Office Pranks

ajstoner21

ajstoner21

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Andrew
Any pranksters here?

I love hearing of a good prank story. What have you done or witnessed? :goofy:

One of my favorites: At work when someone leaves their cube and doesn't lock their computer, leaves their computer open for pranks. One of my coworkers saw someone leave and not lock their computer, and he had gone into the keyboard settings and somehow remapped the keyboard to the "Dvorak Keyboard" and then locked the computer. I don't remember how he unlocked his computer since he couldnt type his password correctly to save his life, but I found it hilarious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
 
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We had an admin who was very concerned about her status compared to that of the other admin's.

If another admin got a new keyboard, she had to have one too. Lather, rinse, repeat for a thousand little items.

So one day another admin gets a wall clock for her area. Our admin
had to have one too.

It came in and was hung near her desk.

Funny thing about that clock, though. It added and dropped 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there on a frequent, but random basis. Pretty much any time someone in the office walked by it and she wasn't within sight.. ;-) She never figured out what was going on. But was very frustrated about the clock...
 
I swapped all the keys around on a co-workers keyboard one time. Took a little time, but popped them off and rearranged them. He was confused and couldn't figure out why it looked weird. Also funny watching him try to recall which key went where.
 
Best one I ever masterminded...birthday of my office mate. We're at company HQ in Colorado with offices in the DC area and China Lake, CA. Got our entire team involved (including a VP). Had a letter signed by the VP transferring Paul to the China Lake office with a one-way airline ticket leaving that Friday afternoon (we started this on Wednesday). Had hotel & car reservations. No one out there knew it was a practical joke so they called/emailed delighted that he was coming out. Everyone in our office kept making suggestions about the movers, route to drive, etc.

He was not happy.

This went on for 3 days. He went to lunch on Friday at the bar/grill around the corner and never came back to the office. We got over there about 4 pm, he'd been drinking the whole time (but really wasn't that plastered).

Finally let him know it wasn't real. But we really had to get that airline ticket back, since it was real $$$ (the travel agent was in on the joke too).
 
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When I checked into VAQ 135 there were several other folks that had a weard sense of humor too.

One had bought a brand new fiat sedan, and was bragging about the milage it was getting. A couple of us thought we would have some fun, so we started to add a gallon of the navy's mogas to his tank every day.

about a month went by, then he told us he had talked to the car dealer where he had bought the car and had told them that he was getting 90 miles per gallon.

it is so hard to keep a straight face, after that we decided to remove a gallon per day. a week or so later he started to whine about the poor milage and said there was some thing wrong with the car, but the dealer service dept wouldn't believe his milage went from 90+ to less than 10.
 
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Years ago, when I carried a toolbag, my big account was Exxon. In their 10th-floor data center in Houston, nerve center for everything they did (this is 1985-ish).

I was doing some off-hours preventive MX, saw this happen.

In the middle if it all was a glass-walled command center, floor to ceiling IBM terminals showing status of systems and circuits around the world.

Guy working the night shift fell asleep, so co-worker sneaked in, turned the intensity on every terminal down, showing a blank screen.

Creeped back out.

Called Command Center, guy groggily answers. "Hey, Bub, I'm getting no response on my terminal, something up?"

You shoulda seen him pop up!

There were no complaints-sleeping was a firing offense.
 
Once upon a time, I posted "Happy 30th Birthday Laura" signs all around our office.

Everyone liked Laura, so she was greeted with a warm "Happy Birthday" by virtually everyone she ran into that day.

Laura was ****ed. She wasn't 30 and it wasn't her birthday.
 
After we had upgraded to Windows NT, we had a co-worker (not very well liked) that could never seem to remember to lock his computer. One time he went next door for something, so one of the guys took a screenshot of his desktop, then deleted all the icons from the desktop and made the screenshot (with all the "icons") his desktop. He couldn't figure out for the life of him why none of his icons worked. I wish we could have gotten rid of the start menu somehow.

Another time, we discovered that the sound that plays when you click "start" was just a WAV file. As a bonus, the menu wouldn't open until the file COMPLETED playing. So we made his menu sound a complete 3 minute song. As a bonus, we found that every time a sub-menu opened it played the song AGAIN, in it's entirety, before the submenu would open.

