What are your best pranks?

Urban Ranger · February 27, 2003, 08:41

During one class, I was sitting next to a friend named Chip. We had chairs with boards that's attached to one side that can be flipped up to be used as tables in the classroom, and the board was in an inverted L-shape that ran all the way back that can be used as a arm rest. This other guy, Paul, put his foot up on Chip's table near the end of class.

Without saying anything, I grabbed his foot so he couldn't take it away, and Chip untied the shoe lace of Paul's boot and tied it to the arm rest of his chair. About this time the bell rang, so all of us got up and left. Except Paul, who couldn't get his foot down.

Zkribbler · February 27, 2003, 10:26

One of the goof offs at work went on vacation. The day before he came back, we took all of his personal items out of his desk (and stored them safely away, of course) and left a note on his desk telling him that his supervisor wanted to talk to him.

PLATO · February 27, 2003, 10:33

Quote:

Originally posted by Zkribbler
One of the goof offs at work went on vacation. The day before he came back, we took all of his personal items out of his desk (and stored them safely away, of course) and left a note on his desk telling him that his supervisor wanted to talk to him.

That's cold....Good, but cold.

rah · February 27, 2003, 10:47

Good one Zkribbler. I'll have to remember that one.

Once when tasked to design an automated marketing report for some weinee that I didn't like, I built in a routine that if triggered by his userid, day of week, and one other random element I don't remember, would display a screen that said something like "error, please get someone that knows what they're doing since you obviously don't" after a few seconds it would kill the program. I stored a flag so it could only possibly trigger once a day. He ran the report monthly so the message would only come up 2 or 3 times a year. Every time he got it, he would race over to tell me about it. Needless to say, he could never replicate it for me. I'd always try to look at him like he was a little crazy, and tell him that what he was describing was impossible.
This went on for over three years. I never told him what I had done. But after the first year, I did tell a few fellow programmers and whenever he came over to my desk to tell me that it had happened again, I was hard pressed to keep a straight face since 2 or 3 people near me would break out laughing.

RAH

loinburger · February 27, 2003, 10:57

My only prank that readily comes to mind is the time (about ten or eleven years ago) that my mom made a pan of brownies. In my family the brownies at the corners and edges of the brownie pan are considered to be far worse than the brownies in the middle, and so we always fight over the middle brownies and avoid the corners. So, I cut the middle out of the brownie pan (leaving only corners and edges), stuck the brownie slab on a cookie sheet, and hid it under my bed. When my dad saw the brownie pan later that evening he asked what had happened to all of the brownies, so I said that I'd eaten all of them, but that I'd left the corners and edges just for him. I swear, I think that I almost made him cry. He grounded me for two weeks (until I took the middle brownies out of hiding, at which point he was still going to ground me until my mom intervened).

Alinestra Covelia · February 27, 2003, 11:13

College prank: While living in the dorms, I waited until my friend HMB went on holiday to China, then we broke into his dorm, turned on the lights, and put mustard greens seeds all over his carpet. We then turned on the faucets in his washbasin and left them running at a low output, so they would overflow and irrigate his carpet. When he came back from China he found that his carpet had mysteriously bloomed mustard greens.

Family prank: HMB's family all eat from a single rice pot and there was one time when he and his brother were both going through puberty and therefore ate huge amounts of food. Disputes with his younger brother over who got what amount of rice were common.

HMB's brother, being a very intelligent boy, decided one day that he would urinate into the rice pot as the rice was being cooked. He then informed everybody of this fact just as they were about to dig in. Understandably, HMB's brother got the entire rice pot's worth of contents to himself that meal.

Bosh · February 27, 2003, 11:22

I always like the simple "set someone's clock forward a few minutes and watch the fun," so simple yet so effective...

Adam Smith · February 27, 2003, 11:42

In college there was a dairy barn on the next street down from our dorm. Late one night a few of us went down to the barn and borrowed a cow. We led it across the street and into a neighboring high-rise dorm. After creating a diversion to distract the attendant, we stuffed the cow into an elevator and sent it to the eighth floor. The cow walked out of the elevator and wandered down to an open door where two guys were pulling an all nighter. It was then their task to call the campus police and convince them that there really was a cow in their room. When the police arrived, the cow did NOT want to go back down. It didn't want to go back in the elevator after being hoisted bodily eighty feet into the air. Nor did it want to go down the stairs, because it felt top-heavy and thought it was going to tip over. The cow had to stand there in the hall until its keeper arrived in the morning.

