If the recipient did the same to you, she/he would laugh her/his damn fool head off.
With this in mind, I once attached the “Clapper” between the monitor and the computer a friend owned. The computer was under the table where he couldn’t see the power lights. I waited until he was an hour into a C++ conflaguration, and told him I knew of a new way to turn a computer on and off. I then clapped my hands.
A coworker and I were constantly playing practical jokes on each other. I started out innocently enough but each one progressed until we started getting really creative. Here are some examples.
He took my jacket off the coat rack soaked it in the sink folded it up nicely and put it in the freezer.
So I took his and tied 25 helium balloons to it and let it go in a 60ft high atrium.
My wife called work and he told her that I had been on vacation for the past week. It took me a half an hour to convince her it was a joke and that I had nothing to do with it.
I got his wife to give me a key to his car and I moved it to the opposite side of the building. He thought it was stolen. Started laughing as he was dialing the police.
At about this time we both decided to call a truce.
Ive always found it easer to get forgiveness rather than permission.
Cool computer pranks I have played on a computer-illiterate co-worker lately:
Switch the mouse button from right-handed to left-handed. Of course it’s right-handed when you get there - these technophobes never could change it in the first place! Or change it back, without a very confused call to our IST anylist!
Another is to change the shortcut from the games on the start bar. Have it directed to Word, a different game, or create a file especially for this - my choice was a HTML file that blinked (yes, the dreaded blink tag!) in huge red letters, “Don’t you have anything better to do than to play games?!?!?”
A friend really got me good one time. He called me pretending to be with a student loan collection agency going on about how I had defaulted and all the terrible things that were going to happen to me.
I spent over 15 minutes trying to explain that I was still in school and had a deferment. Needless to say I was frantic until it dawned on me who it was on the phone. I still don’t see how I didn’t recognize his voice.
I’m resurrecting this thread cause I remembered a couple of good ones.
One I had just begun dating a girl in college, she was hot, but not real sharp. My friend called her up with me in the room, and pretended to be a student health clinic survey. He asked her all kinds of revealing questions about sexual history. I found out that we were in a “serious” relationship this way though.
I was at a bar where a friend was bartending on a slow night. A girl who was quite a bit older than me, and a townie, started hitting on me. I was bored and my friend was busy so I played along. We talked and drank, and she was getting touchy so I played along. She was attractive enough. /Her friends were leaving so she gave me her number as they left. I was feeling devious so I wrote her name and number on the flap of a 100 matchbooks from a newly opened pack. I am sure she got calls from drunks forever.
Office practical joke: Get some heavy party balloons (the kind that won’t deflate overnight). Put a little bit of baby powder in each and blow them up. Put victim’s office chair at the entrance to his cubicle, then fill his cubilce at least chair-high with the powder balloons.
The next day, he’ll see the balloons, laugh a little, then start popping them to clear his way. After one or two, he’ll realize the booby-trap you’ve set, and he’ll have to carry all the balloons away, or at least take special measures to pop them without spreading powder all over the office.
Computer PJs:[list=1][li]Fill the AutoCorrect feature of their Word program with a bunch of misspellings; “the” replaced by “teh”, etc. Even meaner: replace the boss’ name with an insulting slur. It’ll really spice up memos if the typer doesn’t watch it.[/li]Using ALT-Print Screen, capture a bunch of games’ windows, compose them as a montage BMP, then replace this as their Windows desktop wallpaper. Watch them try to click the close button to get rid of all the games before the boss shows up.[/list=1]
A friend of mine got me hook line and sinker once with this:
About 10 years ago or so, VH1 (or MTV) was having a contest to give away a slew of Corvettes. My friend entered it, and promised me (and a few other friends) one each if he won. I stayed at his place for a weekend for some reason, and one afternoon, while he was at work and I was lounging around the house, the phone rang. I answered it, and it was someone calling to confirm my friend’s contact information in for the contest, and left a message for him to call them back. Frantic, and excited, I called him at work and told him all about it. He was too busy to call the contest people back then, so I had to wait until he got off work for him to do so. By the time he got home from work, I had worked myself up into a lather about it, and he confessed to having a co-worker call me about it. He was planning on dragging it out for a few days, but was too amused at my reaction to continue it.
