I’m feeling bored and troublesome at work tonight. Can you recommend any good work pranks for the guy in the lab? Or have any stories about some good ones you’ve done? Please respond with purely harmless fun only… because I still want to keep my profession.
PS: I work an overnight shift, so I basically have limitless accessibility. Whether it’s other lab stations, my supervisor’s office, the MD’s desk, the IT room, or even the kitchen.
PPS: I did a google search for this prior to posting. Although I found no good viable ones to try I will share one that I thought was pretty funny (although not what I was looking for): *Set a mouse free in the office each day. When the problem becomes an epidemic, send snakes after them. *
My Mom is big on April Fools Day and one of her work pranks was particularly inspired. The fridge in at her office was the style that could have hinges on either side. She switched over the hinges so that everything looked as per normal but the handle was on the same side as the hinges.
Ok written down it doesn’t sound as great but in real life, it was funny.
Trust Me.
At my company the employees have to pay part of the cost of their medical insurance. I put a realistic looking notice on the bulletin board saying, employees could get free medical coverage if they agreed to be organ donors and gave the insurance company power of attorney. Even though I did this on April 1st we still had people go to HR and ask for the forms!
One of his coworkers got to work and found a jar of fish food sitting on top of his monitor. He picked it up and looked at it then shrugged and tossed it in the trash.
Eventually, he opened hes desk drawer and found that it had been lined with plastic and filled with water…and there were two goldfish swimming around in it.
My parents, the owners of a small business, went on a week long trip to Houston. There was another “executive” there whom was lazy as all hell and had no problem ducking out early to see a “potential client”.
Anyway, I set up a pool betting on how many hours this man would be in the office that week, the log of his coming and goings being kept by the receptionist.
13 people entered at $5 apiece, the winner guessing closest to the actual 24.5 hours. She didn’t even know him, worked in another part of the building in fact, and her guess was the lowest by a wide margin… but she still overestimated by 5.5 hours.
He found out and complained rather uselessly to my father, who then called me up to find out what’s going on. When I offered to cancel the contest, he paused for a few seconds and replied “No, I want to see who wins.”
He didn’t last long. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I just started a new job. One of the ladies that does our training is in Orlando teaching new users the software.
Her husband works for the company as well and he picks on her about her car. She used to have a Mustang, but traded it in (probably because of insurance) for an Eddie Bauer Explorer. Her husband picks on her mercilessly for having a soccer mom car.
Well, she’s gone and we interns seized upon it. We got a bunch of little toys and baseball cards and crap and flung them around her cubicle. I stuck baseball cards in her binders, where she’ll be finding them months down the road.
The best one I’ve seen was an envelope with a powdery substance in it. Would have been great if the person receiving it not been on vacation. The Federal Marshals were really impressed. The guy lost his job just before they handed out a half-years severence package. He was a really nice guy too. Always good for a laugh.
A couple of co-workers were working on a CICS based tracking system for which they had created an application with four virtual screens to facilitate tracking multiple functions simultaneously. They had one clueless supervisor who kept asking for physically impossible functions from the system. Finally, they went to the tech and had one quadrant of the screen on one application mapped to the keyboard on a different terminal. They then called him over and demonstrated their new process whereby the screen would respond to “mind” commands. The one woman would lay her hand on top of the terminal and announce what she wanted to have displayed–which command was duly entered by her accomplice two cubicles over, causing the display on her terminal to change accordingly.
He watched, fascinated, for a few minutes, then got suspicious and insisted that they were playing a trick on him, but he never did figure out how they pulled it off.
In the mid-80s, about the time that Reagan was declaring the U.S.S.R. “outlawed,” my brother found himself working with a guy who spent inordinate amounts of the workday ranting on about the terrible Rooskies and how we ought to just nuke 'em while we had the chance. One day, he showed up with a new, blocky fur hat of the sort that one pictures atop all the dignitaries in Red Square. My brother noted that every day, the guy would enter the office, remove the hat, facing away from him, and set it on the corner of the desk, then pick it up and put on, without looking at it, when he left for lunch or to go home. So, my brother got some scrap metal from the machine room, inscribed a pentagram on it, and had one of the machinists cut out a perfect five-pointed star. He then used dye to stain the front red while afixing a pin to the back. The next morning, when the guy got up to run an errand out of the office, my brother pinned the “red star” to the front of the hat, then found a reason to be in the machine shop the rest of the morning. The desk faced away from the door, so the guy never noticed when he returned, and at noon, he apparently picked up the hat, set it on his head, and went off to lunch.
A bit later he stormed back into the office, just livid. While out at a local dinaer, some woman had had the temerity to ask whether he was Russian. Russian! The very idea! And then she had pointed out the red star on his hat.
No one in the office ever revealed who had added the decoration to his hat.
If you’ve got a networked system then use Command Prompt to send messages to the IT-clueless that their computer has developed a fault and that they should save all their work and reboot. Repeat ad nauseum.