Another guy (recently promoted) left his email open, so we sent an email to the boss (who was in on the joke) from his account saying that after having the position for a short while, he didn't feel that he was ready for the new responsibility and requested that he be demoted until he thought himself fit. The boss then responded to the email and told him that he was glad that he was willing to recognize his shortcomings and that if he thought he couldn't do the job the boss would recommend to the commander that his promotion be revoked and that he be reconsidered in 6 months. The poor kid (about 19) almost crapped himself when he got back and read his e-mail. The boss played it off pretty well -- "What do you mean it wasn't from you? How is that possible? This new OS is designed so you have to login to send an email. How could someone have gotten into your account?" The guy sheepishly had to admit that he probably didn't lock his computer. The rest of us had to leave the office because we were about to lose it.
 
The one I thought was funniest also caused me to wonder if I would be fired or shot.

Back in the day (or one of them sometime shortly after Kennedy was shot) somebody gave me a gag gift that looked like a nice box for a necktie but in fact had a trick hinge wire that extended from the end of the hinge back through the box and on which was threaded a ~18" rubber snake. When the lid was opened, the bent wire would rise upwards, the snake would rise along with the wire and the snake's mouth would fall wide open.

I was in charge of the annual financial audit for the Kendall Glass Co in Springfield, MO, so took the snake along to have some fun in the office. The woman in the office with whom I interacted most and had become friends (that I later hoped was a real good one) was a tall but strong red-head hill-country gal straight from the sticks, but smart, funny and personable. Her desk was immediately in front of the GM/comptroller's office, and the fifth desk in a row from the front door.

I left the box on her desk and was working at my temporary work area when she opened it, screamed at the top of her lungs, jumped up on her desk and then ran out of the office by leaping from desk-top to desk-top all the way to the front door, then out the door and down the street. When she didn't return, Earl Goode told me that her "people" were very protective of their womenfolk and they felt that they had been subjected to any disrespect that many of their grievances had historically been settled with shotguns.

Not only that, us button-down eyeshade-wearing, pocket-protector equipped auditors were not supposed to be pranksters, especially in clients' offices, and I was aware that some had been "given the opportunity to explore other employment" for severe infractions of accepted behavior. Between watching the front door for a double-barrel and wondering if the next phone call would be the managing partner of the firm's KC office, I wasn't all that productive for the remainder of the day.

She came back the next day, we all had a big laugh and Earl confessed he might have exaggerated slightly about the shotguns. Turned out she had a dentist appointment and just went there when she fled the office.
 
While deployed, if someone would leave a random piece of uniform in the tower, it would promptly go in to a ziplock baggie full of water, and from there in to the freezer. One girl left her cover and had to throw it off of our (210') tower to get it out of the block of ice. Another guy left his CAC card in the computer, so in the freezer it went. We were sure to cover up the strip with tape first.

At the night shift change, we'd go outside the cab and wait until the incoming crew would almost be to the doors on the ground. Then we'd dump some water on them.

We'd also fire off fruit at the van when it'd come within throwing range.

A lot of things flew off of the top of that tower. Everything from cases of water, to tv's and microwaves, to a bicycle! Not at anyone of course.

At another facility, we got a bunch of glowsticks and attached them to a flattened cardboard box spelling out "LIVE NUDES" and hung it from the tower at night.
 
I worked as a broadcast engineer for a group of radio stations in North Alabama. One afternoon I was visiting an AM in Gadsden. The afternoon guy was known to be a player. He would get freaky with the sales chicks and always had one or two on he hook regularly. Well, one day one of the new sales girls caught his eye and the other sales girl was put on standby status. She was ticked off something fierce, the one sidelined for the new girl.

The gal walked over to the cross-cut shredder, the ones hat ha the 30gal bags proceeded to take that full bag of confetti and dump it into the open sunroof of that guys car. I worked there for about a year and every time he left the parking lot more confetti would leave the car. He did say that it was worth it though. :)
 
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If someone locks their pistol up to go to the bathroom, we'll pick the lock, remove said pistol, and watch them freak out when they can't find it.
 
