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10 more goofy office pranks

I had an short audio file of a large fart sound, followed immediately by a baby's cry (as if the baby just became the victim of the foul smell). On a few select users' computers at work, I changed the default Windows startup theme sound to this audio file and turned the sound up to the maximum volume. When these employees logged in the next morning, they attracted a lot of attention.

Was to stick a Speaker into the desk Filing Draw and turn the volume up all the way while altering the balance so that only the speaker in the draw made any sound.

When the victim turned on their workstation after logging in they got the sound of a Wild Charging Rhino coming from the draw along with a Audio saying For Gods Sake don't let it out or we'll all be killed.

The number of times that they just walked away for half an hour and did nothing was amazing. Of course the same thing happened next time that they logged on so it was ongoing till they actually did something like call the Help Desk to get the Wild Animal removed from their Desk.

Then at one auto dealer the mechanics liked planting Radiator Conditioner Bottles filled with the Oxy Gas and an old Spark Plug rammed in the top to one High Tension Lead so that when the victim tried to start their car it exploded. Made lots of noise and did absolutely nothing else.

Of course the Apprentice that did it to me was a Smart A$$ and said that he was free of repercussions because he had a Diesel and no Spark Plugs. I started out making one of these and cable tieing an Old Coil and bottle onto the Frame of his 4 Wheel Drive and a contact switch under a wheel so that when he drove off the switch broke contact sent a big fat juicy spark to the Gas Bomb and blew. Naturally I wanted a Big Bang so I used a 2 Liter Bottle instead of the 500cc that was normal and scared the hell out of him. Not being satisfied with that I then set about making a timer and using that to trigger the Oxy Bomb. The last one was set to start timing as he left work and trigger 12 hours latter so at around 5 AM it blew and had him race out of bed and get done for indecent exposure while looking at his car for what had happened. Apparently you are not supposed to take your top off in the wee small hours and scrape things off the underside of your car.

I had him begging for mercy every day till I left that place and the Indecent Exposure was a little thing compared to the other things he got done for like going to the Police Station to hand in a license for DUI and driving there drunk as a skunk and demolishing the front fence as he pulled up. That was bad enough but they let that slip till he tried to drive away and drove into the front of the building because he didn't want to reverse out.

And because I did the Police Cars I had the Police in on the joke as you most defiantly can not let off Big Bangs in a small Country Town without having them involved.

Col

Our offices had the standard drop ceiling. I took a sausage balloon, filled it with hole punch confetti, blew it up and tied it off. Around the balloon I wrapped a very thing wire and then hooked it to some lamp cord which was run into the adjacent office. One side of a ceiling tile, over the victum's desk, was raised up and the balloon inserted to keep it propped up. When the victum came into his office and sat down at his desk a 12 volt battery was hooked to the lamp cord. The thin wire immediately got hot, popped the balloon (more like exploded), blew out the confetti on the person and desk. The balloon now collapsed allowed the ceiling tile to neatly fall back into place leaving the victum wondering what hit him.

Here are two fun pranks that I remember doing. The first one that we did was to take a snapshot of the desktop, set it to the wallpaper, then hide all of the desktop icons. The second was to go in to the colour settings and create a custom scheme where every colour is black. It is great fun to watch people's pc boot, and then pop up dialogue boxes in black with black text on a black background....

Whenever anyone in my office would go on vacation someone would fill an empty coffee can with shredded paper and place it inside their overhead bin so it was leaning against the door. When the victim returned all the confetti would dump on their desk. Knowing this was going to happen to me I pre-emptively did it to the "prime prankster" in the office before I left. She immediately knew who the culprit was and headed straight to my desk to get me back. What she didn't know is that I had also set my overhead bin up the same way. When she opened mine to prank me back she was hit again with a load of shredded paper. Now she had two messes to clean up.

Back in the days of DOS I wrote a program in C that simulated a hard drive format operation and placed it in my co-workers autoexec.bat file. The program looked real as I had copied all the text from an actual format exactly. At one point the program asked "Format C: Do you really want to do this? (yes/no)." No matter what the person typed the word "Yes" would appear and then the program would count down tracks and sectors as it "formatted" the drive. Didn't really work, though. We had pranked each other too many times and he was on to me.