MikeH · February 27, 2003, 11:45

A guy at work was working late and went out and got a doner kebab for dinner. When he'd eaten all he could he left the remains and it's greasy paper all in the draw of my next. Throughout the next day it started to smell and he kept looking round and giggling. I worked out what was going on and when he left the room I took it out of my desk and hid it in his.

By midday the next day it was really starting to stink. He was looking round at me still but it was starting to look like reall concern on his face. It really, really stank by his desk. I just smiled sweetly.

Eventually I couldn't help bursting out laughing. And he said "you bastard, it's in my desk isn't it"

Really stank by then

JohnT · February 27, 2003, 12:05

Workplace: The bosses were going to be out of town for a week, meaning that my lazy co-worker was going to miss a lot of work. My bright idea was to start an office pool to guess just how many hours he would actually be at work. I got 15 people to pony up $5 apiece, and the winner won $75 with her correct answer of "24 hours."

Home: The following prank call was one of my favorites:

Me: "Hello. I'm with the Phone Company and we are having problems with a transformer near your house. The reason why I'm calling is for our employees safety. Due to the nature of the problem, our employee can actually be electrocuted if you answer your phone while he is working on the transformer."

Mark: "Oh, my!"

"Yes, it is serious, but luckily it is a relatively quick fix - no more than 15 minutes."

"Well, that will be no problem. How will I know when it is safe to call?"

"Here's our standard procedure. We will call you once and let the phone ring 3 times, then hang up. Exactly one minute later, we will call again, let the phone ring 3 times, and then hang up. We will repeat this for a third time, then our representative will call you up and you can answer the phone and he'll tell you it's OK."

"I can do that."

So you wait 15-20 minutes. Call up once, let the phone ring 3 times, then hang up. Call up again, repeat. But on the third time, just let the phone ring and ring.

The poor mark will convince themselves that it's OK, or that they misheard the instructions. So they answer the phone, say "Hello?" and get in return:

AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

A friend should be in the background yelling stuff like "Bobby!! Are you OK??? Bobby! BOOBBBY!!!!! WAKE UP!!! OMG!!!!!"

Of course, I would never do such a thing today in a world of caller ID.

MikeH · February 27, 2003, 12:08

In the UK you can dial 141 before you dial the number and caller ID just comes up as "private number".

Urban Ranger · February 27, 2003, 12:39

Office prank:

While working one summer in the office of a factory, the supervisor was a real arse. She was a middle aged woman with a really foul temper. So I went back to the office one saturday with a really smelly fish, went into her office, and attached the fish to the back of the large drawer of her desk where there was a gap.

When she came back on monday, the fish began to rot. As the days gone by her office stinked worse and worse, until she couldn't stay inside, and was forced to come out to work with us peons. During that time, she couldn't find out what was wrong with her office, while Mike and I had a hard time trying to keep a straight face.

loinburger · February 27, 2003, 13:24

Phone prank:

I called up a fur retailer and told them that I had a large supply of rat carcasses, and that I would like to turn their hides into a rat-coat. I'm not sure if the retailer was simply bored, or if he honestly didn't realize that this was a prank call, because he let me bullshit him for about twenty minutes (I kept having to supply more details, e.g. about the quantity of rat carcasses, their quality, their coloring, the number of blood stains on them from the rats vomiting up their guts, etc.). Eventually he gave me the phone numbers of some wholesale fur retailers/manufacturers.

Urban Ranger · February 28, 2003, 00:40

Com'on, I don't believe you people didn't pull any pranks. Fess up.

loinburger · February 28, 2003, 01:04

I generally just tell outlandish lies to people, and then I make fun of them for being so gullible as to believe me. I wouldn't count that as pulling a prank on them, though -- pranks are more of a whoopie-cushion type of joke.

Here's one that my trig teacher told me in high school: When he was in college there was a BMOC in his dorm who would wedge pennies into the doors of unsuspecting students (usually freshmen) so that they couldn't get out. He had devised a method of unwedging the pennies from his own door (apparently a flexible strip of metal that could fit between the door and the frame or something along those lines), rendering him immune to counterattacks. My trig teacher, seeing the gauntlet thrown down, soaked pieces of wood in glue, compressed them, and wedged them into the door frame of the BMOC's room one night. The BMOC could not open his door the next morning, and nobody would let him out, so he decided to escape through his window. However, he was on the second floor, and broke his leg. Luckily for my teacher, the BMOC never discovered the culprit's identity. He also never wedged pennies into anybody's door again.

