Reposted from a previous prank thread.

A bunch of years ago we had a very sheltered sweet young thing (Jen) working as our receptionist. My friend (Curt) and I walked over to Mini Mart and grabbed a couple of packets of pureed onions from the condiment rack. When we got back to the shop we dumped the onion goo into a condom and dropped it outside the front door. We went back in and got back to work. Later I went out for a smoke break and when I came back in I made big fuss about the nasty thing someone had left near our door. Jen and Curt come out and see it laying there and she starts going off about how disgusting it is. While she is in mid rant Curt reaches down, picks it up, and sucks all the onion goo out of it. I will never forget the look on her face.

We had a new nurse come to work for us, so we decided to have some fun with her.

We put a co-worker in a body bag, and put him in the back of the ambulance. We told her she would have to ride in the back while we did the body transport. Pulled to the drive way to turn out, the coworker shot up and grabbed her with his hand.

I don't think I've ever seen someone run that fast out the back of an ambulance. We caught her a hundred or so feet away crying.

I agree that office practical jokes should be aimed to be harmless. I prefer the 'delayed action' jokes. My favorite may not have been discovered yet:

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.

Another boss left his computer unlocked over lunch. I took the opportunity to give myself network share access to his windows folder. I spent the rest of the year messing with his head. His favorite wallpaper, John Wayne in the Green Berets, altered subtly, First Col Wayne became Lt Wayne, Then the flash on his beret was replaced by the gay pride rainbow triangle, Then the earring appeared... His email notification sound tended to change as well.

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.

So Subby's "prank" is a dick move...but here's one of my favorites:

A co-worker of mine always used to leave our shared PC unlocked and logged in when he would leave (he was the daytime manager, and I was graveyards) which would mean it had been unlocked for several hours before I got there, and after he left. Since we had a lot of confidential info on the PC, that was a pretty bad thing to do, so I had a little fun with him: I made a quick script that went into his startup folder (so it would only affect him) that would wait 5 minutes after he logged in, then pop up a window and say "You really screwed up your computer this time, didn't you?" Then shut down. I went home, and just sat next to the phone waiting, since he knew NOTHING about computers.

He actually sat on that for about 5 hours, trying and trying to start up without it happening (he was either stubborn, or hoping that it would just go away)...and he finally gave in and called me in a panic. I had him start up the computer, set it to lock whenever it went into sleep mode, and THEN had him remove the script...and he never figured out that it had been me the whole time. ;)

I heard the next day that he was just working in 5 minute intervals, rebooting the PC over and over again. /facepalm

I made a "Just Married" sign with rainbows and intertwined men symbols and put it on the back of the truck that belonged to a coworker who car-pooled with his brother. They got funny looks all the way home.

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.

My coworker right next to me had a picture of her 10 year old son wearing his skateboarding helmet pinned up next to her computer. I scanned it and photoshopped my face into his, making his goofy smile and everything, printed it out and replaced the original.
Two days later when she finally notices she busts up laughing and I look over and deadpan, "cute kid"

That also works for family photos as screensavers

Attach threads from their chair to pretty much every small unbreakable item on their desk, such as pencils, stapler, tape dispenser, etc, when they pull their chair out to sit down suddenly their entire desk is rushing at them and ends up on the floor, usually takes them 10 - 15 seconds to realize a ghost did not just attack them

change the "CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE" to a "COHERENCY NOTICE" something like the following:

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The materials in this e-mail message, including any attachments, are private and confidential and are the property of the sender. It is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that any unauthorized review, use, copying, distribution, disclosure or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error and are not the intended recipient, immediately notify the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message.

COHERENCY NOTICE: The materials in this e-mail message, including any attachments, were composed in an attempt to present the coherent message of the sender. It is for this sole purpose that the intended recipient(s) were sent this e-mail message. If the message, however, does not reflect the coherent thoughts intended by the sender, be advised that any misinterpretation of the message by the recipient(s) is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail and find that it does not appear to contain a single coherent thought, immediately notify the sender by reply e-mail and understand that not every message can be perfect.

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.

I worked in a trading room at a brokerage office some years ago and someone sent one of the traders an email with attachment that said something like bikini babes or whatever. As this was still the early 2000's people couldstill be fooled into opening attachments. At any rate he opened it and it turned his screen pink and yelled "HEY EVERYBODY IM LOOKING AT GAY PORN" over and over again and there was the gay porn and when he tried to click out of it more gay porn came up. He had to pull the plug to stop it. The trading floor had a hardy laugh and the head trader wasn't even pissed. Those were simpler times.

