The office that I used to work in was a cubicle farm, with these prefabbed covered shelves built in (so you could put a door down and lock them). Most people would leave them closed but not locked. While they were open, you could get to the screws inside and unscrew the top so that the top would lift up. Then you close the front, open the top, and fill it with packing peanuts. The next time the worker opened it to retrieve a book or binder they needed, the peanuts pour down all over their desk.
This guy. (Link to Google cache of a thread from the old temporary-dope home at bbboy.) Long story short, he was my incredibly obnoxious neighbor in a technical training class. (Read the link for details.)
So: I discovered during down time (training never goes fast enough for me) that all of the stations in the training center were openly networked together; I had free and complete access to everything on every other computer in the room, and indeed all the other training rooms.
Naturally, I focused on the idiot neighbor.
Without telling him (obviously), I started editing and swapping around the graphics files in the resource directory. (It was PeopleSoft, for anyone curious. This stuff is easy to play with.) As should be clear from reading the link, he was one of those guys who thinks he has All The Answers and never asks for help when things seem to be wrong. When his system behaved strangely, he just got red-faced and tried to figure it out himself. If he’d had half a clue, he might have recognized what was going on, but of course he was an idiot.
I played with him off and on for the last couple of days of training, making small changes to his work and the system environment, then before he got too frustrated changing it back in response to something I could see him doing out of the corner of my eye. He would think he’d fixed it, but he wouldn’t know how he’d done it; naturally whatever he’d done last time would be the first thing he tried next time, but of course it wouldn’t work.
I control the Horizontal. I control the Vertical.
It was the only thing that made that session tolerable.
I’ve fiddled with cow-orkers’ autocorrects before. One guy sitting next to me actually sent out three letters imposing disciplinary action signed ‘Joe “The Walrus of Love” Bloggs’ before it was noticed.
Yeah, those auto-correct ones are pretty good, along with similar changes made to ‘User Information’ in Word, Excel, etc (under Tools\Options).
Seems to work best with technophobic employees when you change their name to ‘err=&EF00! <sys>/ not found @ 0000006B6’ or similar, worrying technobabble.
Regularly removing about 60% of the staples from someone’s stapler can be a nice, subtle medium-term annoyance to play on someone who uses one a lot. Complement this with mixing up different sizes of staples in any boxes they keep spare in their desk drawers.
I’ve heard of (but never seen) the case where someone got hold of a hated cow-orker’s car keys, copied them and regularly shifted their car a couple of spaces along in the car park when they’d gone for a walk at lunch.
And when they started checking on the car at lunchtime, nipping out and doing it in the afternoon…
Some of the ones that people have already suggested are great - plenty of opportunity for me, err - someone to have a field day!
Not quite a prank, but just remembered this: one of our engineers managed to raise a part number in our inventory system for:
DISK SPONGE 150mmDIAx75mm BROWN
which is of course, chocolate sponge cake, although it’s ‘camouflaged’ quite well with other 'disk’s. In theory, once a part number exists, he should be able to put it on a Purchase Order at any time…
Emboldened by this success, he proceeded to raise a part number for:
MOBILE PLATFORM TX5 JIG
which is his car. The theory here is that, once the ‘system’ has accepted that it exists, it should be assigned a (non-)stock location - preferably a new one which refers to an exclusive parking spot, as parking is basically a big nightmare around here.
When I used to work for a food-manufacturing business, we occasionally found stock codes which had descriptions changed to things like ‘crunchy frog’ or ‘nail trimmings’ - not having unique user id for such changes meant that people were rarely caught.
I did this one!! My first job, small team of three with a very conscientious but naive boss. M, (coworker) was prone to whinging but was an ok guy. One afternoon, C, the boss, was away and M was in a meeting. I logged onto his machine and sent a message to C along the lines of ‘I’ve had enough, I’m going home and never coming back. So long, suckers!’. I forgot all about it until the next morning and asked someone else where C & M were. You guessed it, they were in a meeting with Personnel discussing M’s inappropriate email…:eek: C really thought he wasn’t coming back and Personnel were concerned he didn’t intend giving notice.
