had a triple cheese pepperoni pizza delivered to his house. Put a suggestion box in Base Ops from ATC, no bottom, with a paper shredder underneath. Grease pencil the eyepieces on binoculars.
Guy played the lottery twice a week, every week. Someone saw his ticket and got the numbers. The set up was on. Supervisor made sure he was on position when the numbers were read. He tells someone going on break to get the numbers. Comes back with his numbers. He goes nuts. Demands to be relieved from position and is. He goes off on the Supervisor. Finger in face, you #@$&#, I’m tired of your sheet, I quit. Him and the Sup actually got along better after that.
 
Kenny Phillips said:
Back when I had an employee who rode an old Harley to work, we put a puddle of oil under it. Because Harley. He went out at lunchtime, put his finger in the puddle, smiled at us and said, "This oil ain't from my bike! It's too clean!"
Click to expand...

Lol. We put rice under the crotch rockets.
 
Fiveslide said:
Go to someone's computer and and switch the m and n keys. Works great on people that aren't great typers. I watched a man struggle with this for a very funny few hours until the company IT guy came and I had to tell them what I did. The IT guy was the boss' brother and I didn't want to waste his time like I had my coworker.

A guy used to get me good. He had shoes especially good at building up static electricity. He would shuffle his feet all the way to my office and sneak in shock the crap out of my ear, it was very jarring. I had this huge desk that literally would only fit in my office one way, that way being with my back to my door, so he probably got me hundreds of times.
Click to expand...

How do you switch out the m and n keys?
 
Mtns2Skies said:
They snap off and snap back on. But, if you've typed in this millennium you shouldn't be looking at the keyboard to type.
Click to expand...

There are plenty of people in their 40's and up who couldn't type their way out of a wet paper sack. Those are the people you pull this on. :devil:
 
NealRomeoGolf said:
We had a guy who would find unlocked computers and write love emails to other coworkers. I was the recipient of one of these. It was awkward. Oh, and this was the director of HR. Not really sure to this day how he kept his job.
Click to expand...

We have a Project Manager where I work, does the same thing. Hasn't done it lately. First time happened to my boss, she was freaking out that she got hacked. PM was just laughing his ass off in the corner.

Oldie but a goodie:

Turn on all (and I mean ALL) of the accessibility features and the theme on a windows computer. Large Mouse pointer, inverted colors, sticky keys, magnifier, etc. Nothing funnier to watch someone try to maneuver a mouse around the screen when the pointer is basically half the screen size. And it's hard as hell to identify where the tip of the mouse is when it's massive like that.
 
It started out as an exercise to see if I could listen in to conversations in the other dorm rooms. If I pulled the room's speaker cover off, there was a massive bundle of wires in it. I took my roommate's amplifier, and started testing inputs to see if I could single rooms out. What I discovered, was that I could not. You could here everything going on. Whatever selection was going on, was happening at the front desk paging system.

Well, it's a two way street. If I can listen in on everything, I should be able to broadcast to everyone, right? So instead I hooked up a couple wires to the amp's output, and did a couple second test.

It worked.

So, later that night, about midnight, I put on roomie's 2 Live Crew CD in the player, and cranked it way up. The resident adviser was madly trying to flip switches, and turn things on and off to no avail. Finally he realized it was someone screwing around in a room, and commenced a door to door search. I had the wires rigged so I could just pull them out from under the plate so nothing would look abnormal. Caused quite a commotion.
 
About a year ago, I typed my daughters birthday into her phone and *bingo* it unlocks. So, I lay in wait until April Fools Day. Early that morning I sneak into her room and grab her phone and change the passcode to: 190401 (and also disable fingerprints). I then set a series of alarms to ring throughout the day, each one with a clue as to the next number or numbers. For example, the first alarm plays "Hey Nineteen" by Steely Dan, etc.
Apparently, teenage girls do not find it humorous when their father screws with their phone...I think she is just now finding the humor in it...
 
Fiveslide said:
There are plenty of people in their 40's and up who couldn't type their way out of a wet paper sack. Those are the people you pull this on. :devil:
Click to expand...
I'm 62, and have worn the markings off of many keyboards. I never look at 'em.
 
You used to be able to calibrate a mouse, I guess you still can. I would calibrate it ass backwards, left is right up is down. Not only do they have to figure out how to find the setting to fix it, they have to completely go against every muscle memory ingrained in their brain to do it.
 
Caramon13 said:
My favorite prank for co-workers who didn't lock their workstations when they went to lunch, was to take a screenshot of their desktop, then drag everything off into a folder somewhere else. Then set the screenshot as the background.

Much fun would ensue watching them try to click on folders and programs that weren't there.
Click to expand...

Similarly, had a USAF supervisor anal about enforcing policy to take out your ID card to lock your computer whenever you were away from your desk. If he found your computer unattended and unlocked, he would take your ID card and you would have to go grovel to him to get it back. So one day I had enough of his tomfoolery, and took a screen shot of my screen with Outlook open and some other FOUO document, and made that my screen saver. Came back to my cubicle one day, having taken my ID card, to find him sitting there frantically looking for my ID card and wanting to rip me a new one. I let him go on for a while, then explained what I had done. He didn't bother me any more.
 
If screen rotation is not locked (it usually isnt)
Ctrl + Alt + left arrow (or down arrow etc)
rotates the page 90°
and many cannot figure it out (it is really hard to navigate the mouse like that btw)
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
If screen rotation is not locked (it usually isnt)
Ctrl + Alt + left arrow (or down arrow etc)
rotates the page 90°
and many cannot figure it out (it is really hard to navigate the mouse like that btw)
Click to expand...