Urban Ranger · February 28, 2003, 01:11

Oh yes, the wedge pennies into door frames trick
[/Maxell Smart]

Asher · February 28, 2003, 01:14

One of my friends nearly got suspended from high school abusing net send on our Win2K boxes. Our sysadmin left them enabled. net send is a primitive messaging command that pops up a window on a workstation with a simple message of your choice, on the computer of your choice.

We had a really...erm...eccentric computer teacher, and he was bored, so upon my insistance he typed the following (paraphrased):

Quote:

net send * "You are in violation of the school's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Your account privledges have been suspended, please contact Mr. Donaldson at 4928 [or whatever his classroom phone code was] immediately."

Apparently he didn't think it would do it, but all over all the computers in the school (150+) this message popped up instantly if someone was logged in. The phone didn't stop ringing all class with scared students, and even staff. What's more, for whatever reason, Win2K keeps a backlog of these messages if no one was logged in, and displays them the second someone logs in for the first time. So the messages kept appearing for days on various computers.

Skanky Burns · February 28, 2003, 01:17

Urban Ranger · February 28, 2003, 02:31

Long long time ago when finger was still being used on *nix boxes, they ported the command over to VMS. A friend of mine figured out how to embedd a contol code sequence in his plan to cause the terminal of anybody who dared to give him the finger to hang solidly.

Fve Crathva · February 28, 2003, 19:05

The first day I moved into a new set of dorms, my roommate-to-be decided to take all my stuff, hide it amongst the dozen or so lockers down the hall in our dorm, and remove the sheets from my bed and hide them (knowing full well that I wouldn't get in until past midnight; the next day was a work day).

About four months of mutual minor pranks and abuse later, I walked into our room and heard him snoring, loud enough that my earplugs couldn't block the noise. I couldn't sleep with that noise, and I had to wake up for work in 7 hours, so I threw various things at him, but he didn't wake up (fortunately, I missed when I threw his shoes at his face).

To make a long story short, I ended up taking all his stuff and piling it up on top of him while he slept: all his clean shirts and dirty laundry, all 13 of his pairs of shoes, all his bathroom stuff, his university papers, everything that was on the floor on his side of the room, or in his closets or drawers. Included in the dirty laundry was a set of boxers in which he had gone swimming in a lake a week before, and which had been sitting on the bottom of his dirty laundry bucket since then (still wet); these got a special place immediately next to his face.

Around this time, my other roommate came in, and went to bed to watch amusedly. The evil roommate slept on the bottom bunk of a bunkbed, so I took all his clothes hangers and hung them above his face from the underside of the top bunk, and used them to support a bottle of shampoo and a loose deck of cards. He was a street magician on the weekends, so he had about $100 in change in his closet, and so of course I spread it all around his bed (mostly near the crack between the bed and the wall). Around then, he turned over and stopped snoring. I was out of stuff to put on him, so I finished up by throwing his keys under the bed, and taking the bulb out of a metal lamp and putting the lamp on top of the pile so that when he got up it would fall and wake me up. I finished up around 02:30, an hour after I'd started.

At 05:00 he woke up, but either the lamp didn't fall, or it didn't wake me up. He hit his head on the clothes hangers, and got smacked in the shoulder by a bottle of shampoo and drenched by a shower of playing cards. He sent about $50 down between his bed and the wall. He was pretty sure that I had done it, but he didn't know our other roommate too well (the other roommate was new), so the bastard threw a pair of wet shorts in the face of the other guy, and his wet boxers onto my face. Apparently I woke up about 20 seconds later with a revolted look on my face, and threw the boxers back at him, and we all had a good laugh and went back to sleep.

The end result? He got to work late because he couldn't find his keys, and I spent the rest of the day with the foul taste of wet boxers in my mouth.

SP

Fve Crathva · February 28, 2003, 19:20

Last April Fools' day I was working in the janitorial department of a residential high school (the same place where the above took place). We had the three of use who worked in janitorial, plus one student who was working with us for the morning, sitting in the janitorial office and desperately not wanting to work. So we came up with a plan. I went to the school's computer lab and printed off about two sets of half a dozen or so signs, and we put them up on the bathroom doors around the campus. On the doors of the bathrooms in the classroom and administrative buildings, we put up signs that said, "Due to a septic tank overflow, this bathroom is out of service. Please use the dorm bathrooms." and on the doors to the dorm bathrooms, we put signs that said, "Due to a septic tank overflow... [etc.]. Please use the bathrooms in the administrative building." By break time we had a good hundred people running back and forth trying to find a bathroom that they could use, and by lunch the principal was ready to close the school for the rest of the day.

