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Best pranks/stunts pulled on friends or co-workers

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tom66:
A colleague of mine was powering on a new development kit worth some thousands of pounds and was not sure whether he had the polarity right as the AC adapter was missing.  I scrunched up some tin foil behind him and made a pop sound, and he panicked and grabbed the off button.

Mr. Scram:

--- Quote from: BurningTantalum on August 04, 2020, 05:03:09 am ---Nali and MadHippy: Great minds think alike: many years ago I had a chum who was a mathematical genius but when it came to practical matters we decided that he had 'ExoVision' and could not visualise what was inside anything solid. His pride and joy was a BSA B33. One day I was walking past his house with another friend. We had visited the local hostelry and were transiting to the next pub. The bike was sitting on the driveway, so I asked my friend if he had some old engine oil. We staggered off to his house to fetch a gallon can of it, and proceeded to lean the bike over and pour about half of it into the joint of the head and barrel fins. It cascaded down like a black champagne fountain. Shambling off tittering we promptly forgot about it until a few days later I passed by and saw my chum amid a heap of tools and the head off the bike. "Bloody head gasket has gone..." he whined. My friend and I swore on our lives never to tell anyone what we had done. Not sure how he imagined 2 litres of oil could come out of the head gasket...
BT

--- End quote ---
Around here the cardinal rule is that you don't touch someone's car or bike.

hans:
At my first intern company, we pranked our operating manager with a "high tech" Ding Dong Ditch. It was a small company with an open office space, a meeting room, and 2 separate offices for the technical and a commercial/operating manager. The operating manager was most concerned with receiving customers and certain letters (trolls/scammers sending registered mail with fake bills to small companies), so he wanted to keep a close watch on the mail and front door to handle that. Of course, his office was farthest away from the door, so that didn't really help.. further worsened by a malfunctioning door bell of the old office place..

It broke a few weeks before I started my internship, so my first task was to fix it. Being an old rental place, the electrical panels was a mess with 0 documentation. So eventually we gave in and bought a battery-powered wireless doorbell that could be attached with some sticky tape on the door frame and inside. Great; door bell fixed. Let's get back to work.

Then one day, both managers were out of office for an external meeting, so we tossed the idea: what protocol is that door bell using? It's probably some 433MHz OOK radio, and since we had several IoT boards that also used 433MHz radio's.. well, how hard can it be? Some quick spectrum analyzer and oscilloscope sweeps later revealed the "magic code" that was transmitted by the button unit to the alarm unit in order to ring the bell. Great: let's hard-code the magic code into a PIC microcontroller, and of we go. :-/O

So come next day.. everyone is back into the office again. A colleague had this board on his table, and it would send the magic code every time he would connect power to the board. Of course, the COO was keen on handling door matters, so checked a couple times when the "bell" rang... no one there.  Becoming more confused every time, he eventually took off the button unit and removed the battery, and the door bell would still rang (of course). At this point it was very hard to hold the laughter, so we gave into the prank. :-DD

Being a small company tight on finances, the first question he asked was: how much engineering hours did this cost us?! :scared:

eugenenine:

--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on August 07, 2020, 11:20:23 am ---
--- Quote from: BurningTantalum on August 04, 2020, 05:03:09 am ---Nali and MadHippy: Great minds think alike: many years ago I had a chum who was a mathematical genius but when it came to practical matters we decided that he had 'ExoVision' and could not visualise what was inside anything solid. His pride and joy was a BSA B33. One day I was walking past his house with another friend. We had visited the local hostelry and were transiting to the next pub. The bike was sitting on the driveway, so I asked my friend if he had some old engine oil. We staggered off to his house to fetch a gallon can of it, and proceeded to lean the bike over and pour about half of it into the joint of the head and barrel fins. It cascaded down like a black champagne fountain. Shambling off tittering we promptly forgot about it until a few days later I passed by and saw my chum amid a heap of tools and the head off the bike. "Bloody head gasket has gone..." he whined. My friend and I swore on our lives never to tell anyone what we had done. Not sure how he imagined 2 litres of oil could come out of the head gasket...
BT

--- End quote ---
Around here the cardinal rule is that you don't touch someone's car or bike.

--- End quote ---

Co-worker would pretend to let the air out of my tires.  The lunch/break room had nice big windows where you could see out to the parking lot and it was a small company so you could easily see your cars.   While we were at lunch one day he walked beside mine and kneeled down and took off the valve cap and pretended like he was letting air out.
So a couple days later when he was back at his desk I walked over while twirling a ratchet, sat a big bolt on his desk and walked away.   Come lunch time we watched as he went out to his car and looked everywhere trying to figure out where the bolt had come from.

VK3DRB:

--- Quote from: nctnico on August 04, 2020, 09:37:03 am ---Best prank I helped pull on a co-worker was when he brought his old (antique-ish) phone from home to put on his desk. One with a dial instead of push-buttons. He declared it no longer worked. Working at a telefom related company we had a whole bunch of parts that would fit in it so one day when he was away we fixed the phone and connected it to a telephone line. When he was back we rang him. He was flabbergasted when it started ringing and even more surprised there was someone at the other end of the line.

--- End quote ---
Reminded me of a phone prank on the Bulgarian. He was a FPGA programmer when we were developing a PABX phone system. Our office of about 70 people used the same system for user testing which was also connected to the public telephone network, but our development machines were electrically disconnected from the office and the PSTN. Effectively they were stand alone PABXs with a few feature phones attached - once for each engineer's desk typically. One day another engineer switched the RJ11 cable that was connected to the Bulgarian's office phone into the back of one of the phones on his development system. The engineer called the phone extension from his desk. The "isolated" phone rang once. The Bulgarian looked at the phone, thinking there was a bug in his development PABX as around that time he had some issues with his XILINX FPGA. A minute later, it rang it again. Same thing. The Bulgarian started checking a few lines with an oscilloscope. A minute later, it rang again several times. He picked up the phone and said in a quiet voice "Hello?" :-DD. I remember the engineer sitting next to me broke down in hysterical laughter, so much so that tears were running down his face. I have known that engineer for many years and had never seen him crack up like that in uncontrollable laughter.

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