thucydides: Then there was the time in high school when my brother and I got hold of a friend's car keys, cut a spare, and started moving his car to a different space/lot from the one he parked it in every day. Thought he was losing his mind until he figured it out.

I once did something similar, but opposite.

Long ago it was my ex's birthday. A few days earlier I went to her parent's house and borrowed her spare car key. I took the day of off from work and didn't tell her. When she started her 6ish hours of college classes I went to where her car was parked, got in, took it to BestBuy and had a brand new CD deck installed to replace her shiatty factory radio. That Cavalier required you to take off the dash to change that biatch so I wasn't about to do it myself.

Anyway, I drove her car back and parked it in the same spot. When she got back into her car there was suddenly a new car stereo and a stack of new CDs sitting on the seat with a "happy birthday" note on it.

/Just felt like sharing

Huck Chaser: Listen to the advice posted above, subby. The "prank" you mentioned in TFH will get you (not him, YOU) fired from any company I've worked for.

Odd I see so many of these types of replies. Where I work, we respect intellectual property security. If you find someone's workstation unlocked and unmanned, I expect you to send disturbing emails, facebook updates etc then LOCK THE farkING COMPUTER for your coworker.

/and make sure you CC all of management
//more fun that way

back when shutdown was an application on the mac...

if i had a teacher in comp lab or in class, I'd make a proper copy of the shutdown application, move it into "startup items", and walk away. They shut down... restart the next day, and get stuck in an infinite loop.

I was 11 years old, and very, very proud.

At one of my clients there were rumors floating around that "Company X" was going to buy their company. Two people went and bought a few fake video cameras - the good ones with a battery so it has a red glowing LED and a cable that runs up into the ceiling. They printed out some "Company X" logos and glued them onto the cameras. Then placed them in the break room and watching all the doors. Holy crap did they get some people wound up with that one...

oxycodon: I might be dating myself, but I miss messing with users on a Token Ring network. It was a two part joke. During the first visit to an office to fix a network problem, you'd make a big deal out of losing the "token" when a cable was disconnected. The second part worked best if you had the users spend at least 10 - 15 minutes looking on the floor for the "token" during the first visit. The next time I went to the office to fix a problem, I'd drop a small washer on the floor. Some user would point and yell, "There it is!!!"

We did something similar but we used a small resistor we'd filed down and colored with a sharpy. It was small enough and weird enough that it looked like it just might have fallen out of the cable.

At an infosec company I worked for ppl were always leaving their machines unlocked when they stepped away. So one of our group did this and another of our group sent the email from his account stating "I Like Sheep!".

Windows Key + L people.

netizencain: Annoy-A-Tron

I wish I would have remembered this gadget when I was laid off last year.

/16 years at that dinosaur called the newspaper industry.

bogey: oxycodon: I might be dating myself, but I miss messing with users on a Token Ring network. It was a two part joke. During the first visit to an office to fix a network problem, you'd make a big deal out of losing the "token" when a cable was disconnected. The second part worked best if you had the users spend at least 10 - 15 minutes looking on the floor for the "token" during the first visit. The next time I went to the office to fix a problem, I'd drop a small washer on the floor. Some user would point and yell, "There it is!!!"

We did something similar but we used a small resistor we'd filed down and colored with a sharpy. It was small enough and weird enough that it looked like it just might have fallen out of the cable.

My favorite part was when the user(s) reported a problem after that. "The network is down. We looked all over the floor and couldn't find the token." It was hard to keep a straight face.

I used to work at a 300+ person office so it was kinda big but highly unprofessional so as long as you did a good job you could get away with murder or banging whoever in the office...I cant emphasis how unprofessional this place was.

Our company dealt with very sensitive information so if you left your machine unlocked it was encouraged to punish the people involved. Usually that meant sending an email out to about 10-20 people from the persons computer stating something stupid like I poo'd my pants or something very juvenile and stupid. This was an everyday occurrence.

