The worst practical joke/stunt you've pulled.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Back when I was a law clerk at the Public Defender’s office, a fellow clerk had recently passed the Bar and gotten hired on as an attorney.

One of the major clerk duties was to screen walk-in clients. Every afternoon, people who wanted a lawyer for whatever reason would come in, fill out our two-page financial affidavit, and the clerks would look them up in the computer system by name, find out the details of their pending case, and get an attorney assigned. We’d then create a file folder with all that info and give it to the newly-assigned attorney, who would go out and call the client’s name in our waiting room to call them inside for an interview.

One afternoon, we made up a fake affidavit and file and gave it to the former clerk. His new client’s name was Anita Mandelay. Which he proceeded to shout across a crowded waiting room.

42

Funny, I always thought that rolling was this.

43

Reposted from here …

When I worked a summer job for my public school district’s grounds maintenance department, we had an elevated gasoline tank we used to fill the tractors, trucks & equipment. They’d fill it with several hundred gallons of gas periodically, and we’d use it over the course of a few weeks. Nice & cheap–no electric pumps needed, everything works by gravity. And it was basically just a big metal drum on top of a metal scaffold, with a hose & a stopcock.

We high school & college kids had had an escalating prank war going on at one point. Well, one day I parked my car on the gravel drive right next to the gas tank, and that gave two of the other guys a brilliant idea. They snagged a length of chain and a padlock from the hardware shed, and chained my rear axle to the scaffold that supported the tank.

I imagine that they planned to give me some kind of warning before I left for the day. But I noticed what they’d done early in the afternoon … I notified the manager, who was pretty much furious, obviously, and stated that the practical jokes were at an end. I agreed, but asked him not to talk to the other guys until after I left. Had to get the last word, you see.

I slipped out a few minutes early that afternoon without saying goodnight to my co-workers. So their first indication that I was gone was the sound of the big V-8 engine in my trusty '72 Plymouth Satellite revving up. I grinned as I saw them running out of the maintenance building, waving their arms and screaming. Then I slammed that baby into drive and vanished in a spray of dust and gravel. I’d snipped a link from the chain & unleashed my axle, but left the chain trailing under the car, so you’d have to get all the way underneath to see that it wasn’t still attached to the gas tank. I can only imagine what was going through their heads …

I’m told that they were very subdued during the subsequent conversation with the manager.

44

I’m sure the zoo was thrilled :rolleyes: I used to answer the phone at one, and nary a 1st April went by without a phone call for Mr. Lyon, Mr. C. Lyon, Mr G. Raph, Mr Behr or even Mr L. E. Fant. It wasn’t even restricted to that day either…

It got old quite fast.

Mind you, at least one of the staff did bring out a very realistic plastic reptile for a handling session one April Fools, took quite a lot of people a while to twig.
I’ve not done any especially creative ones myself, but some of you are giving me bad ideas…

45

I once wrote an April 1st memo to my bosses (at the time, my parents) showing that my “analysis” proved that 40% of all sick days were on Monday or Friday. Not too long later, my mathematically challenged stepmother went on the warpath and wanted to know who was abusing the system.

46

I pretty much never pull practical jokes, but I do remember one time when I was a young kid, my mom had begun drawing a bath for me and my sister. It was april 1st, btw. Anyhow, she had wandered off to go do something else while that bathtub filled up, and I got the bright idea to run, screaming, “Mom, mom! The bathtub is overflowing! You let it run too long!”

My poor, overworked and ever-loving mother screamed, “TURN IT OFF!!!” As she came running into the bathroom as if it were the end of the world. When she saw all was well I yelled, “April fools!” and we got a good laugh out of it.

That’s honestly the only one I’ve ever done, I think.

47

I mentioned my wireless mouse trick in an April Fool’s thread a couple years ago. Here’s the full story of my most memorable experience with it:

A few years ago I took a spare wireless mouse to work and plugged the receiver into the docking station of one of my coworkers while she was at lunch. She sat 20’ away from me, at such an angle that I could observe her out of the corner of my eye without being too conspicuous. For the next few days, whenever I noticed that she was using her mouse, I would subtly move mine. Depending on which way I moved it I could either exaggerate or cancel out her movements. Either way, it drove her to distraction.