SP

Berzerker · February 28, 2003, 19:30

Okay, the guys were hanging out at Tony's house. He had a handgrenade paperweight, diffused of course, in his room. He and I were in there talking and I saw the grenade and commented on it. I said we should take it out to the living room where the guys were and pretend it was real. So I went out to the living room with the grenade in my hand and showed it to the guys. Tony followed me out and demanded that I give it back to him. We started wrestling over the grenade and I slid the pin out and dropped it on the floor and shouted, "oh sh!t", and Tony and I started running down the staircase. The guys were headed in all directions, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the stairs, even the balcony. Got 'em good.

Provost Harrison · March 1, 2003, 06:59

Ah yes, I had the misfortune to buy a shower gel that looked just like semen, and of course, the possibilities for jokes from this was endless. A friend of mine who I shared the house with had gone out to his girlfriends and was bringing her back as it was her birthday IIRC. So what we did was, we got some tissue and covered it in this semen-like shower gel and placed them on his bed...and with it an open copy of 'personal computer world' with some of this shower gel on for effect...he and his girlfriend reached the bedroom...LOL

Barley · March 1, 2003, 08:43

I know its really childish and I should know better at the age of 33 but sometimes when a few mates and I have got together we have a running joke where we phone QVC and ask really stupid questions.

Not sure if you will think its funny but we have a funny sense of humour so it amuses us no end.

The idea is that your watching QVC and they are demonstrating some item, say an electric drill. Questions can be things like what sort of concrete does the drill work on, what colours do they come in etc. The funny bit is because the call handler at QVC is geared to take orders and are really teken aback by your questions i.e. they dont have the information you need and probably think your really thick. The key is to keep a serious voice and engage them in a serious and long conversation about laods of stupid issues relating to a particular item.

Try it.........

Dauphin · March 1, 2003, 08:46

Quote:

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
Ah yes, I had the misfortune to buy a shower gel that looked just like semen, and of course, the possibilities for jokes from this was endless. A friend of mine who I shared the house with had gone out to his girlfriends and was bringing her back as it was her birthday IIRC. So what we did was, we got some tissue and covered it in this semen-like shower gel and placed them on his bed...and with it an open copy of 'personal computer world' with some of this shower gel on for effect...he and his girlfriend reached the bedroom...LOL

That is funny.

For the next time, replace shower gel with the real thing.

Andydog · March 1, 2003, 09:11

A mate announced he was going to have a Hawaiian party in his flat. He agreed to let me send out the invites, which I did. Everyone was to come dressed as Hawaiians (grass skirts and bikinis, yippee!) and had two party missions. The first was to bring all the ingredients for a stipulated cocktail (which had to be made and sampled by everyone), the second was to bring 5 live pigeons.

The beauty of it was, the 30 or so guests all thought that everyone's party mission was different - only they were the ones bringing the pigeons. You can imagine their surprise when they add their five to the Avery that's became my mates flat! And it was almost impossible for my mate to get rid of them - they didn't do what he wanted and fluttered in totally the opposite direction to his shoeing. They got absolutely everywhere, and shat all over everything he owned.

He got a bit dark about it for a while, but now laughs at the memory along with the rest of us.

Lancer · March 1, 2003, 09:13

My best prank was in the military. We were in AIT, learning to use and throw grenades properly. For this we followd a course set out. At each stop there were grenades of a sort that didn't produce schrapnet. The bottom was dilled out, and the surface was notv scored. Yet the made a bang like a real one.

After training we had to po;ice up the used ones and turn in any that some idiot forgot to pull the pin on. We were all sitting around in a big circke picking through the grenades whenn I found one that still had a pin in it. Well, I pulled thecpin and let go the clip. and stuck it in my pocket while still holding it of course. I walked to the dumpster and casually droppped it in and storolled bacjk and sat down. BOOM! The drill instructers were ****ing luivid. We had to run all the way back to the barracks. I tolds nobody in AIT. EVer.

MikeH · March 1, 2003, 09:32

Some friends of mine at uni could empty a person's entire room of everything, including furniture, and put it all in the lift in a couple of minutes then send it on a tour of the hall. God help you if you left your door unlocked when you popped out of your room on that floor.