Back when 300 baud was state of the art and I was fresh out of high school… I found out that the AP news feed for a local radio station was an Epson printer connected to a Hayes modem. A little social engineering scored me the phone number and a bit of dumpster diving got me an old printout so I had the format. I and some friends of mine enjoyed a few college semesters of creative writing. Never did get anything on the air though.
Programming classes in the college were on an IBM Series 36. For those not familiar, that pretty much meant that you typed your program into a terminal and your only output was on a huge line printer in the middle of the data center. All programs in all languages were entered the same way and the only way the mainframe knew what to do with it was that one of the first lines was something like //EXEC COBOL or //EXEC RPG.
A friend of mine had been working on his final project for a few weeks and gotten it down to the point where there were only 5 or 6 compile time errors. Then he left the room and didn’t sign out of his session. It only takes a few seconds to change an //EXEC COBOL into //EXEC RPG. The look on his face when the next submission started on page 3 of errors was sheer beauty. Then he noticed the errors were for a different language. Everyone turned to stare when he yelled my name and no one believed my pleas of innocence.
Fast forward to my current job.
In the main room between the offices there are a set of desks and cube walls. Every Tuesday and Thursday one of the walls would move an inch making the entrance to the cube slightly smaller. It took almost 6 weeks before he realized something was wrong.
My siblings and I planned a surprise 25th wedding anniversary party for my parents. Day came and at the last minute they decided not to attend their friend’s party (our excuse to get them to the venue) and we had no choice but to let them know 200+ of their nearest & dearest were waiting for them to show up. They were excited & happy, agreed to pretend to be surprised.
On the way there I told them the ‘big surprise’ was that a minister was waiting there to remarry them. That it was actually their wedding they were going to and everyone was expecting it, their original best man & maid of honor would play their parts and we’d gotten the original minister out of retirement for it. I don’t know where this idea came from - maybe because the hall where the party was being held was part of a large church complex.
My parents were horrified as I knew they would be. No offense to anyone who did repeat their vows but I knew they thought those types of things were tacky & narcissistic. I couldn’t have chosen something that would embarrass them more.
When we got to the hall my parents stood out in the parking lot agonizing over going in. I remember my mom kept walking around the car, saying “oh my god” over and over. My dad just stood there swearing.
After about five minutes when I got worried that one or both would have a stroke or heart attack I told them it was a joke. They were so relieved they didn’t even get mad.
Last week, I told my chef, who is a penny pencher who would make Mr Krabs look downright charitable, that the jar of horseradish smelled off, it was old, and I was going to throw it away. Of course, he put his head way down in there and took a big old whiff. I nearly cried from laughing so hard as he jumped around, yelling from the pain.
My mother and a former co-worker of hers got into an epic prank battle back when they were in their residency at Ohio State.
It started off relatively tame–things like him covering my mom’s phone with double-sided tape and calling her, so that when she picked it up and put it to her head it got stuck in her long hair.
Mom retaliated. In one of the local news rags (think like the Chicago Reader), there was an ad for a strip club that had a semi-normal name, like The Candy Store. It advertised 14 gorgeous strippers and 3 drop-dead ugly ones. Mom called the place to find out the name of the ugliest stripper, and then left one of those pink “While You Were Out” messages for her co-worker, saying that “Amanda” from “The Candy Store” called, and it was urgent. She told everyone about it, so people were eavesdropping when he called her back.
I can’t remember how he struck back, but Mom ended up ending the whole thing with her next one. In the student newspaper’s police beat article, there was a story with the headline “Man Caught Masturbating in Library.” Mom clipped it out, stole her co-worker’s ID badge, taped it into the article so it looked like it was a picture of him and his name next to the article, xeroxed it, and posted it EVERYWHERE at work.
After that, they both got a talking-to, and agreed to a cease-fire.
I found an old remote for our DirecTV that Mrs. Cad didn’t know about. SHE controls the controller so every so often I would pause the TV, fast forward, rewind, go to menu, etc. Not all the time, maybe 5-7 times a night.
It rapidly progressed from, “That’s strange.” to “What’s going on here?!” to “Why is it doing that?! Fix it!!” to “OOOHHHH! I fucking HATE DirecTV!”
I know I’m an ass but it got so pitiful that I stopped and confessed less than a week into it but it still haunts her. Now if the TV acts weird, she looks over and asks if I have a controller.
My daughter does this to me, but she waits until I am using the controller and then countermands whatever I’m trying to make the Tivo do, making me think that the controller is screwed up.