I started with very subtle movements, just nudging the mouse on my desk every once in a while, but after a week or so I was very quickly sliding the cursor to one of the corners (effectively making it disappear from the screen) any time I saw her hand approach her mouse. Once she regained control and got it back onscreen I would slap it back to the corner again. (If you move it fast enough, it seems to just vanish.)

She also had a very predictable button-clicking style, where she held her index finger an inch or so above the button while moving the mouse, only touching the button during the click itself. This made it easy to make her miss her click target every time.

When she complained aloud about her mouse having a mind of its own, everyone else in the office (a couple of whom were in on the joke) told her she was crazy. Whenever it happened thereafter she would challenge the nearest person to watch over her shoulder to see it for themselves (and of course I would leave it alone if anyone else was around).

This went on for a couple of weeks, and the reveal occurred when she asked me over to her desk for one of these observations. She was trying to close a document before leaving for the day but couldn’t get her cursor to stay on the “Save” menu item long enough to click it. I told her maybe it would work better if I tried instead, using my own mouse. I placed mine on her desk, clicked “Save” and said “There you go.”

She was astonished at first, but it only took her a few seconds to put it all together. She hasn’t spoken to me since.

48

Back in the 60s, one of my Dad’s colleagues (this was in California) had bought a VW bug and the first day he told everybody at length about how much gas he was going to save. So every couple of days, someone would slip out quietly and add gas to his car. After a week or so, he didn’t talk about his gas mileage so much when people asked him about it. After a while (I forget if it was three weeks or four) he went back to the garage to ask the mechanics what was wrong with his car and why the fuel gauge never moved from full. He came back sheepishly to ask his friends if they’d been putting gas in the car and they all had a good laugh.

49

Part 1:
My college girlfriend (call her April) insisted I come over on March 31st. We had a long dinner, watched a long movie, and talked a lot about it afterward. I started hinting that I was either going to head home or drag her to bed, and she started looking worried and sad. I asked why and she stalled for a while, then finally told me she was pregnant. I started asking what kind of options we had and suggested one thing after another with each one being rejected. When I finally asked why there were absolutely no options, she pointed at the clock and said, “Because of the date.”

It was a few minutes past midnight, April 1st.

Revenge:

A year later, my girlfriend had moved into a big house with my good friend (call him Roper), his wife (Claire), and another friend (Missy). Roper and I had scheduled a day of rock-climbing after the last week of March. For some reason, Claire decided to come out and watch us; I think she brought a camera, too. Roper and I spent a few hours on the cliffs, then came down in the early afternoon. As we were leaving, I asked Claire to tell my girlfriend, “Grestarian broke his ankle on a fall. He wants you to meet him at Mesa Hospital.”

Claire agreed, but chickened-out at the last moment and asked Missy (her other housemate) to relay the message to my girlfriend.

Missy missed it. She called my girlfriend and said, “Grestarian is at Mesa Hospital --”

April never heard the rest. She just dropped the phone and jumped in her car to break every relevant traffic law driving from her end of the county to mine. She went to Admitting and to the clinic to ask for me. Meanwhile, I was sitting around near the emergency entrance, waiting to intercept her before she got to the door.

I saw April coming out of the emergency waiting room. She had stormed through the hospital trying frantically to find out where I was (all to no avail), and happened to see me as she passed window; I was lounging around atop an adobe-covered wall, sipping from my water-bottle and waiting to intercept her. She burst through the door, stopped in her tracks, stared at me for a moment, then approached at a more leisurely walk while saying, “Okay, we’re calling a truce right now. This April Fools shit is NOT going to escalate any further.”

—G!

Ev’ry move you make
Ev’ry step you take
I’ll be watchin’ you!
. --Sting (The Police)
. Every Breath You Take

50

Zoos are so used to this happening every April 1 that many of them now use it as a fundraising opportunity, playing a phone recording on that day asking for donations.