The best prank I pulled was when I called our desktop technician stating that my printer would not work and I needed him to fix it. This desktop tech was a VERY conservative guy but had a good sense of humor. So he comes down to fix my printer and opens it up and pulls out what was causing the problem.....a set of (never been used) anal beads that i had lodged into the printer. For as long as I live I will never forget the look on that guys face. He just looked at me and started shaking his head and saying "why...why...why". Its been nearly 10 years and we still get a big laugh out of it.

Take a shiat on his keyboard, fark his wife, kill his children.


Pranked.

KingoftheCheese: I usually have the new employees go around the restaurant and water the plastic plants hanging on the wall.

I got caught by that one once.

Timanous: Create a new folder called Icons.

Take screenshot of desktop

Make screenshot the active desktop image

Put all icons except for one folder in the new folder titled Icons.

Leave desktop image to fool the fool

The next day after he figures it out, come back and put two pieces of scotch tape over the laser on his mouse.

I've done this! (the icon thing, that is)

I used to have an office job where a co-worker and I would take turns pulling pranks on each other. One day I show up 30 minutes before he does and proceed to wrap everything in his cubicle in cellophane. Chair, Computer, Monitor, keyboard, mouse, trash can, phone, pens, and anything else that wasn't bolted down. I used a full roll of cellophane on his office chair alone. I got laid off before he could take his revenge though.

at a pizza shop i used to work at ... it was common to boast to a new person how strong another employees mom was, in a ruse designed to get them to go ask the other employee how many pushups his mom could do. he was then met with yelling and curses and was informed that the mom in question had lost both her arms in an accident.

nearly all veteran employees took great pride in portraying the "dude whose mom had no arms"

b3x: at a pizza shop i used to work at ... it was common to boast to a new person how strong another employees mom was, in a ruse designed to get them to go ask the other employee how many pushups his mom could do. he was then met with yelling and curses and was informed that the mom in question had lost both her arms in an accident.

nearly all veteran employees took great pride in portraying the "dude whose mom had no arms"

For us it was "Ask him how his sister's piano playing is coming along."
Instead of yelling and curses we'd just look dejected and quietly mention that our sister has no arms.

we had a supper gung-ho July 4th kind of guy. Insisted he had to have Admin rights to his computer. Finally convinced him that he needed 2 accounts, one with admin rights and one with power user rights. But he kept staying logged in with Admin rights.

Someone changed his Admin passwd and then changed the policy so that the default background was no longer an American flag , but a Russian flag. He went ballistic. I could hear him yelling all the way down the hall. Being the sysadmin, someone came and told me later what it was about. I remotely changed it back to default. He came and asked me to reset his password, never said anything to me about the flag change.

Use this program: http://rjlpranks.com/download.cfm?d=21

20 foot USB extension and a mouse... Makes for great times.

That or change their default font size to 400%

Tweek the paths the commomly used shortcuts point to. Take his prefered browser shortcut and point it to some other browser. Word points to open office, etc. Or, double/triple start the original program by pointing the shortcut to a command script that just starts the same program 2-3 times. Watch while he tries o so carefully to make ever so sure he is really is double clicking. Bonus points if he starts tweeking the mouse settings.

On a simpler note, take a piece of saran wrap and stretch it over the screen, and trim the edges at the bezel with a razor blade. The wrap is next to invisible if you get it right but distorts the screen image in a very annoying way.


My favorite goes way back. SGI had a flight simulator on their early workstations that was networked. You could dogfight F15s, F16s, F18s, etc. You had guns, rockets, and heat seeking missles. Our gentleman's agreement was that using the sidewinders wasn't allowed. Every now and then a n00b would jump in and not get the hint that was off limits. Turned out much of the simulator was scripted (in PS) and we figured out how to edit the code. We left the sidewinders intact, but set them to arm the moment they were fired, instantly detonating, insuring the only person you could blow up was yourself.

If that didn't work, we would fire up the MACH 3 747 equiped with unlimited fuel and ammo and hunt them down with that.