I’m sure I’m not the first to do this, but it is so simple and easy that it is hard to resist even today. Go to a workmate’s computer when they are away for a moment and have not locked their screen. hit PRTSCN and save the file. grab all their files and folders on their desktop and move them into a new folder on the desktop. set the screenprint as their wall paper and wait for the consternation to begin…
I didn’t do it, don’t know if anyone’s ever actually done it, but I feel compelled to mention the worst prank I’ve ever heard of. Someone mentioned it in a movie.
I haven’t done this kind of stuff in years. A few of my favorites:
Back in college, I was the night shift computer operator for the physics department’s lab. The computer had a paper tape punch, which had a container to catch all of the little chads that came out when the tape was punched. When it was close to full, I spilled some on the floor and left it there. I then dumped all the rest into the exhaust port of the vacuum cleaner. The day shift guy went to clean up the little mess, and showered the entire room with chaff.
We once rotated someone’s office 90 degrees – vertically! We turned one of the walls into the new “floor,” leaning his desk up against it and strapping some of the contents of the room onto the ceiling. The picture on the wall was moved to the floor, and so forth.
The most fun was probably the simplest. When my boss was out of his office, I took the handset from his phone and plugged the cord into a banana. I put the banana onto the phone. When he returned to his office, I called his phone. He was displeased.
The ladies’ restroom at work has a little sign next to the sink that says (in effect) “wipe the counter when you’re finished washing your hands”. This sign is the sort you might find on a restaurant table advertising drink or dessert specials…it’s in a thin, clear plastic holder with a slit that allows a piece of paper to be inserted for viewing on both sides. Last week, no one could agree on where to place the sign – sometimes it was next to the sinks, sometimes it was on the shelf across the room from the sink, and sometimes it was shoved to the far side of the counter. One afternoon, I removed the paper from the holder, made a mirrored copy, and reinserted both papers in the holder. I then positioned the sign on the shelf across from the sinks with the backwards type facing out – that way, the sign could be read while looking into the mirrors. How clever, right?
No one else seems to think so. The sign has continued its cycle of relocation. Strangely, the backwards sign I placed in the holder is still there.
There are advantages to speaking a second language when no one else does.
I’ve worked in Indonesia on two separate jobs. On the first one, I took a crash course in conversational Indonesian and got fairly fluent. We had a new project supervisor come in and he was an old oilpatcher who liked to chase the ladies. We took him to one of the local watering holes in Jakarta and of course, the bar girls immediately came clustering around us. I got to chatting with them and convinced them that Paul was gay. The girls moved off and the guys moved in. Hilarity ensued.
On my second trip, one of my cow-orkers was scared to death by his driver. He asked me how to tell the guy to slow down. Of course, I “accidently” got the word for faster confused with the word for slower.
I got him a second time. We were eating lunch and ordered several sides of sate. They came garnished with the little Indonesian chili peppers that are concentrated death. I crunched one down and was just getting a good sweat started on the back of my neck when he asked me how I could stand those things. I told him that the green ones weren’t ripe yet and they were sweet, they didn’t get hot until they turned orange. Of course, he immediately crunched down a green one and lost his voice for about 10 minutes. :D:D
One of my nieces was born a week before Christmas. Another niece got a life-like baby doll at the family Christmas party.
While the baby was being passed around I somehow ended up holding the doll for the older niece. I quietly wrapped a blanket around the doll, then cradled it like a newborn, planning to ask someone, “Want to hold her?” then tossing the doll.
I got distracted and tucked the doll under one arm to grab something. My younger brother swooped in before realizing it was just a doll. He figured out what I was up to and helped out by bellowing, “What’s wrong with you? You don’t hold a baby that way!” and punching me just above the elbow.
My arm straightened and the doll dropped to the floor. We both laughed as the rest of the room had a collective heart attack.
Just wanted to say thanks for resurrecting the thread-- timeless entertainment.
BTW, on a mac “command-option-control-8” will invert the colors on the screen.
(I tried it just now, whoa-- check out the SD Logo: Navy on Lime and Cyan!)
Well, I noticed a hipster college student in a bar, who went to the bathroom and left her MacBook open, halfway through typing a paper. So I inverted her screen… on my way out the door.
(Okay, I’m switching my screen back – the “typing white on black” is just too 1976)
I repented of my deed, and thought the student might be freaking, so I went back to the bar after an errand or two… Nope, she was just typing away. So I told her how to fix it. “Oh, yeah, I thought something looked a little different… but I had a paper to write.”
The sign has continued its cycle of relocation. Strangely, the backwards sign I placed in the holder is still there.