Back in the days when you used to be able to call a local phone number for the time, I pranked a very cranky woman who absolutely refused to heed the no smoking rule in our office. (Don't ask me why management allowed it. I wish I knew.) Anyway, once a week or so, I'd call the Time number and transfer it to her line. I could hear her clearly over the partition wall. "Hm. The Time just called me. Hm." It's a wonder I never gave myself away trying to muffle my laughter.

Also, sneaking a piece of bubble wrap (the kind with the big bubbles works best) under someone's rolling chair is fun. Typically they won't know it's there until they roll over it and it sounds like firecrackers going off under the chair.

Another good one is to invest $10 in an Annoy-A-Tron from ThinkGeek. It's smaller than a business card, has a magnet so you can attach it to the back of a file cabinet and it emits a randomly timed, high-pitched beep that is all but impossible to track down. Of course, you have to pretend that you don't hear it.

Long live the office prank!

On a rainy day we would take the paper punches from a three hole punch and put them into a coworkers umbrella. This works best with a large umbrella. When the coworker opens his umbrella he is greeted to his own ticker tape parade.

Then there was the "tape a magnet" to the neck of a CRT. It took a bit of experimenting to get the best twisted effects on the screen.

I worked with friend who constantly left his computer unlocked when away from his desk. I tiled his desktop with small smiley faces. He immediately knew who the culprit was. He told me not to put small smiley faces all over his desktop. The next time he left his computer unlocked I left big smiley faces all over his desktop. This time he told me not to put big or small smiley faces all over his desktop. Next time I left one BIG smiley face in the middle of his desktop. He informed me not to leave a BIG smiley face in the middle of his desktop. So, I left a small smiley face in the middle of his desktop. Finally, he had enough and said no more smiley faces anywhere on his desktop. I could tell he was getting really annoyed with this and relented to doing no more smiley faces.

A variation on the overhead bin trick was done to me by a coworker. He placed a sheet of 11x17 paper on the bin shelf, placed another piece as a sort of wall and then filled the bin with packing peanuts. He closed the bin, pulled out the paper acting as the wall and trimmed the bottom paper so it could not be seen. He then taped the bottom paper to the door. When I opened the bin the bottom paper pulled the full contents of the bin out and all over my desk. This was in retaliation for my filling his desk drawers with expanding foam.

Back in the old days of calling a number for a free "sample" of some audio porn, we'd call one, and transfer to somewhere else in the compound.......

In the days before LCD screens, people at Motorola would take a strong magnet and place it at certain positions by the CRT, diverting the beams into something other than desired.

They would call the help desk to report the problem and if you were lucky you could sneak in there and remove the magnet before the help desk showed up.

You answering the phone and pretending to not hear the other person is timely because two nights ago my son started a Facetime (Apple's Skype) with me. I answered it on my iPod (touch) and he could hear me, but I could not hear him. So I called him with my Mac (Lion has Facetime too), and he could hear me, but I couldn't hear him. Two devices, same problem. I rebooted my cable modem, router and Mac and it still didn't work. It must be on his end. So we kept Facetime open so we could see each other and he called the house phone with his cell phone. AND I STILL COULDN'T HEAR HIM! I called his cell with the house phone and we talked with telephony and watched via iPod.

We never found the problem, but I suspect it's his end.

It worked semi well, however, it started to mold so we took the plastic off and the grass died within an hour.

But the prank was ruined earlier than that anyways, it was supposed to be played on a guy coming back from Mat leave, but he decided to quit his job at the end of his leave, so he never saw it anyways....

We had a manager who's office was down a long hallway. You could see him coming down the hall to our cubicle area. Since his visits were usually unpleasant, I would wait for him to get about halfway down the hall then dial his extension. He would stop and go back but of course I would hang up just as he was about to enter his office. I would usually repeat this 3 to 5 times and he almost always went for it, sometimes sprinting back to his desk in an effort to catch that call. Of course this was before we had any caller ID and it did make his visits even less appealing. Asking us "whats so funny?" over and over helped. I once rang him into 8 consecutive trips back. Laughing now just picturing him lumbering back to the phone.

As an office supervisor at a large computer manufacturer, I was called upon many times to mediate with our manager for his habit of filching the underlings snacks and food. On one occasion, after an egregious attack upon a tray of cup cakes, I recommended the offended employees make a batch of brownies laced with Ex-lax and frosted with Ex-lax. After consuming many brownies, the boss lasted about two more hours of work before he had to bail for home in a big rush. Of course, the office had a lasting laugh but the event did not cure the boss.