Had a coworker I was buddies with, and would bust balls on each other all day. He gave his notice and on his last day I spied him logging on, and got his pw. Knowing his wife sat on their home pc I jumped on his workstation as soon as he left for good. I found his home e-mail and fired of a steamy letter from another male coworker sayaing " I'll never forget that night we spent together blah blah, love you." It didn't take 5 minutes for him to call the office dumping f-bombs like a machine gun. He knew I got the best last prank and knew I had won.

logruszed: Take a shiat on his keyboard, fark his wife, kill his children.

Pranked.

LIKE A BOSS.

shift_DAWG: The_Six_Fingered_Man: As a flightline guy, we had to redball planes. Our most common complaint was that the radar would not operate as designed. More often than not, it was because the pilot forgot to cycle power to the radar. So we'd have to shut down the left engine, plug in, and have them cycle power. 99% of the time, it worked. The pilots never even looked sheepish about it. When they asked, our standard line was "the front seat stick actuator was interfering with the radar controls."

On my first ship, we once had trouble getting an ancient (even in the 90's) AN/UYK-7 "mini" computer (about the size of a dorm fridge) to hold it's operational program. We reported the problem to the chain of command and set to troubleshooting it. Now, in the process of troubleshooting these beasts, you often have to take several of the modules (about the size and weight of a cinderblock) out to perform local resistance checks, etc.

As often happens, no bad readings were discovered, but upon putting the whole thing back together to run diagnostics, we discovered that the problem had self-corrected (bad connection, bad air flow, something ...).

We reported to our division officer, a 23 year old know-nothing, that the problem was corrected. He, in turn, notified the department head, who, in turn, notified the captain.

The captain asked the Dept Head what we had replaced or repaired. The Dept Head asked the DivO. The Divo asked us, and we told him that by taking it apart and putting it back together, the fault had cleared.

The explanation goes back up the chain of command to the Captain, who is unsatisfied with the answer. We must have replaced SOMETHING, things don't just FIX THEMSELVES by taking them apart. Captain wants an explanation.

So the Divo comes down and asks us to PLEASE explain what we did to fix it. When it becomes clear that we're going to have to make something up, my boy Clark pipes in:

Clark: "One thing we forgot to mention, sir, is that we did hook up ...

I used to work on the 642 "Bravo" which was right before the "Yuk 7"
A trouble shooting technique we were taught was "if you see a kick mark on the side, give it a good kick, cause that's where the loose connections are."

realityVSperception: My favorite goes way back. SGI had a flight simulator on their early workstations that was networked.

I loved this and the 3D asteroids. The system admin was clueless and thought removing the games from the menu would remove the games. Didn't slow me down in the slightest.

To the prick on the overnight shift who was repeatedly stealing lunches out of the refrigerator: We bought an extraordinary looking slice of pizza and left it in the same fridge in a lovely looking package.

Liberally sprinkled with Dave's Insanity Sauce.

Food theft in our sector dropped to 0%.

Balchinian: HAHAHAHAA!!!! That is awesome, Subby!! You should do that!! SRSLY!!! Better yet, change his sig to say "I randomly jizz in co-workers food". I hear that one really gets some laughs too.

/Dick. I hope he punches you in the throat.

TFF. i'm cracking up so hard right now

We can't send e-mails from unlocked computers anymore after someone sent a couple of other people a harmless few e-mails from a guy's computer and his boss thought his computer was being hacked. She freaked out and the guy who sent them had to tell her boss that it wasn't being hacked but that the guy was a dumb ass and wasn't locking his computer when he left for the day. It was fun but now we can't do it anymore.
Had a supervisor who used to send out e-mails from unlocked computers to the rest of the team about people wearing pink panties...that was fun. That guy learned pretty quickly to lock his computer.

There are many companies where it is completely acceptable to change the password if someone remains logged in as Admin. As an Admin I approve.

