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Best pranks/stunts pulled on friends or co-workers

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WattsThat:
In an effort not to hi-jack the bubble wrap thread, thought it might be good therapy to start a prank thread, documenting (hopefully) harmless but creative ways you’ve returned the favor to a friend or coworker for their annoyances.

Our purchasing guy was a real car nut. Always drove a late model Ford land yacht. Never a speck of dirt on it, oil changed every 3k miles or less, I’m sure you’ve known someone like that. After a few too many of his pranks, myself and two other engineers had enough, it was payback time.

We got foot long piece of 1 inch cast iron pipe, stuck large ball bearing that just fit in the ID and secured it into place with two end caps. It rolled nice and slow with a good deep clunk when it reached either end. We got into his car (left open in those days) and placed it under the carpet under the drivers seat.

We got about a week out of it. It was really hard to keep a straight face every morning when he would try to explain the noise and when it occurred. We finally had to come clean when when he started threatening to take it to the dealer to complain about his new car with the clunking noise. It took him about a month to cool off but we had much better relationship afterwards.

sokoloff:
My dad's a Mercedes nut and while visiting him a few years ago, I borrowed one of his cars and picked up a slow leak in a rear tire. It was in the tread surface and thus easily repaired with a spaghetti plug, which I went to the store, bought, and showed him how it worked, even though he was a little skeptical.

Next morning, the same tire is flat again. "See, I told you that wouldn't work!" Closer examination revealed the tire had two nail punctures and I'd only fixed one of them. Fixed the second one and left the car alone with success overnight.

He was still monitoring the tire pressure daily to see if there was still a slow leak.

The day we left, I let 10 psi out of that tire in the garage, said nothing, and went to the airport to return home.

He emailed the next day complaining about how the tire was going flat again and that he'd already called the dealer an hour away to see about getting the tire replaced. I had to explain through my laughter what was really going on. That was probably 8 years ago and he still jokes about it.

themadhippy:
we managed to convince one of our collage lectures there was a fault with the overhead projector as every time he touched the screen the RCD tripped,lesson changed into a practical demonstration on fault finding, a thorough inspection of the projector  and a test on the rooms electrics didn't find any faults so lesson resumed only for the trip to go again next time he pointed at the screen.The sniggering around the class finally gave the game away and my plug with a switch wired across neutral and earth was confiscated.

james_s:
One of my favorite tricks back in the day was to wait for someone to forget to lock their PC when they went to lunch, then open a browser window or some other window, take a screenshot and then set that as the wallpaper. One day it was the viagra website in a browser window and we sat around trying to stifle our laughter as he repeatedly clicked on the close button, went into task manager trying to kill the browser, then proceeded to reboot THREE times before he finally figured it out. There were about 10 of us in a big room and everybody was dying trying not to laugh.

Another classic office prank I liked was to connect a USB extension cable to their tower and run it under the cubicle wall to an extra mouse or keyboard on the floor under my desk. Then move the mouse around when they're trying to do something or peck a random key each time they try to enter their password.

Oh and swapping keycaps is always fun on keyboards where those are easily removable. If it's something like the N and M or S and D it isn't immediately obvious at a glance. One guy we even told about this prank and he said it wouldn't work on him because he doesn't look at his keyboard when he types. Well a few days later I did it to him and that afternoon I heard him calling helpdesk to say his password wasn't working and he got locked out of his PC. Turns out one of the keys I swapped happened to be what his password started with so he'd look down at his keyboard to type the first letter.

Outside of work I think my favorite prank was printing up a funny or embarrassing bumper sticker and putting it on my friend's car. On one occasion a long time friend of mine had a history of pulling pranks on me so I put a bumper sticker that said "I Masturbate" on his truck and he drove all over town the next day before a girl he was meeting up with noticed it and said something. Just prior to that a group of guys in a big lifted truck kept pointing and laughing and he thought it was because his truck was smaller than theirs  :-DD

Mark19960:
Putting electrolytic caps in the sockets on someones workbench in the lab so when they came in and turned on their gear... BANG.

Along with the fake insects like spiders attached to fishing line that you hung down in front of people in deep thought :)

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