Alice, how about this?
Thinking back- this was pretty mean spirited- but we used to do this ALL the time when I worked at a Baskin-Robbins. It was basically our initiation to any new employee. I don’t know if this is a common prank or not… but here you go…
My buddy “K” would go to new employee (while I made myself busy somehow) and tell them in so many words, that my mom made me take ballet lessons. I’m a big guy. K would really play it up… tell them to imagine me in a tutu, which gets them laughing pretty good. Anyway, K would then explain that I didn’t really like it much, but I did it to appease my mom and I was really sensitive about the whole thing. But, they should go ask me if my sister took ballet lessons. It will be funny, just go do it!
So, new employee walks up to me, “Hey, The Tof! I heard your sister takes ballet”
Me: “Thats not funny.”
NE: “What, I was told she was good.”
Me: “Just shut up”
(At this point, they’re thinking they’re needling me and I’m upset because I know they know my “secret”)
NE: “Why? Does she not do ballet?”
Me: “My sister was in a car accident last year. She can’t walk, she’s in a wheelchair now!”
I at this point storm out of the room, feigning upset.
K then goes up to them, and says something to the effect of, "I can’t believe you did that, man! I thought you knew. He was really upset about it, they’re very close… " so on and so forth. Plays it up for a few minutes until finally the rest of the staff can’t take it anymore and burst into laughter.
Damn, typing it out… it really seems mean. But, nobody ever seemed upset by it at all. Probably pretty lucky we had all good sports.
I’ve been had a few times as well. When I worked at Circuit City… one of my coworkers came up to me and told me my (then) girlfriend was on the phone. I went to answer… “Hello” nothing “Hello” nothing “<girlfriends name> are you there?” nothing… I look up and see one of the managers running at me waving his arms. Turns out they put the phone onto intercom, so I was going out to the whole store.
At my current job, police dispatch, one of our duties is to run subjects for warrants when police have them detained for whatever reason. So, an officer comes up and asks me to run subject “Bob Weadababyitsaboy”. I know, of course, this is clearly a joke. I don’t bother running it, and figure one of the officers is just goofing around. They come back a minute later and sternly ask… did you run my subject yet? So I do real fast, it is of course- nowhere to be found, and i let them know.
A few minutes later, same officer… I need you to run… And keep in mind, they spell this out so it’s not readily apparant “Last Name: i m y o u r f a t h e r first name: l u k e” Ahh, for the love of… I reply “Are you serious, who is this?” (sidenote: ‘who is this, what is your identification’ would have been much funnier, too bad i didn’t think of it haha). I didn’t get any answer, so I did what any newly certified police dispatcher does… I ran to my supervisor. <sigh> They knew right away it was coming from within the bureau… and at that point the culprit could no longer contain himself. Apparantly this was a pretty common prank for awhile.
Tonight one of the gaurds at work wanted to get revenge on a coworker of mine who’d been messing with him.
With my help he got three pads out of the vending machine, smeared 'em with ketchup, & stuck 'em to the winshield of the dude’s car. Juvenile? yes. Gross? Yes. Funny as hell? you betcha.
Jesus! You didn’t mention there were SHARKS in there! :eek:
Although I have to add, either your pranks or you web coverage have gone way down in the last 15 years (seriously - a Smart car in the hallway? Yawn.). You have one more day, mister, to devise and implement the best April Fools prank evah! Don’t let the Dopers down!
A friend of mine did this to a new co-worker. He was working at an English school in Japan, so the newcomers were typically young men who were not only completely on their own for the first time, but were one their own in a country with a language and culture they were still struggling to get a grasp on.
Co-worker: Do you know where I can buy laundry soap around here?
Friend: Oh, that’s easy. Go to a soapland!
There are actually businesses here called soaplands. Essentially, they’re legal brothels. Each room has a bath and part of the service is having the girl soap and bathe you. The dopey new guy didn’t know this, and thought it was just some kind of laundromat. He even started using it in his classes, asking students for directions.
I, too, had an anal co-worker; he kept a terrarium on his desk with lots of nice little plants. Every day he misted them with water and left the lid open for just the proper length of time; then he’d put it back on for the proper humidity and all that.
I went to the pet store and bought a chameleon. When he left his desk . . . in went the reptile. Everybody in the office saw me do it and was waiting for the moment. It took at least an hour for Jerry to notice, and fortunately he wasn’t on the phone with a client. He was doing some paperwork when he glanced over at the glass tank, leapt out of his chair and shouted “It’s alive!”
The whole office erupted.
He immediately got so attached to the little guy that he bought it a companion and food and a book on how to care for it. Their names were Billy and Millie.