On the WinXP box of a coworker who foolishly left it unlocked, I took a screenshot of the desktop, then turned off icons on the desktop, rotated the screenshot 180 degrees and set it as the background, then moved the start bar to the top, inverted the mouse and finally flipped the screen 180. The result was that the screen looked exactly right, and the mouse moved up and down correctly, but reversed on the side to side.

The guy came back and you could hear the frustration. I figured I would give him a couple of minutes to sweat it, but I had to take a call... when I finally got around to telling him, he was already starting to reimage his machine, so I didn't say a word.

You can't imagine the look on his face when it happened again... but that time I told him how I did it. He was a good sport about the whole thing. That whole team was pranking one another pretty constantly, I just had the best success with him.

Upper decker ?

Actually, back in the day, we would unscrew the mouthpiece on our coworker's phone, swipe the microphone bit and put it back together.

Barring that, a well placed fart machine is worth a few adolescent laughs in the right office.

Hubby used to send guys to get gama goat snow chains.

I just changed auto-corrects:

I - I, the Great and Powerful Oz

Me - Me, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do

You - You light up my life

Name of Company - Name of Company, Where GOD Would Work if He could

Pretty tame, but fun.

At a former workplace one person would constantly play (loudly) a song his band did (with him as singer). It sucked. I asked him nicely to not do that. He kept doing it. I finally told him if he played that f*king song one more time he would regret it. He did. So I reconfigured the proxy to send him to a pokemon website no matter what url he entered, except when it was the company's own website.

Then there's the time I pranked myself. I was messing with my computer trying to turn on the ability to switch to the Hungarian keyboard as my wife's laptop had died and she needed to use my computer for work (freelance translator). I accidently switched my computer to full on Hungarian mode. She was very amused when I yelled, "Honey, I need your help to fix my computer". Everything was in Hungarian so I couldn't read the menu options.

Not exactly a prank, but workplace related:

A had a friend whos father own a small construction business and employed two brothers who were deep backwoods "swamp people" types, One day he went out to their cabin, and they were out hunting or something. But there was some deer meat hanging up. The brothers always gave the guy deer meet, so he took some and figured next time he saw them, he'd just say it was him.

The next day, he sees the bothers, and before he could fess up to taking the meat, one of the bothers says, "The damn dog got into the deer meat so we had to kill 'em."

Akward.

Gig103: I swapped the C and V keys on someone's keyboard. You'd think that a software engineer would be a touch typist, but he couldn't figure out why his copies were pasting.

He called IT, and then went to the restroom. I swapped them back. He was a whiny biatch and went to our manager about it after being embarassed.

Yeah, I wouldn't have thought it would have done anything to someone like that. I routinely type in light levels that I can't even see the printing on my keyboard.

skinink: Change his Language Keyboard settings, or change it to Dvorak keyboard. Or just unplug his keyboard and see how long it takes IT to spot the hardware problem.

Install the Chinese input method editor but leave English as the selected language. They'll hit the hotkey to switch by accident. (I've made the oops many a time, I finally tracked down how to edit the registry to disable all the hotkeys--the configuration program has a bug that will not allow you to leave it without a hotkey to activate it.)

FTGodWin: Hugh_Janus: I switched the m and n key, then changed the character mapping (back in the XP days). Thsi is great for typers who look at the screen and not the keyboard.

As a security measure against stupid people who can't even touch-type, I took the home row keys and reversed them on my keyboard, but left the mapping alone. Add that to the fact that I'm one of the few here that use a split keyboard, and NOBODY here can type on it, even the touch-typers. Since it's a split keyboard, they feel the need to look at it constantly, with it warping their brain, even while I'm right there explaining that the mapping is normal.

