Pranks/Jokes that Technology has made Obsolete

In My Humble Opinion
1

Prank phone calls, a staple of juvenile humor since the invention of the telephone, were made obsolete by caller ID about 25 years ago.

“Mouse balls” jokes were the height of techie hilarity in the 90’s and early ought’s until the optical mouse was invented.

Yes, yes, I know that you can spoof an originating phone number, but the room for humorless pedants is the one down the hall.

I also remembering unscrewing the screws that held the shell of an old phone to the body, gluing the handset to the shell, and calling the number. The prankee would pick it up, pulling up the handset and shell, and leaving the base and guts of the phone on the desk.

2

I can tell you as a former call-center employee that prank calls are alive and well. The fact that we have Caller ID is irrelevant.

3

Fortunately, PostIt Notes were also invented, so this is still a valid prank.

4

There are pay services that can make any number you like show up on someone’s Caller ID. Last I checked these services are legal. I would bet that that’s what morning talk radio stations use when they prank people.

5

You don’t see many flaming bags of dog poop since they invented microwave ovens.

6

Well, I once hid my uncle’s stock-ticker oil. Oh, that was such a madcap day.

7

With the advent of electronic displays, the next generation may never know the joy of rearranging the letters on a marquee board to spell dirty words.

8

I was referring to the jokes about how to care for your mouse’s balls.

I think that was mentioned by somebody.

9

Ah. I thought you were referring to removal of same. Carry on.

10

A fun office prank was to take apart the desktop calendar with those spindles through them, take the first couple of days off and shuffle the rest, then replace the first pages. Computer schedulers have done away with that pretty much. Ditto shuffling someone’s rolodex.

11

Okay, this is pretty lame, but WTH:

I was having trouble with a dim-bulb boss during the time of DOS, yes, the time before Windows. A friend suggested that I help my boss by showing him that he should sometime or other (I forget the exact setup) “Deliver” all of his files. That is, at the command line prompt, he should type DEL . <enter>.

Under the best of circumstances, the prank and my subsequent career would have gone down in flames, so no, I never tried it. But it made for a nice daydream.

12

Helicopter ejection seats and solar powered torches (once punchlines to “Great [Stereotyped as dumb ethnicity] Inventions” jokes) both actually exist nowadays.

13

Very few people are keeping Prince Albert in a can these days.

14

Nah, they’ll just hack them the electronic signs now to spell dirty words. Or to warn of Nazi Zombies.

15

I figured the computer mouse prank was a piece of tape over the ball.
I guess that would still work with the new optical ones, too, though.

You don’t hear about the ol’ pebbles in the hubcap number anymore.
Hubcaps are pretty uncommon and are there any steel ones still made?

16

Sheesh, the OP was pretty short; you’d think I might read it all before responding. :o

17

As kids, we had some great ones that worked with pay phones.

[sigh] ahhh… [/sigh]

18

I remember a while back me and my buddies cornered some policemen and a couple of convicts in the local precinct house - they were sheltering some guy who’d shot one of my bloods - and just to make sure they didn’t call for help we cut all the phone lines. Then, just as we were writing out threats in human blood on the road outside (in the spirit of fun, mind), a bunch of cops drove up and arrested us. Turns out the pigs inside the station had cellphones!

So, that prank was a load of rubbish. Next time - giant lead shield.

19

In college I’d inflict a “pager rager” upon people who were unfortunate enough to cross me. Actually I only did it twice, but one of those times I know for a fact my “target” changed his phone number as a result of my pager rager scheme.

  1. Take a pager exchange (i.e. 931-XXXX).
  2. Start with -0001 (i.e. 931-0001) and page this number with your victim’s home telephone number keyed in.
  3. Tack on a *911 for good measure.
  4. Move on to -0002 (931-0002).
  5. Repeat a several hundred times at all hours of the day and night.
  6. Sit back and imagine all the calls your target is receiving with the person on the other end asking “Did someone page me?”
  7. Profit!

Alas, technology has moved us beyond pagers. Also, I’ve grown up a bit and don’t usually have people in my life that I consider a “target.”

20

Actually, in hospital settings pagers are alive and well–better to have something you can glance down at and ignore if you’re, say, seeing a patient, than to have a cell-phone go off. I wear a pager every day to work.