My mom organized something similar to this to a college friend. Over a summer break, she had people mail him chatty postcards from wherever they were signed from (the non-existent) “Don and Char.” Coincidentally, the order in which he received the postcards made sense in terms of its being an actual reasonable vacation itinerary. The guy spent months trying to figure out who the hell Don and Char were, where he knew them from, etc. It’s been a running gag in our family for decades. Every so often when I’m on a trip someplace Mom gets a postcard from Don and Char.
My ex-boss told me this…
When he joined as a trainee engineer in shopfloor, he was asked to go get an "adam bolt" from the stores…
Well , the stores manager made him understand the real meaning of adam bolt… amidst the roaring laughter of the shopfloor guys… 
We went camping with a friend who was very tall and had easily the biggest tent we’d ever seen, specifically so he could stand upright inside it. On the appropriate day, some of us made sure he was out of the way while the rest of the crowd carefully emptied everything out of his tent and parked a Mini inside it. Needless to say, he was between impressed and stunned that we’d managed to fit a car into the tent without him realising it.
Best prank in this thread so far!
One April fools day I called one of my (former) supervisors and left a phone message:
“Hello, this is Mr. Lyons trying to reach Ryan Williams. Please give me a call at 247-6086 regarding an urgent matter. Again this is Mr. Lyons, 247-6086. Thank you very much.”
He called the number and asked to speak to Mr. Lyons. From my cubicle I could hear him ask several times before becoming convinced there was no Mr. Lyons there. The number I had given him was to the Zoo.
I thought it was hillarious, he was not amused and lectured me for about 15 minutes.
Still funny though.
Which is…?
Psst: “A damn bolt.”
Uh…so what’s an adam bolt? Is that like getting another 50 feet of lease line?
This is hardly elaborate, and doesn’t compare to what’s already been offered in the thread, but it’s still a good way to wind up a newly hired teammate:
“Okay, when the application generates its file, you find it here, in the output share. Copy it over to the transmission share. Right. Now, log into the interfaces server with the service account. You can get the password from the… exactly. Right. Okay, now, open the transmission share. See your file? Good. Now open a command prompt, and change to that directory. Right. Notice at the top of the directory, there’s also a batch file? That’s how the commands to transmit the file to the bank are scripted. Just type the name of the batch file, and put in the name of the transmission file as a parameter. Right, exactly. Now hit Enter… OH MY GOD WAIT NOT THAT FILENAME.”
Basically the same gag as in WarGames, the whole “push that red button right there, yes, that red button, yes, just push it, OH NO NOT THAT ONE” while an alarm sounds.
The wet-behind-the-ears recruit will recoil from the computer as if having suffered an electric shock, and snap his head toward me with eyes the size of dinner plates. And a split second later, all the rest of my co-workers fall down laughing. Especially the second-most-recent hire, who suffered the same prank weeks or months beforehand. 
well, It was a slang for “penis” in the shopfloor… The store manager told him how to locate it…
They pulled this on all the unsuspecting newcomers in the shopfloor.
I worked for a number of years in a call center and served for a time as a Team Manager supporting scanners and digital cameras. Occasionally, customers would send us their broken/malfunctioning equipment for troubleshooting, so we had shipping supplies, including an overabundance of wrapping tape – that unsticky but clingy wrap used to immobilize stuff inside the box. I was in charge of out-shipping, and my minions teased me about the amount of “shrink wrap” I used (what the hell, we had more than we needed, and I wanted to be sure …)
One April First I arrived to find my cubicle/office, which was one of the few freestanding cubes, wrapped up. I mean, from top to bottom, all five sides (it was odd-shaped, being in a corner.) Also wrapped: Everything in my office. My phone, my computer (CPU, monitor, speakers, keyboard), pictures on my desk, my coffee cup. Oh, yes, my chair, my waste basket, even the pens and pencils (each one individually, and then collectively) on my desk. And inside the overhead cabinets: Every manual, every stack of forms, every paper tray, every single thing, wrapped up with clear plastic wrap. I got there at 9 a.m., it took me ten minutes just to get into the cubicle, and another hour to unwrap everything.
My team was utterly baffled as to who would do such a thing. Fortunately, our site director had a warped sense of humor, so we determined from shift schedules and badge-out readings from the front door who had been in the building for two hours after their shifts. We had the HR director call them into the conference room, confronted them with the “evidence” and grilled them mercilessly about what they knew about the “vandalism” and “waste of company materials.” Of course, they should have known we weren’t serious – our well-known policy was that disciplinary meetings were always private, never in front of one’s peers. When they finally confessed, we made them serve pizza (the site manager and I treated) to the rest of the team before they could take their lunch breaks.
So you didn’t mean “a damn bolt” after all? Then I don’t quite get it. 
The sucker was sent to find an “adam bolt,” or penis. So he’s walking up to everyone asking them where he can find a penis for the boss.
We had a remote-controlled rat for a while. Nuff said.