/ why yes, it was in an IT dept.
// now I keep an extra keyboard on hand for the rare occasion the helpdesk has to touch it

Huh? I've tried split keyboards. While I've never found one I liked all you have to do is not think about it and you type on them normally. I have even tried one that was built into a chair, half on the left arm, half on the right. This meant you typed with your arms resting on the chair arms--it would have been a good idea if they had put decent keys on the keyboard. That took me all of about 10 seconds to blank out the wrong perception and simply type on.

tallentyre: I had a boss who was retired Army; and he had displayed proudly on his office wall a photo of his decorations case. He went on vacation one week and I was bored, so... I removed the photo from the frame, scanned it into Photoshop and altered it a bit. I printed the result and reassembled the frame with the color print on top. One of these days someone is going to ask exactly where and how he got the Order of Lenin.

Good one!

One Bad Apple: Change his start up page to NAMbLA ?

Best prank i've done involved NAMbLA .... There was a jerk teacher here in the area that harassed me at work because of my political viewpoint (basically he was just being a dick) so I got some really great revenge.. printed up a "Welcome to NAMbLA membership packet" and printed out a nice big color envelope with NAMbLA's logo on it and sent it to him c/o the middle school he worked at! hahaha I wonder if he still has a job at this point....

I sent an e-mail from a co-worker's station to our boss asking whether we had a policy about locking computers. This should have been harmless, but our boss was kind of a dick and complained that the question was a waste of his time. Which is was, but he shouldn't have known that.

Rule #1. Never talk to or acknowledge a co-worker. The day will go by much faster without all the chit-chat crap and everyone will leave you alone.

LordStormes: ANY prank that could get to the hands of management, or worse, outside the company (as an email sig would) are COMPLETELY wrong and will likely get him, or hopefully you, fired. Good pranks are things that will BRIEFLY mess with his ability to work, or screw with his head. Don't fill his cubicle up with styrofoam; that'll take hours to clean up. Do shrink-wrap it, so it takes him five minutes to get into his desk while people snap pictures. If your prank costs the company too much productivity, the management won't be too happy with you.

An old favorite of mine: Buy a mouse or keyboard of the identical make/model as his, and embed it in either concrete, or a Jello mold. Replace his mouse/keyboard with yours, putting his originals in a drawer where they can quickly be found and used after yours are pitched. Reversing the monitor, changing language settings, etc. are OK pranks, but make sure you're on hand to put it right once you've had your fun; don't waste IT resources on correcting it. The desktop screenshot others have suggested is also easily reversible and harmless, so it's not too bad. If your company doesn't monitor personal Internet use (such that he could get in trouble for visiting prohibited websites), leave his browser open and pointing to an embarrassing (but SFW!!) website. Don't use stuff like porn, or anything political/racist/homophobic, etc. Go more for things like girls' cartoons, ballet schools, a sports team he hates...

You can also do things like subscribe him to newsletters to silly stuff (the same kind of subject matter as described above), or create an alias to his email address and use it to list him on Craigslist with some sort of goofy thing he has for sale.

This is what happens when we embrace the PC mindset. Grow some balls, pussy.

APE992: //didn't really want to do anything destructive at 17

17 is the best age to do stuff because your record gets wiped clean when you turn 18!

Replaced the batteries in a coworker's mouse with a handful of M&Ms.

Back in college, we had labs of NeXT boxes. In their first iteration, you could log in to a remote box and play sounds (orgasms and farts were popular), post pictures to the screen (there was one picture involving a corn cob that was well liked), and run little programs (like a malloc loop). Ahhh, good times.

Alias carriage return to "wall I'm a farkin idiot".

Or # rm -rf / logout dude

Noobs

Here's a simple harmless prank. Requires that the person use sound/headphones while working:

Record an audio file of someone in the office saying the person's name. Insert a 30-second delay at the beginning of this file.

Set it as the system sound for minimizing a window.

A co-worker went to a trade show and signed up as another co-worker. He then went around to all the booths (McCormick Place in Chicago) and had the vendors scan "his" id. 2nd co-worker kept getting calls from sales people for months.

Same two keep going into the others office and replace the hand cream with white glue.

Another good one. If the person uses Office/Word/whatever, set up an auto-correct entry for their name that replaces it with

[name] is a douchebag

or something to that effect.