51

A day or so after my dad passed away I got a call from a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a while. He said “I’m sorry to hear the news” and I said “What news? I’ve been in bed the last few days and only just turned on my mobile phone.” He freaked out a bit but I quickly told him I was joking. It was a lousy prank and probably an inappropriate time to pull it but sure it gave me some much needed comic relief.

52

In the early 90’s I span a story regarding a proffesional Hard disk based TV Broadcast Camera.
Essentially that the hard drive span a such a speed as to cause a gyroscopic effect, try and pan the Camera left or right and it would tilt up and down.
So fairly tame so far I thought, until someone in the company heard this rumour and took out a full page advert in Broadcast magazine a couple of weeks later to deny these rumours!
People really shouldn’t belive every rumour they overhear in the BBC club :smack:
Peter

53

Escalating but harmless series at former job resulting in:

  1. a guy with a large cube (with guest chairs) having 100 or so paper cups ½ filled with water every couple of inches such that when he came in he could not step to his chair. The cups were filled enough so that he couldn’t empty one into another to consolidate. He had to make many trips to the bathroom to empty them all.

  2. another guy, with an individual cube coming into to find his cube was now a snow globe. Saran wrap, packing tape, styrofoam bean bag balls & a fan lying face up on the floor, with large sheets of paper used to funnel the falling balls back over the fan to be blown upward again.

54

A friend and I were at the Toprail (a C&W ‘dancehall’) in Dallas many, many moons ago and were attempting to ‘make the aquaintance’ of a couple of cute, young things.

Things were progressing along nicely, till one of the “regulars” (that had already consumed way too many longnecks) decided that he would join our group at the pool table. The guy wasn’t taking a polite hint that he was “cramping my style”. :mad:

Rather than risk an attempt to ‘bow up’ and make him move along, I had a flash of evilness overcome me. With the pretense of needing to relieve myself, I went to the head and rolled up and ‘palmed’ a piece of toilet paper about 2 feet long. Since he was a little too ‘touchy, feely’ already, I guessed that he wouldn’t notice when I patted him in the small of his back as if to move by him to take my shot on the pool table. :wink:

With that, I tucked the end into the top of his pants right in the middle and it rolled down, almost to his knees. :smiley:

He walked around for damn near five minutes with that toilet paper hanging halfway to the ground out of the back of his pants, almost the half the people in the place were falling down laughing before he finally figured out, they weren’t laughing at his attempts to be funny!

55

My co-worker dumps copious amounts of salt on everything she eats. She even keeps her own salt shaker in her desk. In fact, on numerous occasions the break room salt shakers have gone missing, and we usually find that she has taken them back to her desk.

Yesterday I replaced all of the salt in the shaker at her desk with sugar. Then I left a bunch of empty sugar packet wrappers in my other co-worker’s top drawer (one known for pulling pranks).

Coworker hasn’t eaten at work the past few days, so it’s basically now a ticking time bomb of hilarity.

56

Good move. And much easier than forcing the cue ball into his mouth, followed by the conventional means of removal.

57

In High School I typically sat towards the back of the room and I was typically bored. I enjoyed composing romantic notes to someone sitting near the front and passing it up, signed by someone a seat or two behind. It was always fun watching the recipient reading, and then turning around to look at the unsuspecting sender. I prided myself on subtlety and creativity rather than crudity, and serious consideration of the personalities involved.

58

Way back in 1984 I had moved in with my boyfriend, who had the stupidest lease I ever heard of. There were 3 bedrooms in the house, and if we did not find a third roomie, the landlord would stick us with someone. So he did. We figured out that he was an ex-con because any time anybody except us was in the place he would ostensibly be reading the bible, not drinking or smoking or swearing and we noticed when he had his shirt off certain tattoos that you tend to see on people in mug shots :eek:. [I was not thrilled to be in the house with him because he sort of exuded sliminess and he seemed to always be watching me. Dan was not thrilled either.]

