I worked in retail sales (large women’s clothing) for some years. For Halloween, we always decorated the store with the fake spider webs and plastic spiders, along with various other creepy crawlies. I rather liked the spiders and felt that they should hang around more. So I took to leaving the spiders in various places that were available only to the store personnel…the cash drawer, the cabinet in the break room, things like that. The spiders were fairly realistic looking. My best attempt was taping a spider to the mouthpiece of the phone. The manager nearly peed her pants when she noticed it in the middle of a phone call. Of course she wanted to do the same thing to the assistant manager after she got over her shock.
There are some VERY realistic looking plastic cockroaches for sale. These are lots of fun. Or at least, I had lots of fun with them.
Considering the only time we use the lab safety shower here is when we’re on fire or covered in chemicals, I won’t get much chance to soup-shower a coworker. But trust me, I will keep it in mind for an April fool’s joke I can use at home. Best new prank idea I’ve heard in ages. How would I do it, though? Unscrew the showerhead, stuff bouillon cubes at the pipe’s opening, and reinstall the showerhead?
Even better, if I can rig it to somehow spew out colored water…
Ah… the 70’s and brezhnev style furry caps, gotta love it.
A simple, classic, yet effective prank is to install a nice dollop of shaving cream in the earpiece of the victims phone, and then replace in the cradle. Then call them right away. Nobody looks at the phone when they answer. Be sure to play dumb later - “Wha??”
Well, I didn’t do this one or witness it but I did want to repeat it when I heard about it. I work at a veterinary hospital, I heard a co-worker tell a story about a previous employee who long before had pulled this prank. We will collect animal stool samples on tongue depressors. This one guy had brought a brownie with him to work that day, he took some of the brownie and molded it to look turd like and stuck it on the end of a new, clean tongue depressor. He walked into the lab area with it as if he’d just collected it and was about to run a parasite check. There were a couple other people in the lab and he started talking to them and idly stuck the “sample” in his mouth and ate it. They freaked out.
I wanted to try a similar prank to this. We have this topical ointment we all love to smell. It’s Nolvasan Antiseptic ointment and it smells nice and fresh and clean. Everytime we use it we always comment on how good it smells. Well, I had planned to take an empty jar, clean it well and put some frosting with an eensy bit of blue tint in the jar. Then I would open it, comment on how good it smells and stick my finger in and eat some. The problem is that I would either have to just randomly grab the fake jar for no reason or wait until we had to bandage something and keep the fake jar somewhere else and run and get the fake jar when needed otherwise I would run the risk of people putting frosting on open wounds, probably not a good idea.
Or seal the entire phone together with clear packaging tape while the mark is out of the cube. When you see them come back, call as they are approaching so they are in a hurry to answer. Entire phone is picked up. Hillarilty ensues.
I’ve never actually done this, just heard about it on the show Scrubs and thought it was hilarious. I imagine you’d put the bouillion in the pipe opening, like you thought. I guess the seasoning packets from ramen noodles could also work if you use enough of them, especially because most of them have coloring to make the soups. Beef and pork are brown, chicken is usually yellowish, shrimp is pink… and ramen noodles are cheap!
The Office has more great pranks, mostly Jim tormenting Dwight with them:
Putting a co-worker’s wallet, cell phone, keys, and other personal effects into a glass-fronted vending machine (the kind where the snacks, candy, etc. are on little hooks) so he has to pay to get them to drop down and regain his property. This will probably involve enlisting the aid of the vending machine restocking person. I have always wanted to do this, but also be sure it’s a machine where only your small group of co-workers have access, so some random person can’t put in a buck and steal the wallet before your prank pays off.
Moving co-worker’s entire desk into the men’s room (or even funnier if he’s a guy, into the ladies’ room).
Encasing staplers, calculators, etc. in gelatin molds (someone already mentioned this).
One that takes a long time but sounds well worth it: Every day, unscrew co-worker’s desk phone handset and put a few nickels in the mouthpiece. Do this gradually so they’ll never notice the weight of the phone slowly increasing, maybe over the course of a few weeks. One day, remove all the nickels at once. The phone will be unexpectedly light when they pick it up, and they’ll probably sock themselves in the jaw with it! Wah ha ha!
Change the left and right click options on the mouse
Change the mouse drag speed to really fast or really slow
Put a bit of sellotape over the optical mouse bit underneath
I replaced our marketing manager’s phone receiver with a banana: I stuck the curly cord in the side of the banana and balanced it so the hooky things were down and the phone would ring. She actually picked the banana up and said “hello” when we called her from the next office . . .
When you do, if you want to do it with more style, be sure to “teach” the word fuckin’ to the program by adding it to its dictionary. That way, your target won’t see a squiggly red line under it.
A lot of good office pranks are almost hacks, or aren’t necessarily repeatable (like replacing phone parts) everywhere. Things that relieve tension or knock the stuff-shirts back to humanity if only briefly, are fun. The photos I’ve seen of completely tin-foiled over cubicles, or foam peanuts filling an office are pretty good, though.
It might be tougher these days with clocks everywhere, but moving clocks to different times, either ahead significantly, or behind, along with group participation versus one or two individuals, is very effective.
Something that I thought was a prank but turned out it wasn’t…
At a previous job in a warehouse, I had a collection of rubber mice, snakes, cockroaches, etc in my desk. The rubber cockroaches were pretty big, about two or three inches long. One day I came back from lunch and saw this big-ass cockroach on the wall. I assumed someone had taken one of my rubber cockroaches and taped it to the wall. I was just about to reach out and grab it when I realized it was actually a real cockroach! :eek:
Just FYI, depending ojn how you do this, be careful. The phones at my workplace are Nortel Networks display phones, retailing at about 600 bucks a pop. You do NOT want the telecom guys seeing you put shaving cream on the phones, beleive me.
Wander your work site and look for people who have left their computers on but not secured, i.e. a screensaver without a password.
Help them by adding a password.
Alternatively, you could fire up their email client (Outlook, Lotus Notes, whatever) and send an all-users broadcast message: “I don’t secure my workstation when I leave!” For added hijinks, see if your mail client will schedule delivery of the message for a particular time, so it gets sent out while you’re not actually there.
(Somebody did that to my own manager maybe six months ago. Not me. Heh.)
And speaking of finding an unlocked workstation, I understand there are lots of Internet groups devoted to carnal relationships with farm animals…
One great side benefit of this is if you work in an Outlook shop, the default editor for e-mails is MS Word, so this will happen in the e-mail’s they try to send to the fuckin support dpeartment describing the fuckin problem they are having with the fuckin computer.