/csb

This one wasn't me, but I had to "fix" it.

We had two people sharing a cubicle, with separate computers, and someone swapped their mice.

That is, computer #1 had computer #2's mouse (still attached to computer #2), and vice versa.

I got the tech call of "my mouse isn't working", and got there just in time for the second guy to make the same complaint.

Because I always have them demonstrate the issue (to remove PEBCAK issues), I noticed what was going on.

Change his browser home-page to: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294317

thucydides: car keys

I sold a car right before I moved from SC to GA. Turns out the man I sold it to was new in town, and gave the car to his daughter, who enrolled in my old school. My friends noticed my car still attending my school and mentioned it to me. I still had a key to it, so next time I visited I moved that car to the other side of a 4 acre parking lot. It was a nice day, so I put the top down too.

To this day I've never met that girl. I have no idea what she thinks happened. Hell I was only in town a few hours and didn't mention it to any of my friends. Maybe sometimes she still lays in bed, about to go to sleep and suddenly thinks "Seriously, WTF?"

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.

Where I used to work, our manager insisted we lock our computers. If he came across an unlocked computer, he would send an inappropriate email to everyone in the IT department from that PC. This started off as just for IT staff but eventually escalated to include anyone (our manager would send the same thing from any unlocked PC he could find, including the CEO). The rest of the department would send emails from any unlocked IT computers but weren't game enough to do it from the rest of the business.

As our manager was the biggest prankster of the department, it made it an awesome work place. One of his staples was to move someone's car down the road if he found unattended keys and turn the stereo right up. One time he put rolled oats in my water bottle and by the time i went to take a drink, it was basically porridge.

In return, we listed his company car for sale in the classifieds with his phone number. We also tried to give away live chickens but he got a call from the classifieds to say that he wasn't allowed to list animals. We coated his keyboard and pieces of fruit in the stuff you use to stop chewing on your fingernails.

One time I removed all the casters off all but one office chair in the IT department, hid them in a drawer and then went away for a week.

Someone else put coffee beans in the boom mic of a headset. The headset was owned by a guy who really hated the taste and smell of coffee and he had no idea where the smell was coming from.

don't take a picture of the desktop... move the monitor out of the way and take a picture of what is behind the monitor... then make that the wallpaper.

(google, transparent screen illusion)... you can get fancy with PS...but who has that kind of time for a prank.

At my last company, our snack machine vendor brought over a new vending machine. I posted a memo on it with the vendor's letterhead that read something like, "Attention: this vending machine is voice controlled in compliance with The U.S. Workers with Disabilities Act of 1974. Please insert coins or bills and clearly announce your selection. Note: Be sure to face the keypad and speak loudly".

Our senior VP was the first to fall for it (in front of witnesses, anyway).

dj_spanmaster: JasonOfOrillia: A couple of guys I new at this telco would do things like change the outlook autocorrect dictionary to do things like replace the word "and" with the phrase "and, as a man with a fabulous moustache," That one caused all sorts of giggling.

Another vote for this kind of awesomeness. I've played the XKCD trick (replacing the word "keyboard" with "cougar") to great effect.

For the record, it was fantastic watching him send email after email to IT about his broken cougar.

Roman Fyseek: freewill: My boss left his computer open, so we shared his Windows sounds folder on the network.

A few months later, I brought in a CD of random crazy sounds. When he was walking around the office, I'd drop one in over a random Windows sound, then switched the file back once the sound had played.

It lasted a week or so, anyway.

I was giving a demonstration of our software to a senator when my computer announced "Loser, loser, loser." In Homer Simpson's voice. I then heard Grace cackling her ass off down the hall. Then, it did it again. I said, "Excuse me a moment," and walked down the hall. "Grace. I have a senator in my office."

"Oh, crap!"

As I got back to my office, my computer announced in Grace's voice, "I didn't mean *you* were a loser, senator. Just Roman."

GRRRAAAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCEEEEEEEEE!

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.

Tough love is sometimes the only thing that will get through to people.

I've worked in secure environments where if someone left a system unlocked and their boss found out it would have meant being fired. It's the kind of a security lapse that just isn't acceptable. A prank is something that will at least leave enough of a mark on their memory that will perhaps smarten them up.