I can think of a few office pranks that come to mind:

1. Where I work right now, it's a given in our Support team that when somebody goes on vacation, their cube will be molested. One guy goes on vacation, and when he gets back, he finds that everything in his cube has been superglued down. Keyboard, mouse, mousepad, coffee mug, papers, pens, paperclips, LCD monitor...literally everything. I don't know how in the world he got everything un-glued, but I'm sure he spent the better part of his first day back getting his cube back to normal.

2. Back in the early 2000's, a good friend and I worked at the same Silicon Valley startup. He had finished composing an email on his PC and was almost ready to hit Send, but we both decided to head out to lunch, so he left it but forgot to lock his PC (this seems to be a recurring theme in this thread, lol). When he got back, he almost hit Send, but something didn't look quite right, so he read it closer. It was now addressed to the CEO and read something like "I've decided I don't like this company and job anymore, so consider this my resignation effective immediately." We had a good laugh about that one. A fellow teammate had done it, and was sure to get the CEO in on it first, just in case Send was hit.

3. At that same startup, since it was the 2000's era dot com boom (and bust), money would sometimes flow pretty freely, and oversight more lax, than during normal times. A group of us tried to take advantage of this by burying a Ferrari 360 Modena in a multi-million dollar purchase order of computer gear. Unfortunately, Purchasing caught our little extra line item and returned the PO to us with a sticky note on it saying, "Nice try." That really bummed us out, as we were already making plans to share the car and take it on nice weekend drives in Napa. Darnit.

4. Also at the same startup, we had a guy on staff who was almost OCD about labeling things in his cube. He'd take one of those labeling machines and make labels for all his desk drawers and overheads listing the contents. A particularly devious coworker of mine came in one weekend and labeled EVERYTHING in his cube. There were dozens of labels in there. He even had one stuck to the carpet that said, "Carpet".
 
JB1842 said:
If someone locks their pistol up to go to the bathroom, we'll pick the lock, remove said pistol, and watch them freak out when they can't find it.
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I know of a Glock that was found detail stripped in said locker.
 
One of our spare cars was an old traffic car with the traffic alert on the rear of the light bar. You can program several alerts/advisories to the bar. An officer who was using the car left it unlocked at the pd. Someone programmed CAUTION SLOW OFFICER on the bar. He was riding around for a few hours with it displayed.
 
We had an outside sales guy who was a ruthless prankster, his favorite trick was to spread hand lotion on the inside of draw pulls or on phone receivers. So he was always subject to retaliation, the first involved adding an entry in his Word user dictionary so every time he would sign his name, it would automatically change it to something nasty. He actually lived with this for a few years because he didn't want to let on someone got him and he didn't know how to fix it.

The second involved the same guy. He pranked the wrong person, named Chris, one time too many. The revenge involved a long thin tube and an oral syringe. Chris poked a small hole thru the ceiling tile positioned directly above the prankster's head, the tube was well hidden and hard to see. Chris would then drip water on his head. It would be a couple drops at first, then a full blown squirt. The prankster started complaining the roof was leaking (he was on the first floor of a two story building). I would help him "search" for the leak occasionally then bust him for being nutty. This went on for a week or two, then the prankster rearranged his desk to avoid the water. Later that day Chris moved the tube and the dripping started over again. The prankster kept pranking people oblivious that he was being harassed, after a few more weeks someone finally felt bad for him and clued him in.
 
Corpsmaide said:
One of our spare cars was an old traffic car with the traffic alert on the rear of the light bar. You can program several alerts/advisories to the bar. An officer who was using the car left it unlocked at the pd. Someone programmed CAUTION SLOW OFFICER on the bar. He was riding around for a few hours with it displayed.
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That's good. We will turn on all the emergency equipment while the car is off. Makes a nice surprise when they get it and turn it on. I am also the only person in the office who has access to program our phone system. I had someone's greeting set to "Chuck Norris" for about 6 months until he found out about it. He said that explained why some people who called him sounded weird on the phone.
 
