I seem to have somehow gotten into an “office pranks” war with a co-worker of mine (male if that makes any difference…) His latest prank on me was to put a tissue paper toilet seat cover in my chair while I was away from my desk.
I’m begging the help of all you comedic genius Dopers. I did pull a tiny prank on him, but he’s WAY ahead of me. What are some good recommendations?
I have a few suggestions 
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=80287
When he’s out of his office, maybe you could do a forensic chalk outline of him on the floor with his hands in an inappropriate place???
For Halloween we were encouraged to bring in decorations for our office. I brought in a big stuffed rat I bought at Wal-Mart for about 5 bucks. Fast forward about 4-5 months and the thing is sitting in my office drawer. One of the ladies is playing a few minor practical jokes on me so I decide to get her back.
I placed the rat in the same drawer that she places her purse in. When it came time for lunch she opened the drawer and screeched rather loudly when she saw the rat. It got me a bit worried because I thought I might get into some trouble. But it was worth it.
Marc
If you can access his computer for a few minutes, try some of the pranks at http://www.computerpranks.com
1). take a sheet of paper that has a title of interest written on the top of it (Employee Salary Rates, Discipline Write-up for your boss, etc.).
2).Put the paper on top of a bookshelf sticking out where he is sure to see it, but he can see only the title.
3).Cover the piece of paper with anti-holes (the little round pieces of paper left in the hole puncher).
4). When curiousity gets to him, he gets snowed on.
5). Do a [Nelson]HaHa![/Nelson] at him.
A co-worker of mine at a law firm had an order from Amazon sent to him at work. One of our co-workers left a note on his desk saying "See me about receiving personal mail at work. Signed ____ " (one of the partners)
So, Co-worker goes humbly into Partner’s office, hands him the note and says “you wanted to see me?”
Partner looks at the note, looks at Co-worker and says, “I didn’t write that.”
It probably doesn’t sound half as funny as it was
We once drove a guy nuts by substituting yesterday’s sports section in his newspaper for about a week. I took him that long to figure out why his paper had two day old sports news.
in his coffee. An entire bottle of it. Only works if he drinks coffee black out of a dark colored cup, a covered cup is even better.
Results in green lips, teeth, tongue…and it’s temporary. Unless you get him to eat a pickle or something, vinegar will make food coloring “set” better and make it harder to remove.
But I would really hate to think of what he could do in retaliation of something like this.
Where were you last November-January? These are called chads.
I posted this to another pranks thread, but it fits with what you are looking for.
If your office uses Microsoft Word…
MS Word has an autocorrect feature that you can adapt to your typing idiosyncracies. If you always type the word “inventory” as “invintory” (like I do) then you can set it to automatically change it to the correct spelling.
What we used to do is set a person’s autocorrect feature to change something correct into something incorrect. F’rinstance, you could set it up that whenever he types his name, it changes it from “Fred Smith” to “Fred the Doofus Smith” or whatever.
Be careful, though what you choose to correct, because you don’t want him to send a memo to the president from “Fred ‘I like big cocks’ Jones”
It’s cool because they cannot for the life of them figure out how the hell this is happening.
If someone is using Windows (I know this works for NT, and I’m presuming it is the same for 98, 2000, etc.), and leaves their computer unattended and unlocked:
Minimize all windows and hit Ctrl-PrintScreen, which captures the entire screen image to the clipboard. Open Paint, and execute a Paste, which will place the captured image in the Paint document. Save the new file as a bitmap and close Paint.
Next, set the file you just created as the guy’s desktop wallpaper. It won’t look any different until you then move all of his icons down to some obscure corner. Pictures of each icon (that do nothing, as they’re simply part of the wallpaper) will remain in the original locations.
The victim then clicks madly on My Computer, or whatever, becoming confused and frustrated when nothing happens. Hilarity ensues.
Disclaimer: Attempt this prank at your own risk. Electricity is dangerous
That being said, I seem to remember my high school physics teacher telling us about a prank he had played on a co-worker.
<snip>
Cecil can talk about playing “shaking hands with Jesus,” but you, my dear, are not Cecil.
So knock it off. your humble TubaDiva, Administrator
who reminds you that it’s only funny until someone gets hurt (then, of course, it’s truly hilarious)
[Edited by TubaDiva on 09-02-2001 at 11:56 PM]
I started putting tape on the mouse ball of a coworker. That way, the pointer wouldn’t move. Not too interesting at this point, but I did this every time he left his computer unattended. Eventually, he got into the habit of checking the mouse ball for tape when he came back. So I opened up the mouse and put tape over just one of the wheels. That way it looked fine, but the mouse pointer would only move along one axis (either up/down or left/right). After that, I unplugged the mouse, put some tape on the plug, and plugged it back in. That also looked fine, but the mouse wouldn’t work at all. Finally, one day I wrapped the entire mouse with about a half a roll of scotch tape. (This would be funnier if you were there.)
I’ve done this one before, but I left all the windows open when I took the snapshot. When my coworker couldn’t get any of them to work, he thought those apps had locked up.
KneadToKnow with his Jay Leno-like freshness! Take that Macarena!
A friend of mine at work used to do the following: move around everything on someone’s desk, steal and hide each other’s chairs, move one object on someone’s desk a little bit each day.
Another possibility: Swipe something off their desk and leave a ransom note. A warning: Don’t do what the co-worker who did that to me did (he (1) put it in a spot that I found it in easily, and (2) left copies of his rough draft ransom notes in with his completed work, so when I had to go in to pull some paperwork, I found the copies–I got his boss to write “Busted” on it and put it in his in-bin when she was passing out incoming mail.).
The best software prank I ever found was an old Mac gadget called “Mitten Touch Typist.” You could secretly install it and nobody would know it was active. It input the wrong character about one in about every 10 or 20 keys you hit, just enough that you figured it was your own sloppy typing and not frequent enough to make you think it was a computer glitch. And it was also clever enough to mistype the key next to the key you typed. It was particularly evil for the really good typists, it would slow them down to a crawl, but the really bad typists never seemed to notice the difference.
This one’s kind of subtle. We whipped together a .doc file that had the cow-worker’s name and photo (from the database) in it. Just that. There were three or four of us that had copies of the file. Every now and then, we’d send it randomly to printers scattered throughout the building. Said cow-worker had people coming up to her all the time with these pages with her name and picture on them, asking “Is this yours?” She suspected all of us at one point or another, but we made a point of covering each other. Like she’d be talking to me, and my friend would print one out to the printer right behind her, so she knew it wasn’t me. We kept this up for months. Loads of fun.
I pulled one a few weeks ago that was pretty good. At my office we have a little plastic bicycle horn (the kind with a bulb on the end that you have to squeeze) to use whenever we need to gather everyone together, and there’s one guy who uses it at 10:00 every day for our morning meeting. One evening when I was the last guy in the office I filled the bulb with water. I didn’t plan it, but the next day I was chatting with someone in the open area where we have the meeting and when Jeff squeezed the bulb water shot out about four feet. The guy I was talking with just fell over laughing.