How do you torture your coworkers?

Once or twice a week I’ll play a song by Heywood Banks on my computer. I usually play the song Big Butter Jesus, Pancreas, or The Revenge Song. Even though my technician *hates *these songs, the song will get stuck in his head after I play it, and he ends up humming & singing it all day. :smiley:

I don’t sign my e-mails. That’s about it. Really.

She always signs hers. Even if it’s just “I agree,” it’s always followed with

It’s not a computer-generated sig, either. She’s typing it. She’s Frank Fingerman.

I fart.

I stalk my coworkers and pounce out of dark corners, scaring the shit out of them. Well, just one of them mainly, since he’s really high strung and jumps 3ft in the air when you do it.

Otherwise, just general little pranks… Go up to someone while they are on a forklift and talk to them, and try to snatch the key without them noticing. Sticky chemicals we use as ingredients on padlocks. The continuing competition each night to get the good forklift first.

I so want to get one of these, but haven’t yet.

Annoy-a-tron

I always use my (template) sig. This is annoying because my sig looks like this (in addition to my name, title, supervisor’s name and title, company name, address, telephone/fax numbers and e-mail address:

Ocasionally I switch “have a nice day” with “so there” or some other brief contribution of my own to the legalese. I think I used “free Tibet!” one time.

This was a long time ago when I used to work for another software company that also made its own workstations…one of the things they were pioneering in was virtual keyboards (so you could bring up keyboards in various languages). One of these was the Dvorak keyboard. A couple of times when I was bored and nobody was around, I went into a coworker’s system and reset their default keyboard mapping to Dvorak.

It was always fun watching them get increasingly confused as they knew they were typing the correct thing but it was showing up on the screen as gibberish. :slight_smile:

Our office services department (the photocopying and office supplies folks) usually have rap playing on their radio, which I hate. On the rare occasion that no one is in the photocopy room when I visit, I sneakily change it to a local old people’s swing station, which I’m sure makes them vomit.

There’s a lot of little computer pranks you can play. Hell, just resetting someone’s left mouse button as the right, and vice versa, can drive a normally calm person batshit insane.

My favorite, though, is to mess with someone’s MS Word AutoCorrect. I’ll put my boss’s name to be replaced with something like “Chief Corporate Lick-Spittle.”

There are some coworkers I drive batty because I do silly things like approach problems with, ya know, logic and stuff. Also, I might not say “how high” when they say “jump” or not do everything the way they think they should be done.

In turn, they drive me batty by continually forgetting conversations and consensus that were reached the day before, or, more entertainingly, continue to play music and/or hold meetings in their office with the door open, such that I can’t hear myself think.

Fun times.

An old prank I still use on occasion: You know that little pop-up thingy on a phone receiver? That depresses when the phone is hung up, breaking the connection? (If anyone knows the term for that I’d love to know.) I tape it down with Scotch tape. When their phone rings they pick it up, but it never connects. They’re holding the phone to their ear and it keeps ringing.

My absolute fave is the “Ctrl + Alt + [directional key]” trick which reorients your display with the top in whichever direction you pressed. Only works with Intel machines but it confuses the ever loving crap out of people.

I did it to the receptionist once while she was grabbing coffee. I came back two hours later and noticed that she’d laid down her monitor on its side. :smiley:

Simple one: You know those tissue paper toilet seat covers? Put ‘em on peoples’ chairs. I’ve done it a few times, in different offices. The trick is to be the first one in, place them carefully
(pretending the chair is a toilet) and wait for the befuddlement and annoyance. Yes. I am 12.

I like to hook up their testicles to a car battery.

I have one co-worker who’s quite religious. She once gave me grief for not saying, “Bless you,” when she sneezed. I explained to her that I’m an atheist and hadn’t come up with what thought was an appropriate secular response to keep up the medieval superstition.

She still thought it was rude. Now, whenever she sneezes, I tell her, “Stop it!” Drives her buggy.

We use to save our pennies and then cover our boss’s desk with it or tape everything down. Stuff like that.

A really good joke played on me was a small device that would randomly beep about every 5 minutes. After tearing my desk apart over the course of 2 days it was moved to an area I already checked. It only beeped twice so there was no way to really locate it. The high frequency seemed to bounce off everything.

Our forklifts are propane powered so if you can reach up and shut off the gas valve without them noticing they will sputter to a halt just as you’ve made your getaway.
Ditto on getting (and keeping) “the good one.”

Oh, I listen to NPR all day, that bugs 'em GOOD!

At my old job a favorite was when someone’s finished half a can of soda, take a knife and make a tiny vertical slit 1/2" or so below the opening. When they take a swig, it runs out the hole and down thier neck.

My department head went on vacation for about two weeks. To welcome him back, we ganged up and filled his office with balloons. Since we had so much time, though, we did it right– we got good quality balloons (that wouldn’t leak), and a coworker brought in a helium tank and an electric air compressor. There was a materials station outside the office for a week, so people could stop in, fill up a few balloons, and pitch them in. Visitors to the department were invited to help.

The results were suitably epic: I have a picture somewhere of D.H. sitting at his desk, “working”, at least chest-deep in balloons (and this was done after he removed/popped quite a few even to be able to enter the office at all). On top of that, I believe that someone shrink-wrapped most of his desk before the balloons even went in-- to keep things pristine for him. :smiley:

I can’t take credit for the idea but recently we got three or four of those white urinal pucks from the janitor’s closet, put them in a bag and crushed them up. Then we sprinkled the powder throughout the tool chest of one of the millwrights. It was in the fingers of his gloves, inside sockets, a hundred little places. The smell drove him batty. Then we loctited his lunch box to the floor. There are still some tiles missing from where he finally pulled it up.