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JB1842 said:
That's good. We will turn on all the emergency equipment while the car is off. Makes a nice surprise when they get it and turn it on.
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My dad did something similar to me once. He followed me to the store, moved my truck (technically it was his and he had a key, I was about 17) and turned on the windshield wipers, turned the radio all the way up and im sure did more.
 
JB1842 said:
If someone locks their pistol up to go to the bathroom,
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Probably showing my ignorance here but why do you need to do that? :confused:

I mean lock up your pistol, not go to the bathroom. :D
 
Everskyward said:
Probably showing my ignorance here but why do you need to do that? :confused:

I mean lock up your pistol, not go to the bathroom. :D
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We're cops. No place to put all your gear in the bathroom if you have to drop your pants, and we don't wear duty belts around the office.
 
Used to be a contractor for the US of A overseas.
Walked into the boss's office (big guy, 300+ lbs), told him we have a problem, Internet service provider called and said that we are way way over on the used data. Someone's been downloading a ton of porn, our IT guys said. We ran some checks, and that's either the boss (the guy I was talking to), or one of our secretaries (tiny little thing, still in college).
The man blushed all over and said he'll go talk to her tomorrow :D never did

Ah, those were the fun days..
 
Our local PD used to give a new officer an address and tell him of a deceased person there. Address was a cemetery.
 
Don't go on vacation.
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JB1842 said:
We're cops. No place to put all your gear in the bathroom if you have to drop your pants, and we don't wear duty belts around the office.
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And my understanding of cop relationships is while you can trust the guy with your life you shouldn't trust him with your wallet and CANNOT trust him with your lunch:goofy:
 
Skylane81E said:
And my understanding of cop relationships is while you can trust the guy with your life you shouldn't trust him with your wallet and CANNOT trust him with your lunch:goofy:
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Nope. Don't leave your credentials laying around. You never know who's picture may end up in it.
 
way back when Tetris was popular, a guy at work got pretty good at it on his Mac. At the time it wasn't generally known that you could connect multiple keyboards. One day when the guy was playing Tetris (during a break), one of us was out of sight with the extra keyboard and would occasionally hit an extra key (e.g., drop the block or rotate it a few extra times). The guy was very confused as to why he couldn't score as high...

it was weeks before he found out why.
 
A few weeks ago, I saw a pickup truck in the parking lot with every square inch neatly covered with post-it notes.
 
Bob Noel said:
way back when Tetris was popular, a guy at work got pretty good at it on his Mac. At the time it wasn't generally known that you could connect multiple keyboards. One day when the guy was playing Tetris (during a break), one of us was out of sight with the extra keyboard and would occasionally hit an extra key (e.g., drop the block or rotate it a few extra times). The guy was very confused as to why he couldn't score as high...

it was weeks before he found out why.
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A guy in one of my customer's auto plants used to play MS Jezzball constantly. I waited until one of the rare times he was working instead of playing that stupid game, whipped out a binary editor on a 3.5" disk, and customized all of the game messages with his name.
 
Wow, which companies are these that you folks have all this time to screw around at??? I want to get my application in ASAP.
 
ajstoner21 said:
...At work when someone leaves their cube and doesn't lock their computer, leaves their computer open for pranks...
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About five years ago on the Rotary Wing Forum, there was a post, supposedly from a long-time gyroplane parts supplier, which was actually a prank message sent by a coworker when he left his computer unlocked. Paraphrasing:

I must confess, I have always considered myself a woman trapped in a man's body. After decades of living with this in silence, I've begun the surgery and hormone therapy required to make the change. To all my long-time friends here, I hope you'll understand...

This guy checked the forum only weekly or less. The next time he logged in to find the thread, there were dozens of posts from all over the world expressing compassion and support. Reading it, I laughed so hard my ribs hurt!

The thread was eventually deleted at his request.
 
We had a guy leave his car keys in the common area and we went out and moved his car into the warehouse and put the keys back.

One funny one was purely unintentional. We had had some people leave the division so I decided it was a good idea to change the combination on the door into our end of the building. As usual I posted a note that the combination had changed and to see our division secretary (by name) to see the new one. Unfortunately, she got on the wrong side of the door before I had a chance to give it to her.
 