We used to change backgrounds mostly; David Hasslehoff in a plum-smuggler was a favorite. In college the Asian grad students had a habit of wandering off for the night with their workstations logged in. The Admin, a man with balls of steel I might add, came in with some mpeg of a woman felating a horse and set a script for it to play on startup and then delete. They'd be forced to sit through about eight seconds of happy horse sounds and then a woman choking and vomiting before they could do anything. He was a vicious bastard....glad I never landed on his bad side.

One holiday season, we had a guy decide that it would be funny to set up one of those singing fish toys (with the motion sensors that cause the mechanical fish to start singing when someone passes by) in the main hallway of the IT department. Sure, that was briefly funny, but soon had us plotting retaliation.

One person took the fish home that night and audio-captured a bunch of the sounds from it. The next night, after the fish-giver went home, several members of IT let themselves into his office. First, we performed a backup of the settings on his Windows PC, so we could easily restore everything we were about to do.

Then we:
* Hid most of his desktop icons
* Changed his wallpaper image to a picture of the singing fish
* Altered most of the system noises (especially startup/shutdown) to play songs/quotes from the fish
* Altered several things he was likely to try invoking to fix it so they'd shut the machine down
* Hung the fish on the wall of his office.

He got the hint the next morning, so we restored his machine to the previous settings. There haven't been any more singing fish in the IT hallway since then.

SPLAMM: My coworkers made a habit of using my flavored coffee creamers that i kept in the main kitchen refrig, even when i put a sticky note on it asking them to respect my property. It continued, so i just emptied a cup of salt into a half empty carton and left it there for all the thieves to enjoy. I checked it a couple days later and it was half gone. I checked it a week later and the level had not moved. Justice is a salt lick.
[coloradoguy.com image 374x747]

Related, I had a co-worker that would eat anything in the fridge. Didn't matter if it had your name on it, or not, if it wasn't locked away half of it or more would be gone by lunch time. The guy had a typical type-A "I'm WAY better than these drones I work with" personality. So one day, another co-worker, who was fed up, cut up some dog biscuits and left them on the counter. Not 10 minutes later we see the guy sneaking into the kitchen, 1 minute after that we heard loud gagging and coughing. Everyone rushed to the kitchen to find him on the ground puking into the trash bin.

The public shame still makes me smile to this day. Oh and the food suddenly stopped disappearing.

About 1990 I worked at a newspaper pasting up pages with actual paper copy. Every day we had a rundown of where everything was supposed to be on each page in each section. An average paper had about 16 pages that we had to worry about

One April Fool's Day I went in early and cut-and-pasted that night's rundown with the previous night's rundown. Jim came in and looked at it and turned pale. The paper had about 32 pages, two of which were editorial pages in different sections. He was going around to the copy boards and trying to line them up with the rundown. I was trying not to bust a gut laughing.

He called the boss at home to find out what was going on.

Best April Fools prank I ever pulled.

/Got away with it only because it was April Fool's DAy.

If my old boss would find someone in his group had left his/her computer unlocked, he would send an email to himself from that users account saying "I quit". Then he would go back to his desk and reply back "Ok, I'm sorry to see you go".

A number of years ago a coworker changed the screen saver to annoy a lesbian with serious male issues. It read simply "Repeal the 19th". Took about a week for her to figure out what it meant and then all hell broke loose. They were never able to prove he actually did anything.

/end CSB

I put a dead cockroach in "Miss Princess'" bottle of hand sanitizer. I pushed it down with a pencil so it was suspended in the clear goo. Took her 2 hours and 3 uses to discover her little friend.

Oysterman: We had a list on a white board: "Things ResTechs will never do". I filled it in as such:
- Give you up
- Let you down
- Let you cry
- Saaaaaaayyyyy goodbye
- Tell a lie
- Hurt you
- RickRoll

Jesus...I was just rick rolled via text and it was still just as annoying.

Paper Clips - Hung paper-clip strands from the ceiling, attached work papers - This was last week


Xmas - Wrapped everything in the office


Peanuts - Made it appear as though the office was full (didn't have enough money for that)


Foil - Our first office prank


Beiber - Fever


Balloons - I think this is our best, 4-ft wall of balloons

I just change people's screensaver to Marquee with the text "Next time, you should lock your computer." If they keep leaving in unlocked, set their monitor's sleep time to one minute. That's lots of fun.