Having cubicles back to back with a shared phone and Ethernet common access, some employees found their mouse jacks plugged into their neighbors computer. The response was always entertaining. It worked especially well if the mouse jacks could be replaced into their proper respective computer port BEFORE tech support could respond for diagnosis.

1) I was responsible for an office automation machine which had the 3420 reels with it. The plastic strip which held the end was the same color as the red light shining through a hole on the keyboard template.

I threw his keyboard offline, put the plastic strip behind the template, and waited to see what happened. I could hear him (behind me) typing away, but nothing except the keystrokes occurred. "Are we down?" "No!" someone yelled. Eventually, he started checking all of the cables, what was plugged into what, etc. and the plastic ribbon was found.

2) I decided to go after the same guy. I was relatively new, so I didn't know about everyone, their history, etc. He'd get a full mug of coffee, head for the machine room, tear off the greenbar from the console, and take it back to his desk. I started putting things in his unguarded coffee: salt (no response), Binaca concentrate, etc. Nothing phased him. I was stumped.

One day, he was walking into the men's room as I walked out and I forewarned him what awaited him. "That won't matter -- I had a brain tumor and can't smell or taste anything." Damn. That rebounded on me.

3) I was working at a startup with oodles of wired, but unused phone jacks. I was getting tired of spam at that moment, so I plugged a phone into it, responded to a spammer for refinancing mortgages. About two minutes later, the phone rang. When I told him the phone was on the DNC (Do Not Call) list and he said something like, "He TOLD me the lines had been scrubbed. After two more calls, there was a call from someone who was madder than... The proverbial throbbing vein in the corner of his head had to be purple. He was the "owner" of the spam and sold access to the information for the parameters they specified. We tried again a few days later and got the same response.

After that, we'd been laughing so hard (not as hard as the time we put Gaines Burger in the college's salad bar) but still pretty hard.

XP Pro has a feature in the desktop menus that allows you to rotate your screen by 90, 180 or 270 degrees. It's a bear to fix because your mouse doesn't respond the way it should because it, too, is rotated. It'll drive people crazy trying to figure out what they did wrong.

30 years in the business and didn't experience or see any of these where I worked. Frankly, I'm not the least bit sorry for that. Boring can be good.

1. Way back when I was a bench technician for Montgomery Wards, we had a fairly new technician who was very afraid of electricity. This was back before computers, when the TV's were hybrid with both tubes and solid state parts. The HV tube that drives the HV transformer had a plate cap. I told the manager of my intent for the next day he was all on board.

I looked at the tech's schedule of work and pulled his first repair from the shelf, repaired it and replaced it back on the "To Do" shelf.
I placed the wire of a little gag thing called an "Auto Fouler" under the plate cap of the HV tube. This thing was meant to go under the spark plug wire inside of a car. When you start the car, it starts to whistle very loud, explodes like a fire cracker and then emits tons of smoke. I figured the 1200 volts on the plate cap would be enough to set it off.

We all stood back the next morning and watched the tech got his coffee, pull the TV from the shelf, proceeded to go into his very small booth and closed the door.
After about 30 seconds, we all heard the audio from the TV because that part was solid state, then when the tube warmed up, the device went off with a very loud whistle, explosion and plenty of smoke.
We could hear him screaming through the door.
He came running out of the booth with his eyes wide open, arms flailing, face white as a ghost and saw everyone laughing their heads off.

He immediately pointed to me and said, "You, You did this!"

Later, he did join the laughter with the rest of us and told us that when the whistling started, he pulled the power cord but the sound kept on and when the smoke started, he just freaked out.

The TV suffered no harm whatsoever in this prank.

Edit: The device used was a "Auto Fooler" and you can still buy them today.
http://www.fakecrap.com/auto-fooler-p/1002.htm
Only $1.50 - May buy a few of these!

2. I taped a large 18inch Degausing Coil under a very long repair bench in the center of our repair center. I ran the cord down one of the legs and into my booth. One of the new techs came in and put a color TV on the bench directly over the spot where the coil was. When he got the TV working, I would switch the degausing coil on and off several times. This would distort the screen many times more than a single magnet would and also really messed up the color even after the coil was off. He would get other techs to help him and while they were looking at the screen, I simply hit the switch again and he would say "You see that? What could be causing that" The other techs would say, "Wow man. I have never seen that problem"

I had to tell him after about an hour of troubleshooting and he got a good laugh as well.