The funny (and a bit evil) bit was that I denied all knowledge - M knew it had to be me (I had some history - see below) but C thought I would never do such a thing.
Another time (not at band camp) - same job, same people - I got on M’s machine and added ‘arseholes’ to his Autocorrect as a replacement for ‘assessors’ (a word we used a lot). Took him a good hour to work out why he couldn’t type his letters without accusing our clients of being arseholes. Typical sentence read ‘We are pleased to inform you that the team of arseholes that will be attending on 14 June is as follows: Arsehole #1…’
M left not long after that but I don’t think it was down to me!! As I recall, he used to dry his underpants on the office fan after playing squash so don’t be too sympathetic!!
I think this goes beyond harmless prank - there are people who have to avoid caffeine due to medical conditions or interaction with medications. I was taking something (can’t remember which med) a few years back and I know the doctor said it was important that I avoid caffeine. Consequences could be very bad.
The only prank I ever pulled was a success, except that the prankee was able to get me right back. We did our CAD work on a Computervision mainframe system, back before everyone had PCs on their desks. I learned how to write shortcut programs to perform the routine tasks I did every time I started a new engineering drawing. And I realized that if one of these programs was part of logon, it could run and automatically log off and the user couldn’t stop it.
So I messed with my cubemate’s logon. I had it open a blank page, then draw a big lightning-bolt zig-zag across the screen while printing out something about the dilithium crystals cracking. Then it would initiate “emergency shutdown” and log my cubemate off. I was there the day he discovered it. I’m not good at keeping from laughing. He got me back the next week, then we called a truce, but I thought it was particularly inspired.
About 12 years ago when I transfered into the office where I work now, we were in a huge open area rather than cubes. A couple of our engineers were, um, packrats - they had piles of drawings and documents stacked in the knee wells of their desks, as well as on top and against the wall. As it happened, the facilities people decided we needed those automatic air freshener sprayers in the bathrooms, complete with cloying scents. One of the guys swiped the one from the men’s room and affixed it under Bob’s desk all the way in the back and high up so it wasn’t obvious. Bob would be sitting there working and he’d hear the “pssssssst” then smell something fruity or floral or whatever it was. His usual reaction was “What the f*** was that?!?” And he’d look around trying to figure it out. Meanwhile, the rest of the office was dying! I think he found the sprayer after about 3 weeks.
After an embaressing proofreading mistake, one of the lawyers on our staff wanted me to change the MS Word dictionary to always change “pubic” to “public”. Clueless droid…
I had a dreadful co-worker who would harp on every little thing I did that he thought was wrong. And always wait to do it in front of other people.
One of my failings is I throw things in the direction of the wastebasket under my desk. If they don’t make it, I just leave them there. Mostly we’re talking paper her, not half-eaten tuna sandwiches.
This guy started taking everything from under my desk and putting it on my chair. Ha!Ha! Really original. I started waiting till he had someone in his office, then walk in and put the stuff in front of him, saying “You left this on my chair.” He stopped doing it.
You can also go to a public fax place and dial your office’s main phone number about 50 times. Every time they pick up, they get that annoying fax sound.
I worked with a guy who, like clockwork, would take his
newspaper and go crap at 10am.
One time after he left the room I got a glass of water and
went into the men’s room. He was alone in a stall doing his
business.
I went into the next stall and unzipped as if to piss. I started to
pour the water into the bowl in short bursts as if I were having difficulty pissing. Then slowly I turned toward his stall, continuing to pour water first on the porcelain, then the floor and then the wall. Of course the water was now splattering on his shoes.
To him it looked like I was pissing on the wall.
He started screaming “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?”
I couldn’t keep quiet and burst out laughing.
He recognized my voice and threatened to kill me but then he just started laughing too.