Changing the "m" and "n" keys, and mucking with auto-correct in Office is always fun. (Change the period to "as according to prophecy.")

Someone modified my sig to say Olympic Hopeful. I don't think I caught on right away.

I password protected her screen saver and made the password "Horsepussy".

I usually pop off an email to my immediate supervisor, saying what a great employee I am, what a hard worker I am, etc. I then log off the computer so nobody else can mess with them.

I will, immediately thereafter, go and inform said person of how they violated protocol, what I did (so they won't be surprised and try to deny it), and tell them they should be thankful I didn't send an email to the BIG boss telling him what I really think of him.

I figure they aren't going to fight the email that I sent on my behalf because it would make them look incompetent and would be apparent that they broke security protocol by leaving their computer unlocked when they weren't around.

You can make the sig line funny without getting the dude fired.

Something like "I'm a pretty pretty princess."

Our office was being renovated and a moving company was hired to work over a weekend to move everyones belongings into their new space.

All boxes were tagged with a code to identify which office/cubicle they were to go to. I grabbed a roll of labels and a marker and labeled every plant I could find with the bosses office code.

I arrived on Monday morning to find an email sent to all staff stating that if they wished to have a plant in their area to please come and pick one up from his office.

Rodeodoc: Lots of tightasses here. Lighten up, Francis.

Try looking for another job in this econom because of a 'prank' and then call folks tightasses. Dickhead.

I used to pull all sorts of pranks when I worked helpdesk. The best was when I swapped the mouse and keyboard cables for two people who went to lunch together. They both came back and sat down from lunch at the same time and both hit Ctrl-Alt-Del at the same time to unlock their machines (which was perfect). Because the computer seemed to respond to their keystrokes, it took them a WHILE to figure this out... I figure the mice moving when the person on the other side moved theirs would be caught sooner, but no..... They continued to CTRL-ALT-DEL and mouse shuffle for about 20 minutes before rebooting their machines and starting the process again. One of them finally decided to check their mouse and realized that the cable was plugged into the tower across from him instead.

Good Times

When I was stationed on a submarine we had a particularly gullible sort from Idaho or someplace. Somebody once sent him on a mission to go find some fallopian tubing. Everybody he asked said sorry, they didn't have any, and suggested that he go try someone else. When he got to me I sent him to the Corpsman.

There was also the Mail Buoy Watch...nothing like sending a noob up to the conning tower wearing a life vest and equipped with binoculars during surface operations...keeping a sharp eye out for the buoy that would be in the middle of farking nowhere, which happened to have our mail delivery attached to it.

Guess what, subby. You are the annoying one.

i have it on good information that this was an office prank

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB94WN1m_OE

about 1 minute into it--

A classic was to load up the ring area of a 3-ring binder of an obscure manual on the boss's shelf with marbles, then send a noob in there to ask to borrow the manual. Marble chaos ensues.

Another good one was a co-worker went on vacation, leaving his prize Philodendron unattended on his desk. I planted pumpkin seeds on the edge of the dirt and packed plant food sticks around them. Shortly after his return, pumpkin plants started shooting up at an amazing rate.

Finally, a lady came to work for us (in the U.S.) after a year in England. She told me she had not done her taxes properly and the Inland Revenue was after her. A few days later I left a hand-written phone message at the front desk for her, purportedly from "Ian". The number I put was the British Embassy. My co-worker called the number and asked for Ian. Lo and behold, there WAS an Ian at the embassy (good odds on that.) When he came on the line and my friend asked who he was and he said a rep at the British Embassy, she assumed it was about the tax situation and gave old Ian a royal dressing-down over the phone for harrassing her at work. I just loved her unbridled rage, and the thought of Ian staring in amazement at the phone.

It was time for the department Xmas dinner and all of us and the significant others were going out to some steakhouse. We warned the new guy that one of our co worker's wife had a glass eye and could get really weird about it if you maintained eye contact or stared for too long. She would freak out and yell or sometimes have a complete breakdown. Of course this was a total lie.

New guy also had recently adopted a rescue grey hound and as it turns out, the wife of the co-worker also was into rescue greyhounds so we made sure the co-worker let his wife know ahead of time that New guy had just adopted a rescue greyhound.