Now that is useful information. My wife must have managed to that accidentally one night and couldn't figure out how to fix it. I finally found something in a menu somewhere to fix it, while standing on my head.
 
Fiveslide said:
Go to someone's computer and and switch the m and n keys. Works great on people that aren't great typers. I watched a man struggle with this for a very funny few hours until the company IT guy came and I had to tell them what I did.
Click to expand...

Maybe when I move back stateside I will take my German keyboard to work and switch it with someone so they type the Z and Y backwards all the time. I have a German keyboard at work and on one computer at home. My other two computers at home have American keyboards. I have to remind myself which keyboard I am using when I am typing. Otherwise I get some wackz tzping.

Edit: I guess the umlauts would give it away. Oh well. Funny to think about anyway.
 
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Glue down the markers in the classroom.
Fill an engineer's office (small office) floor to ceiling with balloons (orange & blue when he's a Raider fan)
Couple others that take too long to write up (2-day practical joke for a 30th birthday)
 
"Borrow" a partition from somewhere in the cube farm and use it to eliminate the entrance to the supervisor's cube.
 
Morgan3820 said:
Ok done. I’ll see how it goes. Good clean fun.
Click to expand...

The co-worker I did it to, they did it to their supervisor. He also swapped his own so when the guy came in there to tell him what was going on their keyboards looked the same.

Hope you picked the right victim!
 
When I was 21, two friends and I rented a house together. One roommate got a dog, a boxer, and tried to name it a manly, tribal sounding name. The other roommate and I actually spent more time with the dog than its master. We made damn sure that dog would only come and answer to "knothead". We trained it to stay when his other name was said.
 
Party at my house one night right after the movie Old School came out. One dude suddenly yells something like, "it's streaking time", got naked and ran towards the road. One friend grabbed his clothes and soaked them in the sink and I grabbed the million candle power spotlight and lit him up. He walked back to the house with his head down and one hand covering his junk.
 
At around 18 I worked for the parks department in a northern suburb of Chicago for a couple of years. There was one guy, later in life when I read catch-22 the character Arfy reminded me so much of. He was lazy, incompetent, and just rubbed me wrong.
So one day I am in the PW garage housing down the floor, and he pulls in in the truck and honks the damned horn. I give him a look and warn him not to park there, and do NOT honk that damned horn again. He of course does.

When he gets out I spray him with the hose. Not too bad. He mutters something about getting even with me. I know he doesn’t have much imagination, so I’m pretty sure he is going to just try and spray me later.

The hose was just outside the break room. So I backed off the nozzle to almost the last thread, put it back in place and then walked by the break room looking as much like a great target as I could....I see him out of the corner of my eye, I kid you not, literally walking on tiptoes like a cartoon burglar over to the hose. He gets there, aims it at me and turns it in going “HA HA!” and it takes him what seemed like many seconds to grasp that all the water was shooting back at him, none of it reaching me. He was also a part the volunteer at the fire department. I gave him a card with my address and said if he ever heard of a call for a fire at my place, just don’t come ok? “If you can’t figure out nozzles I don’t think it would help much with a fire”

Same place, a week or so later I noticed the assistant to the director, foreman if you will, a very gruff ex marine, kept Coca Cola cans in the refrigerator at work. His name was Rick, and I noticed all his cans had a magic marker “R” both in the side of the can and also the bottom. Asked him about why he did this, and got this really enthused look and told me excitedly “see, that way if they rub the R off the side, I’ll still see it when they drinks it” very proud of his trap.

of course the next day I bought a can of coke, wrote a big R on the bottom of the can, and opened it in front of the other guy, then said “I don’t know why I opened that, I don’t want it. Do you?” So he said yeah. Took it, and I went over to Rick to ask him something that would draw his attention to the other guy...I say “Rick, over there do you want me to...” and he holds up his hand and says “wait a second”, walks over and stands right next to the guy, who is upending this cook the R very prominent, enjoying it, and Rick just stands there a foot away at his side staring at him hard...I can’t help it, It was like Oliver and Hardy, the guys innocent look looks over at Rick who just says sarcastically “THANKS for ASKING A-Hole!”

I was already on my way out so I didn’t get to see what happened next.

sounds mean, but this guy was just....I don’t know, asking for it.

One on me...Moved to Norway and was working in IT, it was raining out and my coworker mentioned “hey if you don’t have an umbrella, there is a loaner there by the corner”. “Oh, thanks! I’ll borrow it!”
I go down in th elevator get outside, open it up, and it’s snowing on me! WTF?
Turns out, every time this guy emptied out the hole punch with those paper circles he would empty it out into the umbrella, just waiting for someone to borrow it. It was filled.

sorry for the length but one last one, same umbrella guy. He loved bathroom humor, was a funny guy. This was I like ‘93 or so, we had internet and it was just getting past the newsgroup stage. Took many minutes to load a web page. I happened to find a sound file with a huge fart sound. This wasn’t an intentional prank, at first but, I sent it to him knowing he’d get a kick out of it. He did. He loved it. Huge wet fart. He almost immediately configured it to be his “you have mail” sound.
Some hours later he has to call some vendor, where he had mentioned several times the woman sounded very sexy, and he wouldn’t mind...etc. so he is talking to her on the phone, and gets an email.

You see where this went, he goes all beet red, and he goes silent, a pregnant pause that just makes it worse and even I can hear the woman trying to suppress a giggle, he tries speaking again but is just wanting to crawl into a hole, so of course, I start sending him emails as fast as I can, and he is trying to wrap it up. He was stuck, he couldn’t really say “umm...that wasn’t me you see...I um...” there is no way she would buy that. He also couldn’t quickly hang up or say “I gotta go, call you back later” as that would just make it worse, There was just no way out. We laughed for like ten minutes til I was sore from it.
 
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