My coworker has vole problems in her backyard, so we bought a whole bunch of vole dolls back in May…she’s stilll finding them in obscure corners and desk drawers.
I also make up 500 + cardboard boxes in the spring. I once had probably 150 done, so I got my coworker, we stacked them 20 deep and four across in front of her office, turned out the outside lights and went home.
I always thought it smelled like Fruit Loops.
I’ve done this one to one of my co-workers. Small and simple, but it drove her batty.
I work with a lady that would fall for that.
Actually it wouldn’t be that different from trying to talk to Verizon’s voice menu system…
A coworker used to use basic windows photo screen saver program. One day he left for lunch with his computer unlocked. I ran to his desk and mapped the photo directory to a file share we both had access to. I copied his photos to this directory.
Every week he had to take a long call with some clients. Normally he’ll talk until his screen saver kicks in. When he started the call I replaced his photos with a fake blue screen.
I could tell he was like “WTF?”.
Bumping the mouse made the blue screen go away.
A few more times of this was great fun but I gave myself away when I replaced the blue screen with a Commodore 64 boot screen.
He thought it was pretty funny and left the mapped drive just to see what I’d put up next. Sometimes it was old video game screen shots (Frogger, Donkey Kong, etc) or screen shots of my own workstation rigged for funny (an open browser with CNN up and a modified story about the coworker, a million windows open, etc)
He liked the screen shot of as million windows opened. he called it his “busy guy” screen. That would kick on and he’s say “I can’t talk now. Look at all this work I’m doing.”
Not really a prank, but fun. I was joking around with the same guy above about monitors. He said he wanted a big, huge monitor (he had a 17 inch LCD). He always left a couple hours before I did so that night I took a monitor box, cut a hole for his LCD monitor to poke though, and gave him a GIANT monitor. I added fake dials and speaker grills. I printed a label that said “Megatron 3000” and placed it along the top. It looked like an old 1950’s sci-fi movie prop.
I wasn’t there when he came in the next morning, but I hear the reaction was priceless. He thought it was the silliest thing ever and left it on his desk for about a week.
Another good computer trick is to swap the mouse and keyboard plugs (only works if they use both PS2 keyboard/mouse). This is really hard for most people to catch. I’ve even seen people unplug and plug both right back into the same wrong plugs.
If the mark works in an open office, and has computer speakers, change a little used event sound for a fart noise.
Host files are fun. If the mark uses google, change the host file to point google.com to yahoos IP address (or something more sinister). This is also useful if you see them dicking around on a website instead of working. We had a guy who spent 6 hours a day posting on a gun nut message board instead of working. In the host file on his workstation I pointed the forums domain name (something like http://forum.gunnut.com) to the IP of just gunnut.com. It gave the coworker the impression the gun nut forum wasn’t working. He never did figure it out.
See, I like this. The problem with replacing “the” with “the fuckin” is if a co-worker dashes off an email without checking to a customer or something. But by simply messing with the spellchecker in subtle ways, we can simply make them look like terrible typists. I like it.
‘The fuckin’’ is HILARIOUS but very impractical. The humorless drones at my office would go into cardiac arrest, followed by reporting the incident to management, followed by finding out who did it, followed by the perp being out on his or her ass without a job that same day.
Try potassium permanganate crystals in the shower head. Lots and lots of bright purple.
This one is mostly for FMG, but I also just wanted to update you on my happenings. It seems this thread really has legs, so why not?
I did this free health insurance for organ donors scam. It was easy, especially since currently HR is performing an open enrolment for all benefits right now. What I did was go into my email and print out the most recent email I received from HR. in our MS Outlook whenever you print something the top of the email always has your name, so right off the bat people should have suspected something… I’ve got that kind of reputation (in a playful, not devious sense).
I took the email and covered the actual body of it with a clean white piece of paper and made a photocopy of it. So all that remained was my name on top as well as the date and the part that said it was sent from HR. I then typed out the actual prank, matched the font size and aligned it so when I printed it on my made up sheets it would look like a very realistic email from HR. Once I printed it out I posted it on our bulletin board next to the other emails from HR about open enrolment. It stayed up for 3 days before someone finally took it down. It fooled A LOT of people.