She spent the night trying to engage New guy in conversation about their shared passion and he spent the night freaking out, talking a little, staring at his shoes, talking a little, looking around the room nervously and sweating a lot. Good times.

Back in the day there was an MS-DOS (or early Windows) virus whose effects were a subtle but kinda mean prank: it would monitor the time of day, and use that to set a threshold for a random number generator. At 9AM, the threshold would be like 0.01 (1%). As the day wore on, the threshold would gradually increase, until it reached about 0.25 at around 4PM.

It integrated into the keyboard driver so that it would see every keystroke before the OS, let alone apps, did. If the user typed a regular letter or digit key, it would generate a random real number in the range 0.0-1.0. If the number was less than the then-current threshold, it would randomly replace the key code with the one immediately to the left or right of the actually pressed key.

Result: the user thinks that s/he's making more and more "typos" as the day wears on.


Another one that would be cool: more senior FARKers will remember the various April Fools filters that FARK would activate on April Fool's Day. They'd kick in after you did your Preview, and only take effect once your post was actually posted. The filters chosen at random included eliminating every "e" from the post, random "typos" similar to the above, etc. But the best ones used typical ValSpeak (valley girl) and Jive filters to transform ordinary English into those dialects.

I always wanted to write a pseudo printer driver that would, say, apply the Jive filter to any text sent to the printer driver, then pass the results on to the real printer driver that it was mimicking.

Imagine a co-worker rushing to print out a proposal for a board meeting due in minutes. :-D

Create a new hosts file that randomly redirects sites to different sites. Create backup of said file. Have a login script that installs this hosts file.

Use this power wisely.

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

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.

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%.

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

Pranked.

LIKE A BOSS.

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


Pranked.

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...

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!!!"

I searched for kiddie porn on his computer, saved an image on his desktop as his wallpaper,called IT pretending to be him to fix an unspecified glitch. He spent two years in jail is now out on parole and will be on the sex offender list for life!

Good times good times

Owner of the small shop where I worked was having trouble at home so he kept taking the women from work out to lunch for advice and/or sympathy. They were getting tired of it so we decided to prank him. Office manager made sure he was in his office long enough for me to sneak into the john, change into a skirt she lent me, and get back to my desk. Then she calls him to come to my office. I'm pushed up hard against my desk so he can only see me from the waist up. We start talking about him taking 'the girls' out to lunch. After a couple of minutes I push back from my desk in my steno chair, cross my hairy legs, and ask "What does a guy have to do to get you to take him out to lunch?"

/ Burgers and beers at Kelsey's on the company Visa.
// We never made it back to the office.
/// No, I did not wear the skirt for our 'date.'

Want to drive an engineer nuts.... leave random tiny screws and nuts in the bottom of a camera or laptop bag.

In my childhood, I dealt with wall-to-wall A-types 24/7 for 5 years straight, no vacation, no day off. I cut my teeth on this goof:

Insufferable co-pilot was insufferable for two weeks straight with, "carry my bags or I'll write you up and have you in front of the commander..." In central Australia, I caught him playing the slots in uniform before 10am while we were waiting for the crew bus to take us to the jet. I summoned a security guard, brought him up to speed on my impromptu prank, and set him loose on the unsuspecting GI. Guard informs our co-pilot it is illegal to gamble before noon and he would have to arrest him. Meanwhile, another of the crew is on the phone to the Military Police to get them on board. Someone mentions the consulate, and next thing I know, we have a fabricated international inciden concerning a military officer gambling in uniform. Mil Cops have him in the back of the car for two hours while they are "waiting on a call from the embassy" to see if they release him back to his crew. The crew tells the co-pilot we can't wait on his sorry ass as the sweaties finish the preflight. Dude is in tears, violent, wrenching sobs. We taxi out to the hold short line and the cops final figure enough is enough and let him off the hook.

That was one of the more gentle capers pulled. But I digress...

csb, I know...

oxycodon: oxycodon: The_Six_Fingered_Man: Let's see.

When I showed up for my first duty station, ......

100 meters of flight line and a 5 gallon bucket of prop wash.

Batteries were BA-1100-Ns.

Brand new officers were told they'd have to fill out an ID-10-T Form for whatever it was they were sent to requisition. Yes, we had this form printed out ready for use.

It was also fun to tell someone to they could find "some random, nonexistent item" in the basement of the hanger.