Oddly, my gas gauge got really inacurate, as in I could fill the tank, and it would slowly go empty even though I never drove on weeks when I had a company car. We noticed food going missing and neither of us were eating it. We ultimately found out from the landlord that he had paid the first and last months rent, and that was it, though he was there for 4 months [it took the 4th month to do the legal process to evict him, though bailed out just after the landlord filed on him :D]

We decided to check on the food issue. We started buying cartons of the premade chocolate milk. We would do a single glass of it to start the carton, and it would slowly vanish over the course of a week. So Dan bought a package of the chocolate exlax, popped it into the blender, and added half a cup of hot water to melt it and blended in the carton of chocolate milk that had a cup or so out of it. Every day or so he would pour a tiny amount into a cup and put it into the sink with water in it so it looked like he had drunk some and put the glass in to soak. Jackass claimed he couldn’t job hunt because he had a ‘stomach bug’ for 3 weeks until we stopped getting the chocolate milk. Poor sucker lost about 20 pounds. Then just before the landlord came over to let us know he was evicting him, we decided on the next way to annoy him. We took pink fiberglass isulation, some white peppercorns and a cheap thriftstore blender and made itching powder. A cheap turkey baster to whiffle it and everything in his room, bedding, clothing, blankets got a dose. He comes in from ‘job hunting’ and decides to take a nap. After an hour or so, we hear a bunch of swearing, and the shower running. 3 showers and lots of swearing later, he storms out and returns to take yet another shower. More swearing ensues, odd rummaging and slamming sounds, and he exits stage left complaining he can’t live where he is being eaten alive by bugs :dubious::smiley:

Oddly, my gas consumption improves, and our food stops vanishing. We negotiate a new lease. No more craptastic roomies get dumped on us. [we had been perfectly willing to pay the whole rent by ourselves in the first place.]

59

We had a friend at school who had pranked each of us pretty much constantly for six or seven years. Of course everyone else was in on the joke each time, but this also meant everyone had also been a victim. And he’d never been pranked. So we decided to get the ultimate revenge.

After he’d moved in with his wife, we put everything he owned (and stuff he didn’t own like a full-size pool table and a sailing dinghy) up for sale via the classified ads at low, but not unrealistic prices, with his landline number. The phone started ringing at 5am and didn’t stop for three days. They unplugged it in the end. At one point his wife plugged it in to call her mother and it started ringing again immediately.

He didn’t find it funny and we haven’t spoken since.

60

My turn.

Late 60’s. My friend Barry drove a Yamaha 250 (?) motorcycle. Our friend Wes had somehow gotten hold of a master ignition key for that kind of bike. My failing memory is that authorized Yamaha mechanics had such keys. In any case, Wes had a key to Barry’s bike and Barry didn’t know it.

One evening, Wes found out that Barry had gone to see a movie at our local theater. So we drove over, spotted Barry’s bike in the parking lot, and waited until we knew the movie was nearly over. Wes went over to the bike, started it up. I don’t know if it’s still possible nowdays, but at that time some cars and bikes would keep running even when the key was removed; that’s what Wes did. We scuttled to a dark corner and watched as Barry came out to the parking lot to find his bike idling nicely, an hour and a half after he’d left it there.

=====

Early 70’s. Hot summer afternoon. A bunch of us impulsively decided to go to the beach. Four couples. We brought blankets, towels, and a couple of six-packs. Being painfully hip, free as birds and so forth, we weren’t into the whole “preparation” thing, so it was only after we’d trudged to a spot and spread our blankets on the sand that we realized we had cold beers but no cooler for them.
No problem. One of the guys decided that it’s plenty cold enough just a few feet under the sand, and after many minutes of asses, elbows, and flying sand, a narrow hole about four feet deep had been excavated. The cans went in the hole, then the sand. A sandal was placed to mark the spot, and the four guys went off to bodysurf. The women stayed behind to smoke a joint and watch us freeze our butts off in the water.
Out in the surf, I was the only guy to look back and notice the girls carefully moving the blankets, towels, and The Sandal about six feet away from the original positions.
After a half-hour or so, the guys came back, dug down, no beer. The digger had obviously just missed the treasure. Betraying my gendermates, I kept my mouth shut while the other guys kept excavating a bigger and bigger hole. The females giggled helpfully for about fifteen minutes before admitting their treachery.
The beers weren’t very cold.

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