I’ve always thought about getting back at him by having a lawyer friend of mine draft a letter to him asking him for paternity money for one of his ex-girlfriends…
Some good computer related practical jokes:
Put a piece of tape on the bottom of the mouse, so the ball doesn’t track.
Remove the ball from the mouse.
Rename the big file that they’ve been working on for months.
Change their word processing spell checker to British English.
My favorite joke is while teaching rookies how to perform vehicle extrications (how to cut open car wrecks to remove victims). In most cases, you remove the windows from the car prior to cutting it open, so you have control over where the glass goes. We have a center punch (a spring loaded device that looks like a wide pen with a spike instead of a ball point) that you push into the glass to break it. The rookies don’t know this. I have an old pair of gloves that are a bit too large, there’s enough room in the index finger of the gloves that I can slip the center punch into the glove and pop the end out of a hole in the top of the index finger. Walk up to the car, and tell the rookies “if you push on the window just right, you can pop the glass really easy,” followed by pushing the punch into the window, whereupon it smashes rather nicely. For the next week, you’ll see the rookies jamming their fingers into every car window they walk by trying to pop them.
Jeremy…
I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine - Kurt Vonnegut
In high school, I once got my hands on some official school stationary and wrote to my friend’s mother telling her that he’d been suspended. That one went over well.
One my uncle pulled, before my time:
4-H Winter Camp, the middle of January. The winter building is pretty small, basically one room with a fireplace. Cotton (my uncle) goes up on the roof with two garbage cans full of water and a lunch tray. He pours one can down the chimney and immediately slaps the tray on top. A huge cloud of soot and ash explodes into the room, and everyone rushes out headlong, coughing and choking. As they cross the threshold, Cotton nails them with the water from the other can. He had to scrub the entire building by himself before they sent him home.
Once took a glove and attached it to a can of whipped cream with the top cut off, a small pin was holding it closed. He then put the device into an empty coffee can. When the victim opened the can, the glove would slowly fill up, and the glove was taped to give the victim the finger as it inflated.
Dad once got back at a guy who used to love a rather smelly brand of cigars. He bought a cheap remote controled car from Radio Shack and used it to build a squirt gun that looked like a cigar, and could track the victim. The look on this guys face as the cigar popped out of the box, spun around to face him (My dad had the remote behind his back.) and started to squirt him with cheap perfume was classic.
>>Being Chaotic Evil means never having to say your sorry…unless the other guy is bigger than you.<<
I suppose this would count as a practical joke, even though I was serious.
Some guy took a bunch of pictures off my little web page and put it on his. Worse, he directly linked to my page, in esscense using my account to make his own page.
So I changed all the graphics he took into a message that said “Thank you for looking at my page and uploading the DaVinci virus. If your computer didn’t the virus this time, please return to this page later”
No more of my pictures!!
“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument” - William McAdoo
Make a screen shot of the entire desktop. Set this as wallpaper and hide the icons – the user will click forever and get nothing.
Or take the screen shot and set it up to replace the “It is now safe to turn off your computer” image. The user thinks he can’t turn off his computer.
And there was always Hugh Troy, who did things like taking an elephant’s foot umbrella stand and using it to make tracks in the snow.
His best was devistating in its simplicity: He bought a park bench identical with those used in Central Park in New York, and walked around with it. Spent the whole day being arrested and released (once he showed them the bill of sale).
When my college roommate got married, the rest of the wedding party and I got in his honeymoon suitcase and got all of his underwear.
We then found the hotel where they were staying, got its address, and mailed him a pair each day. The last day we replaced his conservative tighty-whiteys with some paisley bikini briefs.
In AP Calculus class in high school, we were all a bit burned out by the time our teacher’s birthday came that year, so we decided to take it out on her. Our class met right before lunch period, and after class, a few of us stayed behind in the classroom while she went to her office and turned EVERYTHING in the room upside down. Her desk, the student desks, the bookshelf, the books on the shelf, the writing on the chalkboard, etc.
We all skipped class the period after lunch to see her reaction. It was priceless.