Alternatively, wait until a colleague has left their PC unlocked and has disappeared for a bit. Hit Alt + Printscreen to get a screenshot. Then store this as an image file and set it as the desktop background. THEN drag every file they have on their desktop to someplace else and watch as they repeatedly click on the images of files you left for them. Fabulous fun in an i-hope-he-doesn’t-explode kind of way.
This is almost certainly not going to be an available option for the OP, but my favourite ever is when a bunck of uni students living in a flat noticed that the old lady below had a ceramic frog in a flower pot on her window. One of the students saw these cheap frogs for sale somewhere, and realised that the lady had bought the smallest of about five sizes. So he bought on of each size. Every other day, he’d replace the frog with one slightly bigger…
I’ve pulled a couple on my former boss over the years.
When I was at PG&E in downtown SF, anything heavy had to be secured with these locking “earthquake straps” so keep them from sliding around and falling on somebody in the event of an earthquake - we had to lock down the monitors and PCs and such. For April Fool’s day we took a boxfull of the things and locked every single loose item to my boss’ desk - his mouse, keyboard, phone handset to the phone body, his little pack of postits, we even fastened his chair to his desk.
Got him again a few more times at our current company, twice relating to his coffee mug.
First time I took the mug and locked it to the handle of one of his desk drawers using a Defcon laptop lock (it’s a combination lock with a retractable steel cable and a battery-powered screaming alarm). He was just about to bring the mug, still locked to the desk drawer, over to the coffee machine when I got in.
Second time I used a screwdriver to unfasten one of the cabinet handles from the inside (they’re big metal loop handles used on all of our office furniture), threaded it through the handle of his coffee mug and then fastened it all back down. He had to hunt around for a screwdriver to take it off.
Luckily he has an extremely good sense of humor, we still laugh over all those. And he has paid me back a few times as well.
So far I’m ahead since my last prank was to go over to his house with a friend while he was away on vacation and we painted his truck hot pink but that’s not a “work thing”.
Anyhow a good prank should obey a couple of basic rules:
Thou shalt do no permanent harm.
Thou shalt clean up thine own mess.
Thou shalt not get thy victim into trouble.
Thout shalt know thy victim - if they are not the type to laugh when they get “got”, do it to someone else.
If any of you have showers at work (labs, gyms, police or fire stations, etc), put bouillion cubes in the shower head so your co-workers get a deliciously hot soup shower. That’s a favorite of mine.
In the mid 1960, paychecks were handed out at the ABC Radio Network on Thursdays anout 11 AM. One announcer worked a shift that started at noon. His colleagues got his paycheck from his desk, steamed open the envelope, Xeroxed his paycheck, trimmed the Xerox to size and reinserted it into the envelope. When he opened it up, he said “What the H—?!?” Whereupon he was presented with a (pre-prepared) bogus interoffice memo explaining that due to “payroll processing problems” certain employees would be receiving COPIES of their paychecks for one week only. However, to cash them, they had to take the copied checks to the MAIN OFFICE of the payroll bank–way down on Wall Street.
Where, of course, Mr. Gullible went. And where, of course, he was met with total contempt by the bank tellers.
They gave him his real paycheck when he stormed in the next day.
One of my favorites was when we switched the ‘s’ and ‘d’ keys on a fellow software engineer’s keyboard. It didn’t hurt that he wasn’t much of a touch typist and really didn’t have the keyboard positions memorized. It drove him crazy and he ultimately reported a defective computer. Boy the help desk had a lot of fun with him when they figured out what it was.
A couple of years ago, one of the docs bought a white coat for another doctor, and had embroidered on the left chest “Dr. Andrew Weil”. For those unfamiliar, Dr. Weil has made his fortune on herbs and alternative medicine, and in certain medical circles in this community, he is not very well-respected. The victim of the prank is known to actively dislike Dr. Weil and his practices.
He saw patients wearing that coat for three hours before he noticed.
Someone in our office a while back was sending messages to the printer display, so instead of it displaying “Ready” it would have something like “Hi There” or “Stop That”. It was a different message every day and this went on for over a month. One woman got kinda freaked out when she was the first one in the office one morning, went to go pick up something off the printer, and the display said “Come Closer”.
I had the misfortune to work with a complete twit, at one client. I was complaining about him at the company Christmas party when one of our techs perked up. He had known the same guy at a different client earlier in the year.
It seems that one day the tech got a panic call from the twit, saying that his keyboard had completely frozen. When our tech walked into the programmer bullpen, all the other programmers hastily turned away. Figuring soemthing was up, he went over and typed out a few commands, none of which even registered on the monitor, much less executed. Haing ascertained that the keyboard was not in communication with the processor, he leaned over and wiggled the jack, whereupon it came off in his hand. The twit’s co-workers had simply pulled the jack far enough out to lose contact while appearing to be still plugged in. He had not had the brains (of course) to actually run his line to be sure that he still had a connection.