Here is what I wrote: The actual body of it I’ll leave in italics, but I will change some parts of it with brackets just so I don’t tell you where I work. It would be bad for business if you knew such shenanigans occurred here.
Here it is:
*Health Insurance Rebate for Organ Donors
In order to encourage possible organ donors *[name of company] * will rebate employees $100 a month off their *[Hospital brand of insurance]*insurance program. The requirements for this offer are to register as an organ donor and consent power of attorney to the insurance provider. This offer extends to all family members covered under the program as well, with an extra $25 rebate for each member after registering.
This offer is not available to employees insured under other health plans.
To print out application forms and information regarding this new policy and continued news during open enrolement please visit, *[the HR website]
For More Information
If you have additional questions about open enrollment, please e-mail the Benefits Department at Benefits, Information on the global address list or via the Internet at [email address, or call the Benefits Office at [phone number. You can also contact your MGH HR generalist at the following locations: * [locations of HR]*. For a complete listing of the HR generalists by department, click here: HR Generalists and Recruiters * [email address].
Professional staff can contact the Professional Staff Benefits Office: * [names and numbers of HR staff]. * This is all actually a parody, please don’t contact Human Resources.*
That last line was my insurance.
Of course, this is poisonous and will leave nice dark stains on the skin that will last a couple of days.
So it actually was “ring ring ring ring ring ring ring bananaphone”!
Die.
This prank should only be used for those who really deserve it. Get a can of shaving foam. It has to be foam - not gel. Put it in your freezer overnight. Cut the bottom off the can and put it in the victims desk drawer (or any other enclosed place) at the end of the day. When it melts, it will fill the area with foam.
You’d be amazed how much foam is in one of those cans.
Sorry for the tangent here but this is my favorite funeral home story. One thing, these guys have no sense of humor.
When my grandmother died she was cremated. She wanted her ashes buried in Florida with the rest of her family. It was going to be a while before my mom could get to Florida so she left the ashes at the funeral home.
One thursday she calls me and tells me we’re going to Florida tomorrow. She needed me to drive. She had made all the arrangements. I’m driving all night, the whole family is going to be at the cemetary and we can rest up so I can drive back sunday and make it to work on monday. Fine.
I asked her several times to make sure the funeral home would be ready since we were going to get there late and they said they would be. We even called when we were on the way.
When we got there though, the funeral guy went downstairs and stayed there a lot longer than should have been necessary. When he came back up he had an everything is not so great face on and I even commented that it didn’t look good.
He started apologizing profusely. Apparantly, they have a separate room for remains that haven’t been picked up in a timely fashion ( it had been about a month ) and her remains were in that room. That room was locked and the guy with the key had left for the evening.
At this point I said “well, can you just give us somebody else then”?
He turned beet red and boomed “NO I CANNOT.”
I said “come on, when the guy with the key gets here you just switch the little tags. Who would know.”
At that point he just stormed off. I’m not sure if he heard me because my mom, who has the same sense of humor as me was trying to get me to leave it be but I did say “who knows, maybe they’d like to visit Florida.”
In any case, in about half an hour or so we had somebodies remains to take with us.
Have you ever actually done this, and can you verify the effect firsthand? Because snopes disagrees with the premise and links to a couple of tests of the prank.
From the website in your link:
I haven’t actually done this, but heard about it from a friend that I think is reliable. The snopes article was questioning whether the contents would fill an automobile - which of course it will not.
It will, however, make quite a mess of a desk drawer.
Sorry about the double post, but I just had a thought. The website suggests that the foaming is accelerated by the nozzle of the can. What if you froze the can and then somehow secured the button of the nozzle down? I wonder if you’d get better results as the foam thawed?
Okay, thanks for the clarification. From your original post I was thinking you meant the entire cubicle would be filled up. The drawer makes more sense, and one of the demonstrations linked from the Snopes page shows a large bowl being filled as a chunk of frozen foam slowly thaws and expands.
Re pressing the button, see the linked demonstrations. There’s actually a lot less foam in the can than you’d expect.