3. Then there was a fellow worker that was complete jerk back in the Dos days whom everyone disliked. I proceeded to modify his command.com file with a hex editor and changed his startup screen to display "name-name is a total as--h---" several times when it first booted up.

He was very upset to say the least and proceeded to look closely at his Autoexec.bat and config.sys files for the text. After a while, he decided to reformat his hard drive and reinstall Dos.
What he didn't know was I changed his command.com file on his Dos installation disks with the same line of text.
Every time he reformated and reinstalled his dos, the startup text was still there.

After a few hours, the boss told me to fix his computer because he was tired of hearing his whining. I did and actually later we became very good friends and are still friends today.

I can remember when all the "techicians" used the Auto feature on their Tektronics o'scopes. They'd leave for lunch and the gig was on. I'd set up their o'scopes to a one time trigger, reduce the brightness to zero, trigger on event, rotate the display and everything else I could think of. What fun to see them try to figure out what to do to get their scopes to working in a manner that they could handle. They didn't make techs back then like the ones the navy put out. Most today only have a specialty. One trick ponies. And still can't find a use for a four input high speed O'scope nor realize when they're having aliasing problems.

1. At a previous company, we used to use a photogrammetry program that used configuration files for all of the menus and menu options. If you knew what you were doing, you could modify the menus to do just about anything you wanted. For a couple of users, I mapped every single item to the exit command. It always asked for confirmation before exiting, so everything the user would click would result in a message "Are you sure you want to exit?".

Extending the same prank, for another user (who insisted her computer was out to get her) I removed all menus except the "Help" menu. I removed all options from this menu and added one that said "Help Me!". Upon clicking, a message would pop up that said "There is no help for you."

2. We had a user who was well known for his paranoia. I created an application that would display a graphic of a small cartoon dog wagging its tail on the screen. The dog would display a random number of times per day, at random intervals, and for a random length of time, no more than two seconds. Every time it popped up he would freak out and start yelling "there's the wagging dog again!" Everyone except those who knew thought he was losing it.

3. A coworker and I managed to get a hold of the employee picture of the guy who took care of shipping. We took the picture and put it in front of a funky looking rainbow colored background. We then scaled it to the exact size so that when printed, we could run it through the cross cut shredder and have confetti with a tiny little picture of the guy on both sides of each piece. We then mixed it all in with the packing peanuts in the overhead dispenser. He didn't notice for some time. Every single package that was shipped for months on end contained a littering of the tiny little pictures. Since many of the packages were shipped round-trip, we were able to verify that the pictures continued to go out for some time.

4. When one coworker went away on vacation for two weeks, someone formulated a plan to get him. We had one person who was particularly good at photoshop. We provided him with a variety of head shots of the guy. He then took a variety of pictures from his desk: CD covers, book covers, pamphlets, etc. Anything that contained a picture of a person. He then picked one person in each scene and photoshopped his head / face in the picture, printed the new version, and replaced the original. He was Willie Nelson, Bob Marley, some opera singer, people in magazines, and many more. The best part about it was that the photoshop jobs were so good, you wouldn't notice unless you paid attention. Literally everything on his desk with a picture of a person had his face on at least one person. To top it all off, dozens of tiny prints of a goofy picture of him were made and placed everywhere: taped under his keyboard, between documents in his drawer, behind his monitor, under his chair, under the desk, everywhere. It would be years before he was able to find them all.

Back in the day when every phone had its own wire pair and caller ID wasn't around to spoil things, I was living in the dorm, and had the means to tap into a second circuit. I patched the two lines together through some switches and a matching transformer that I had rigged up. I had fun connecting two unsuspecting outside people to each other, each blaming the other for calling. The best was when I simultaneously dialed the operator on both lines.
Operator 1: "Operator, may I help you?"
Operator 2, picking up the line: "This is the operator."
Operator 1: "Yes it is."
Operator 2: "May I help you?"
Operator 1: "Are you having some difficulty?"
Operator 2: "No ma'am, who are you trying to reach?"
Operator 1: How may I complete your call?"
Operator 2 (realizing she's talking to another operator, and taking an air of superior knowledge): You need to disconnect your call before looping into another exchange."
[click]
I'm rolling on the floor.