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us AAirways said:
Wow, which companies are these that you folks have all this time to screw around at??? I want to get my application in ASAP.
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It's team building. Pranks in the spirit of fun can be a good thing for the morale of the troops.

I wouldn't work at a place that thought people can work flat out for 8 or 9 hours straight, 5 days a week, 52 weeks per year.
 
Well, I've done a couple of school pranks... the one I'm proudest of is drafting a letter to my best friend in high school from the honors college at the local state university, which he had already been accepted to. The crux of the letter was "we overadmitted, we no longer have space for you, but we wish you the best of luck. You still have admittance to the standard college (non-honors)". I printed it out on official letterhead with a nice looking signature, and an official printed envelope, complete with my high school's address in the "to" section of the envelope. I had it delivered to his desk by a friend in the guidance office during the day's first class, and let him sit there for the remainder of class with a pathetic look on his face. He nearly punched me when I started laughing after he told me the "news".

The prank I'm least proud of led to the computing department at the local college sending a "beware of internet predators" email to the entire school and launching an investigation... I was thankfully able to clear that one up though.
 
My very best or worst depending on how we are rating these:
One of my managers had a physical done for his life insurance, they sent a nurse out to the dealership and she did the usually blood work, blood pressure etc in a private office. Really routine stuff.:dunno: Well, he made the mistake of leaving her business card on the desk. :nono: A little history on the guy, he was a PLAYER, loved the women and apparently they loved him, I actually fired him a few years later for having a relationship with a female salesperson.:no: Anyway this was in the mid to late 90's and AIDS was the big on everyone's mind. So, we had the receptionist write one of the pink message notes from the "nurse". Mr.XXX I need to meet with you AND your wife as soon as possible, and left her number which we copied off the business card. :D
We watched as he picked up his messages, no voicemail in the old days, and as he walked towards his desk the color sort of vanished from his face. I am sure he was thinking about all the women he'd been with.:yikes: He jsut sat at his desk and stared at the pink note sweating, really sweating, his face turned red as sweat poured down his face and we thought he was going to have a heart attack.:yikes:
When we let him off the hook, I didn't know if we was going to kill us of hug us, but I laughed so hard I couldn't breath! :D
 
LT left her duty belt in dispatch one day. can't recall why or where she left to. Officer came in and we tore the belt down. Even took all the bullets out of the magazines, everything was in pieces. Wrote up a ransom note and photo copied it with her gun (broken down).

When she came back in, I handed her the note. Gawd was she PO'd. She laughs about it now, but she was cursing us the whole time she was re-assembling everything. We never did get the ransom though.
 
Roy "Gooch" Gowdy ran a laundry/cleaners that was located just off the lobby of the old Casa Grande hotel in down-town Elk City, OK, using the machinery and equipment formerly used by the hotel prior to its demise.

Gowdy had inherited numerous sections of wheat ground (with full mineral rights) in the OK panhandle, so he had no money worries and ran the cleaners for something to do and so he wouldn't drink quite as much.

He was also a bit of a prankster and known for wearing a customer's sport coat that was in the shop for cleaning to a party that he knew would be attended by the owner of the coat. Gowdy knew that the customer would spot the coat and probably wouldn't say anything but would stop by the shop early the next morning to pick up his coat, just to see if it was ready and find out if in fact Gooch had worn it to the party. Gooch would leave the party, go back to the shop and clean the coat, bag it and hang it on the rack so it would be ready bright and early the next morning, and snicker to himself for several days while telling the down-town guys about his success.

Gowdy was also the best alterations guy in town, and was used by most of the clothiers for hemming, cuffs and other work. The restrooms in the cleaners area were small and cramped (as would have been expected for use by the laundry help at the hotel) so he used the big fancy restrooms in the adjoining hotel lobby as customer changing rooms.

He knew the women would go inside the toilet stall (that itself was inside the big restroom and with its own privacy door) for sake of modesty when they changed into their new duds, so he rigged a rubber tarantula on a string and pulley device. When the stall door closed, the spider would drop to approximate eye level inside the stall. The stories about the results would take days to re-tell, but all are about what you'd expect, except for the amount of cussing involved.
 
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