The batteries were for the Chem-Lights of course.

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."

To my knowledge, none of the pilots ever got the joke.

Several years ago, I had an annoying co-worker who would come in every morning before I got to the office and add two things to my Win95 Startup folder: a .wav of Nelson "Ha Ha!" and an .exe that would flip and invert the screen until I pressed a key. After about two solid weeks of this, I put a stop to it.

I was catching a super-early flight out to see a customer - along with my boss - so the boss and I met at the office so we could carpool to the airport. But first, I had to do a bit of work on my annoyer's PC.

First, I put all of his desktop items in his Recycle Bin. Then, using TweakUI, I removed all of the "permanent" Win95 icons except for My Computer. I set the Windows theme back to the default blue. Finally, I created two shortcuts: Network Neighborhood and Recycle Bin; I changed the icons for each to the default (with the Recycle Bin being the "full" graphic). Network Neighborhood was the screen flipper, and Recycle Bin was "Ha Ha!"

Then I caught my three-hour flight to New York.

When we finally touched down and checked to see how things were going back home, my co-worker wanted to talk to me.

"You got me good. Ha ha."

"Yep."

"I've been reloading Windows all morning since I got in."

"Oh. You could have just gone to My Computer, opened the real Recycle Bin, and put your stuff back..."

"Oh well, too late now."

And that was the end of the pranks on my PC.

I used to work in a warehouse that had old Texas Instruments terminals in the workstations. Green type on a black screen. My "team leader" was an old woman deathly afraid of computers. If you hit the wrong button, you'll shut down the entire eastern seaboard. Her basic job was to do NOTHING all day except order people around and take credit (and collect a paycheck) for everyone else's work.

I would wait until she was away from the terminal and change the font color to black against a black background. She would flip out and call IT to come fix it, then literally run away from the evil computer. With her away, I would change the type back to green so that IT would find nothing wrong. They would leave and I would change it back to black, repeating the cycle.

Eventually IT went to management and had her demoted and me put in her place. I used my promotion as a springboard to launch my career in the company and eventually made operations manager. She retired early because she couldn't handle the physical part of the job. Last I heard she was forced into moving in with her daughter because she hadn't put anything away as a savings. Retirement accounts are evil too.

Go into the mouse control panel, do the mouse calibration, then move the mouse in the completely wrong direction.

Simple, infuriating, and unless the target knows a bit about Windows, they'll drive themselves nuts trying to figure it out.

bogey: Reposted from a previous prank thread.

A bunch of years ago we had a very sheltered sweet young thing (Jen) working as our receptionist. My friend (Curt) and I walked over to Mini Mart and grabbed a couple of packets of pureed onions from the condiment rack. When we got back to the shop we dumped the onion goo into a condom and dropped it outside the front door. We went back in and got back to work. Later I went out for a smoke break and when I came back in I made big fuss about the nasty thing someone had left near our door. Jen and Curt come out and see it laying there and she starts going off about how disgusting it is. While she is in mid rant Curt reaches down, picks it up, and sucks all the onion goo out of it. I will never forget the look on her face.

The TRUE genius prank would be if someone came around after the onion condom was dropped out there, and replaced it with one that contained a more.... genuine... filling..

Prank's on Curt?

Set his/her keyboard layout to dvorak.

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

Put a printed sign that read "please do not fart in this chair" on a random chair in a conference room.

Depending on where you work leaving the computer unlocked may be against company/organization policy. Check and if so report them to the proper personnel for their impending termination.

Oh look! One of my coworkers doesn't believe it is necessary to put constant security on his computer, as they think we are all mature adults. I'll show him! Ha ha!

I once loaded a "fifteen pictures of Cindy Crawford naked" screensaver on an office mate's computer and then told him that clients were complaining that he was a perv.

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.

You were subby's victim then?

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.

http://www.27bslash6.com/f26a.html

One I heard about:

A cubicle minion got on his boss's computer and wrote a long letter of commendation for himself, and then sent it to his boss's boss, while his boss was having his annual performance review.

Delete system32?

You could edit their host file. Also, you could just share out their System32 directory for future pranks. Anyways, if you edit the host file, then you can send them to Nambla or 4chan whenever they try to hit Facebook or yahoo or whatever, then change it on a daily basis (if you shared the sys32\drivers\etc path). It's an easy way to direct traffic without the fuss of a man in the middle attack.