Back in the day with Windows 95/98 you used to be able to send network messages to individual users that looked like they were coming from a server/network admin. To the trained eye you could tell it WASN'T coming from an admin but for the most part if you didn't pay attention, you could pull off almost anything.
Such as telling users they have to reboot several times a day because of "issues" their particular computer was having. I had 1 guy reboot about 8-12 times through out the day because his computer was showing violations of its term of use. And rebooting was a 5+ minute ordeal. He would openly complain to those around him (including me) that he wasn't doing anything wrong. This lasted WEEKS before someone spilled the beans about it. Best IT practical joke I ever pulled.

I worked with a guy some years ago that got a paper shredder that sat by his desk. He was constantly shredding and loved that thing. When he went on vacation, I wrote a ransom note in sharpie directing him to the location of his shredder, then shredded the ransom note. I put it in an envelope with a note that he had to piece the ransom note together to find out where the shredder was. He was directed to another shredded note, then finally to his shredder.

He was so insistent that his shredder, which made long 1/4 inch wide strips, would protect confidential data, that I couldn't resist proving that it wouldn't.

Unfortunately, he did not appreciate the prank.

Also, the more recent pranks were that we built a tiki hut around one guy's desk, wtih an opening that he had to crawl through. He left it up several days, and quite enjoyed it. We filled another guy's office with giant trashbag balloons, and another office floor was lined with the ubiquitous red cup that was filled to the brim with water. I will also say that fun size Hershey special dark candy bars that are microwaved for just a few seconds and rolled around on a dusty floor can be molded into realistic looking, uh, "cat presents", so to speak.

...you couldn't have been very busy working,.. funny though

My first job in electronics engineering was with Hughes Aircraft. It was 1965, and, a new hire, I was the person on the receiving end of the Eastman 910 prank. I let the fellow apply the clear, watery liquid, pressed together my thumb and forefinger just as he asked, then very subtly rocked them together so as to be able to sense invisibly when the stuff set up. Just as it started to set up, I separated my thumb and forefinger, drawing several fibers of cyanoacrylate between them and spoiling the prank. "I've known about Eastman 910 for a few years," I told the prankster. The next time someone tried an office prank on me, it was 1986. I spoiled that one, too.

Some high school interns played this joke on a new, cocky Systems Engineer. They installed a Blue Screen of Death background on his computer and hid the mouse pointer and task bar at the bottom. The SE reformatted his computer 3 times before he realized what was happening.

Once when a co-worker went on vacation, the boss got the idea to wrap everythnig in the worker's cubicle with aluminum foil. I mean every thing. The stapler. the tape dispenser. the candy jar. the chair. the computer. the moniter. Every square inch, except the floor, was completely covered in silver bliss. Kind'a creepy.

About 15 years ago while our local Mensa chapter was still very active sending messages back and forth to one another there were three of us who were always stirring up trouble. I got the idea to send messages out using Outlook and Word as my editor and posted messages with the font color changed to white. The emails would look blank and we'd email each other privately laughing at the reactions we got. It's still a fun thing to do and I think I'll do it again right now to one of my ultra right-wing friends.

This was a prank in which I was the first ever victim at my company. It was just before Christmas and the company sent out an email to sign up for Secret Santa. For those who don't know, each person who signs up puts their name in a hat. Each person then pick a name from the hat and purchases small/cheap gifts for that person for a determined $ limit. This was a two week Secret Santa with a $15 limit. Being very new to the company and not really knowing anyone, I opted to skip Secret Santa for my first year. Well, to my surprise I started getting little gifts on my desk. I confirmed with the coordinator that I was not included and though someone was just putting the gifts on the wrong desk. The gifts continued and got more elaborate and weird (Frisbee, a Dawson' Creek paperback, and the ugliest Christmas decors were only a few of the crazy gifts I received). When it came time for revealing the Secret Santas it turned out that six people got together and decided to play this joke on me. In total there were about 25 gifts. For the next five years the person who was tricked the year before got to pick the next victim (only new employees hired after the prior Christmas would do). The same gifts were passed on along with any crazy new ones. Each year that person contacted the coordinator letting them know they were getting gifts even though they hadn't signed up.