I got some good ideas from this thread to keep me busy next week. Here are a few of the many mischievous office gags that have been successful here:
Fax Gags
The public fax machine is your friendly accomplice. Whatever you decide to fax to your office, make sure it’s from a machine that doesn’t put the name or number along the top edge. I recommend: [ul][li]Fake announcements. Send over a 1-page note on your company insurer’s letterhead announcing surprise drug testing. That gag had people here scrambling and sober for a week. Had I been really devious, I could have sold my urine to my more “unclean” co-workers at a premium price of $50 an ounce.[]Complaint letters. Something like, “Your employee, Joe Blow, made lewd and suggestive comments to me…”[]Quotes, etc. “accidentally” sent to your company on your competitors letterhead that that make your firm look like they’re pricing is all out of whack.[/ul][/li] Car Gags
Individually tailor them to suit your needs. The 3 that have worked best here:
[ul][li]Putting a rainbow flag decal on the company homophobe’s rear window or a “Hillary for Senate” bumper sticker on the cars of the most loyal Republicans pick-up truck.[]If you have anyone with Sports Team vanity license plates, a little photo-shopping gets you something like this Rangers Suck tag which can be printed out and taped over their existing plate.[]Speaking of covering license plates, this was a classic. The day after the war in Iraq, (when diplomats we’re prohibited from leaving the city), we made this farked “TS” Iraqi Diplomat plate & put it over the manager’s tags. Even the cop who pulled him over thought it was funny.[/ul][/li] Farking
You can modify just about anything and have a lot of fun with it. These items still hang on our company’s wall of fame:[ul][li]Something like [[]Front page newspaper articles like [url=http://public.fotki.com/JohnBuckLINY/work_stuff/trench.html]this](]this, for all the slobs to read on the bathroom wall[/url), this or this: which incorporate the news of the day with individual employee quirks. []The Xmas gift wine label gag discussed in a current thread pictured here & here.Do you have pictures of your fellow co-workers? If you do, something like this Separated @ Birth picture (ala Spy) is always a big hit as is something like this for management[/ul].[/li]
Uh-Oh, I better get back to work
The only thing I can remember pulling is on my dad. I took a screenshot of our home computer’s desktop, flipped it vertically and horizontally and set it as the background. Then I moved all of the stuff off the desktop and hid the menu bar. My dad freaked out - he had this upside-down and backwards desktop, and nothing that he clicked on did anything.
(sigh) Lame.
At one point my dad worked in the personelle department of this largish company. He was the only one with decent desktop publishing skills, so his coworkers talked him into faking a letter for them to send to their boss. The letter (when he was finished) was on what looked like the genuine leterhead of a law firm, and stated that they were taking the company to court for having unfairly rejected a potential employee.
Hilarity did not ensue. Complete. Panic. Next thing he knows, the letter has gone up six levels of management, lawyers are involvolved, people are running around crazy. He laughs now, but I think he was really close to getting fired.
My friend told me that in his High School that he had a teacher who would stomp down on a waste paper basket to compact the mostly paper garbage inside. As a joke, my friend and his buddies filled the basket with water and cover the H2O with paper.
Superglue the caps securely in place on all of a coworker’s markers, pens, and highlighters. Pisses 'em of every time. They get especially irate if one of the pens is a Mont Blanc or other expensive status symbol.
A coworker was telling us about something stupid his wife did. She works as a registered nurse, but was forging doctor’s prescriptions whenever the doctor wasn’t around to do it himself. This got her in trouble with the law. The coworker told us the police showed up that last night and told her to come with them downtown. She kept them waiting while putting on makeup, trying out her clothes ensemble, etc. The coworker kept telling the cops to just go ahead and take her downtown, even if she’s only in her panties.
A couple of days later, his wife called, and he wasn’t there. I took a message on one of those generic While You Were Out pads, and for the “Location Calling From” blank, I put down Johnston County Courthouse. I figured he’d see through the joke right away, but he actually called the courthouse, looking for her. When he couldn’t find her, he called her at home, and told her, " I got a message you called from the Johnson County Courthouse. I thought you might have screwed up and gone back to jail again!"
She was horrified that he told his workplace about her. He told her he didn’t, that somebody just pulled a prank on him. He asked me if I did it, and I owned up to it, but he wasn’t pissed. It was another opportunity for him to dig on his wife, which he enjoys.
You do understand that these are human beings, right? That must’ve been frustrating as hell, stuck in an office for over a day. And it did a bunch of damage, which cost people money to fix.
You ought to be ashamed of it, not bragging about it.