If you're wanting a low-tech office prank, just rub your balls on their keyboard and mouse.

Not a prank, per se, but an act of, "knock it off you annoying asshole."

I used to work in a maintenance shop. Part of it had two rows of our desks and we all had (scavenged) high back office chairs. The biggest trouble maker in the shop had the squeakiest chair.

In the morning the boss would come in, give the morning meeting, and hand out the work orders for the day. This trouble maker loved to squeak his chair in the rhythm that the boss spoke, while he was speaking. I got fed up with this one day and when no one was around I took penetrating oil and sprayed the shiat out of every moving part of that chair. He never could get it to squeak again and never knew why.

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.

Quickly plug in a secondary wireless mouse.
Wait for them to come back
Possessed computer

I used to use remote management on XP or 2K to eject the CD just about every time a coworker played anything annoying, most of his music. It took weeks for him to figure out it was me.

I inter-office mailed the severed heads of some rabbit peeps that were being passed around one Easter. It was like The Godfather, but pink and marshmallowy.

But pranks that get others in trouble are lame.

I'm a helpdesk guy and the Windows sysadmin at work. All of my coworkers have admin accounts that we use for all the tasks that you need admin access for around the office, and it's important that nobody else use those accounts - they could mess things up.

To that end, whenever anyone sees someone else's admin account logged in, we always change the background to something embarrassing and then log it out. Next time that person logs in, they get the embarrassing background as a reminder to log their shiat out.

The best use of this was when I set someone's background to a Live desktop of the My Little Pony theme song. He couldn't figure out where I had set that, never having used Live desktop before. I believe he found this out when he logged into the PC of a VIP, and the My Little Pony theme started going.

I haven't seen him make that mistake again.

/Yes, auto-logoff would make more sense, but this is more fun, and sometimes the admin accounts need to be logged in for a while.

Many moons ago, when the internet was young I worked in an office with an older lady who never locked her computer and always left her email program running. We signed her up to a BDSM listserv. She couldn't figure out how to unsubscribe and was too embarrassed to ask the admins for help.

Good times.

But the screenshot desktop one is a classic.

My coworkers made a habit of using my flavored coffee creamers that i kept in the main kitchen refrig, even when i put a sticky note on it asking them to respect my property. It continued, so i just emptied a cup of salt into a half empty carton and left it there for all the thieves to enjoy. I checked it a couple days later and it was half gone. I checked it a week later and the level had not moved. Justice is a salt lick.

The_Sponge: CSB:

A coworker left his computer unlocked this morning, so I used it to send out an email asking a few people if we would like to join his Justin Bieber fan page on Facebook.

That's downright hateful.

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.

I was always partial to the BSOD screensaver myself

A simple one... if they use Microsoft Word a lot, go into their autocorrect settings, and set it so when they type in the word "the" is autocorrects to a curse word or something like that.

I freaked out my boss with Fake delete once. That's all.

Ten years ago there was a screensaver that replicated a WinNT blue screen of death, even using the PC's correct info for crash information. Install it, set screensaver for 5 seconds...

We had to stop fairly quickly, as the poor guy (this was an IT office) was really freaking out.

Whether weed should be illegal or not is a different thread, but as long as it's still illegal, it's probably not a good idea to alter someone's signature line to state that they perform an illegal activity, especially when drug use can get you shiatcanned and make it hard for you to find other employment. Why not go whole-hog and change it to, "I like to touch little boy's penises" and be a complete assmunch, if you're going for the whole assmunch thing?

atlfarkette: Do you work at a bike shop in Atlanta submitter? My facebook friend leaves his computer unlocked all the time and his fb status update just popped up as this, "gave a homeless man a rim-job."

He's just being a southern gentleman.

Make it simple:

"4Chan4Life!"
"My Other Ride is Your Mom."
"FYI, Your typing looks fat."

One time, my buddy and I modified an unlocked co-worker's workstation so it had a glittery pink My Little Pony wallpaper. When he got over it, we instructed him on how to use WIN+L.

/that's about as evil as I would go; modifying a sig file is totally uncool.

Cyberluddite: Here's an interesting fact that I'll bet you weren't even aware of, Subby: You're a f*cking asshole.

Which is why we should encourage him so he gets fired for being incapable of acting like an adult at his place of employment.