I once read a comic that had stories of hard core pranks that went bad.
The one I remember was these two guys grabbed a third and threw him in a casket and burried him alive for while. The person relating the story said that the victim was never the same after the incident.
My friend / coworker Jack had a a reasonably new girlfriend, Hanna, in Vancouver, who he was about to head out and visit for a week. Shortly before he left, I got a call from Hanna, who I barely knew. We’d been working on a tough deadline at work and she thought it would be funny for me to call him early one morning, explain that the deadline was all fucked up, and he had to fly back immediately. That wasn’t nearly funny enough for me, though.
So, early one morning, I called up Jack at Hanna’s place and told him that that the project was messed up, and he had to fly back. Jack’s response quickly went from anger to cursing to personal insults, the kind of which you don’t get to take back. He ended the call by quitting his job and slamming down the phone.
I still giggle, picturing Hanna’s reaction in my mind. Apparently Jack couldn’t keep a straight face once he turned and saw the look on her face.
[QUOTE=MrFantsyPants]
My friend / coworker Jack had a a reasonably new girlfriend, Hanna, in Vancouver, who he was about to head out and visit for a week. Shortly before he left, I got a call from Hanna, who I barely knew. We’d been working on a tough deadline at work and she thought it would be funny for me to call him early one morning, explain that the deadline was all fucked up, and he had to fly back immediately. That wasn’t nearly funny enough for me, though.
So, early one morning, I called up Jack at Hanna’s place and told him that that the project was messed up, and he had to fly back. Jack’s response quickly went from anger to cursing to personal insults, the kind of which you don’t get to take back. He ended the call by quitting his job and slamming down the phone.
I still giggle, picturing Hanna’s reaction in my mind. Apparently Jack couldn’t keep a straight face once he turned and saw the look on her face.
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Good one.
MrFantsyPants, I don’t think I get it. Had Hanna told Jack about the gag so that he could turn the tables on you and make you think he’d quit, or did he genuinely think he was quitting his job?
MrFantsyPants told Jack about the joke that Hanna was going to tell. She thought she was going to play a joke on him, but he took it further (making her think he was quitting his job over her practical joke).
[QUOTE=Aspidistra]
This isn’t so much a practical joke as - well, a really nasty hazing - but one of my friends when I was at school had a p/t job in a supermarket, stacking shelves. Out the back there was a box crusher machine - basically a giant hydraulic press, you shoe the boxes in, turn it on and the press would come down slowly and turn them all into flat cardboard.
So you can all probably see what’s coming here - yes, they all ganged up on this one kid none of them liked, put him in the box crusher and turned it on. Of course they turned it off again after about two seconds, but just thinking about what might have happened if there’d been a sudden fault and the off button didn’t work, frankly gave me the cold shivers, and still does (and this was a kid I’d never even met, I just heard the story)
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I’d have those assholes arrested, if they did something like that to me or anybody I knew. “Reckless endangerment” for starters.
There are some pranks that are just too easy for them to go wrong, and end up with someone seriously injured or killed.
When I was in the Navy, we periodically tested out the torpedo systems by firing a tube filled with nothing but a slug of water. (Not surprisingly, they were called water slugs.) After a water slug (or a real torpedo launch, for that matter), someone had to crawl down the 20-foot long 21-inch diameter tube to wipe down all of the seawater on the way down, and oil the tube on the way back. It was truly creepy in there. At the far end, you know there is nothing between you and the crushing depths but the breech door. This door is interlocked such that it cannot be opened so long as the muzzle door is open. In the past, junior personnel were hazed by having the muzzle door shut and even locked once they went in. Of course, following that, it would not take much to flood the tube and drown them.
Apparently, this prank had happened with such regularity, and the victims had been so scarred by the experience, to include nearly killing the perpetrators when they got out, that the Navy wisely banned the practice. This was accomplished by making a fleetwide pronouncement that anyone who shut the muzzle door on another sailor would be promptly court-martialed, no questions asked.
[QUOTE=robby]
<snip>Apparently, this prank had happened with such regularity, and the victims had been so scarred by the experience, to include nearly killing the perpetrators when they got out, that the Navy wisely banned the practice. This was accomplished by making a fleetwide pronouncement that anyone who shut the muzzle door on another sailor would be promptly court-martialed, no questions asked.
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Now, THAT’S a proper response to practical “jokes.”
[QUOTE=robby]
When I was in the Navy…
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When I was in the Navy, I probably wouldn’t have mixed up which end was the “muzzle” and which end was the “breech.”
Those two terms should be swapped in every instance in my previous post.
At least I was consistent!
When I started working for an IC chip manufacturer, the standard sendoff for any maintenance tech quitting or transferring out of a fab was to wrap them in duct tape. The last time that this was done, the guy was taped to a chair and rolled through a tour of the facilities. He was wheeled into a return air plenum and left so that the people in the fab could say goodbye; he was wheeled out of one building and to an adjacent fab. Finally, the guys opened the door to the womens bathroom and pushed him into the washroom area. He was left there for about an hour. None of the women seemed to mind. They would just laugh and/or say hi as they walked past to take care of business.
After that episode, the word came down from on high that taping anyone would result in immediate termination. When the next guy transferred out, we spent twelve hours wrapping his toolbox in tacky mats. He was a fussy guy who liked to keep his toolbox organized, so we also rolled his box upside down and sideways until the tools were wedged together and he couldn’t open it. Fortunately (for us), this was the start of a longish going away party and he took it well.
One Christmas, my rotten cousin was elated when he unwrapped that familiar Nintendo 6400 box(this dates this story to another millennia 
). Of course, the box only contained some rocks and two pairs of BVDs. My aunt had warned him that unless he behaved better, all he would get from Santa was underwear. 
This reminds me of the crappy tricks my friend plays on his daughters every Christmas. One year, he’d bought his 12-year-old tickets to a boy band concert and hid them in an enormas box by sliding them in between the layers of corrugation in the end flap. then he filled the box with junk. He told her that the tickets were in there, she just had to find them. She confidently boasted that it would be no trouble at all. So he made her a bet: if she could find them, he’d throw in $50. If she couldn’t, the little sister would get them. So after HOURS of searching through the stuff in the box, (it was a huge box, like a refrigerator sized box) she gave up and swore that the joke was that there were never any tickets in there. She then watched in horror as her dad neatly took the tickets out of the flap and handed them to the little sister.
Of course, there were three tickets since dad was taking both girls anyway, but she still had to admit that dad had beaten her.
The next year, he had a coworker show up at the door the day before christmas playing the part of a toys-for-tots collector. He called the girls into the foyer and they watched as he gave all of the little sisters (And no one elses!) gifts to charity. New gifts appeared on christmas morning.
He’s a real bastard.
College Humor employee burns coworker by paying for a marraige proposal announcement on the Jumbotron at a Yankees game the victim is attending with his girlfriend. Video and Q&A
[QUOTE=garygnu]
College Humor employee burns coworker by paying for a marraige proposal announcement on the Jumbotron at a Yankees game the victim is attending with his girlfriend. Video and Q&A
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Yeesh. That was rough. I saw the video a couple days ago, and I was wondering what happened to the victim and his girlfriend. Good to see a follow-up on that page.