Not necessarily advocating that anyone should be the office asshole or anything, but it looks a lot of dopers like to gripe about co-workers, so I figured it’d be fun to set up the situation where instead, they gripe about us.
Me and my co-worker occasionally have to teleconference with our PM and a consultant. One consultant has a really thick Scottish brogue and can be hard to understand, and his phone tends to fade in and out. Our PM is always asking him to repeat himself and I usually have to mute myself so they won’t hear me laugh.
So whenever I IM the coworker, I now do it in Scottish. Like, “Och lassie, dinnae ye get yer power point dunn? Begorrah, they surely be knockin us senseless if ye dunt.” She has no idea why I do this.
I have a small foam ball that I keep at my desk and squeeze at times to relieve stress. I will randomly toss it over the semi-wall into the next cube.
I used to work with a guy who would fake a sneeze into the building-wide intercom. He also had a recording that he would play into the intercom. It said, “Call the operator, please. Call the operator, please.”
There is one thech that I sneak up on, elaborately . I will crouch behind a door or crawl forty feet on a dirty concrete floor only to tap him on the shoulder so I can watch his jump about ninja moves.
I only did this once, but… I was bored, as I had started all the batch runs and there were no backups or print jobs to run, and wouldn’t be any for an hour or so. One of the programmers was working late, so she was seated alone in a bullpen area where there would normally be 3-4 people during the work day. I got under the raised floor in the computer room and quietly struggled through all the cabling (being careful not to disrupt any). Once I figured out where her terminal was, I smashed upward through one of the floor tiles about 3 feet from her, doing my finest B-movie monster roar (“Attack of the Mainframe Zombie!”). She actually thought it was funny, once she worked her way through screaming in terror, then yelling at me for scaring her.
Simple things like taking a screenshot of the wallpaper and icons, setting that screenshot as the wallpaper and moving the icons off the desktop. Wrapping tape around the handset cord and then calling the phone incessantly. Filling up drawers with styrofoam peanuts…
I have a friend who is a master at coming up with small, not too vicious, but funny practical jokes. He & my sister by weird coincidence found themselves working at the same company, and he would pull stuff on her all the time. My favorite was one where he took a paper clip and used it to “tether” the end of the phone cord that goes into the receiver to the end that goes into the phone, so when you pick up the receiver, the entire phone comes with it. Good times.
At my last place of employment, I had a somewhat pranky co-worker - he’d pull little things like hiding something in someone’s desk, et cetera. He also used to kid me about my ketchup - I’d have a pack or two left over from bringing in a fast food lunch to my desk, and I’d store the packets - which would accumulate.
Well, when I left, I got into his office with the help of someone who worked with him directly, and hid the remaining ketchup packets in places all over his office and files.
I work in a big box retail store. We have to carry wireless internet phones on the floor. One woman who worked there who was a pest to everyone was a favorite target of mine. I would call her phone, and hang up… do it like 4 times. When the outside line rings overhead I answer it and forward it to her, typically she would be peeved by then and promptly answer it with “what the fuck do you want”! Needless to say, it brought me to tears every time.
I work overlooking Times Square in NY. Every now and then, someone leaves a backpack on the sidewalk, prompting the police to clear the streets and the bomb squad to come out.
So one time, everone is pressed against the window, silently fixated as the scene unfolds. So I sneek up behind a new hire and yell
I worked in Ventura, California in the early '90’s during the Northridge earthquake. We felt it very strongly in our county. For a couple of weeks, everyone was on edge, what with the frequent aftershocks.
And with my sneaking up unseen and shaking their cubicle walls, causing them to frantically save their files and grab vases and glassware before the “aftershock” could knock them to the ground.
We’re having a cockroach problem at work. One of my coworkers found a piece of foam that had broken off her armrest that looked sort of like a big roach. She placed it on a white scrap of paper and drew little legs underneath it and placed it on my other coworker’s desk. I saw it first and it startled me a little, but the desk’s owner jumped about two feet into the air! :D.
Another person got a huge fake cockroach and taped it to her shoulder. She called it her “personal infestation”.