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What is the best office prank(s) you’ve pulled?

One that I distinctly remember is hooking up a wireless keyboard to a not-so-bright IT employee. My cubicle was right next to his, and every time I heard him type, I would hit a couple keys on the keyboard or hold down backspace. He proceeded to curse and bang on his keyboard repeatedly. It was so hard not to laugh and give myself away. He finally figured it out after 3 days of thinking his keyboard was broken…

I have plenty more stories but I’m curious to hear from you guys.

111 Spice ups
2

I have to be very careful about playing pranks, but I did do one the other day.

I went into the switch that servers our office and disabled the network port for a coworker. Then I said out loud, “Huh! I can’t seem to get to the Internet…or any local servers…or anything!” Panic growing in my voice, I said, “See if you can ping anything…I’ve got nothing here…OMG, the whole network is unreachable!”

I let her type a few command and watched as her eyes got wide. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and confessed.

63 Spice ups
3

We were being merged with a bigger company at the time, and I pushed out an e-mail stating that due to policies set forth by that company (that we had to adhere to), email storage was dropped down to 50 MB per mailbox, and attachments were to be cut down to 2 MB per attachment. More storage and a larger file-sending was not in the rules. Was to go in on May 1st or something.

I sent that mail on April 1st (yes, it was meant as an April Fools prank), between midnight and 1. I think I used deferred sending for it, but whatever.

The next morning I got loads of irate users on the phone (or by mail) about how that made everything unworkable and whatnot. On a mail being sent I usually decided to just call them back by phone :slight_smile:

As they started a rant towards me, I just asked: ‘When was the mail sent?’

They rarely got beyond the word ‘April’ at which point the 1st behind it registered (or in my case 1 Apr… since we non US folk use a different notation), and they just dropped into silence. Usually before the chuckle too :slight_smile: One user called me a ‘magnificent bastard’ as he started grinning… all in good fun :slight_smile:

At the end of the day I sent out a mail declaring my previous mail a hoax, specifically referring to the date. I also thanked all the people that were kind enough to call in :slight_smile:

48 Spice ups
4

Log in as local admin user.

Create hidden task in task scheduler.

When any user logs into computer, run chrome.exe with link to never gonna give you up.

That sound played every time, without fail the whole song.

They logged into domain admin, looked in task scheduler (but alas wrong user) and could not figure it out.

It was there for 9 months solid, even after I had left.

I finally took it off.

70 Spice ups
5

There was a time at my last job that someone went out on vacation and left their car in the parking lot. Let’s just say the alarm system didn’t work that well. When she came back she found her car shrink wrapped, raised up on blocks, and had messages written on her windows with a bar of soap. We were expecting her to scream/yell but laughed and she asked a few of us if we would take her car off of the blocks and said lunch was on her.

However, we didn’t tell her about the air horn we taped to the doorstop of her office and on the bottom of her chair. She really screamed twice and refused to talk to us for the rest of the day. The HR lady couldn’t stop laughing about it.

37 Spice ups
6

I’m a miserable old so and so; so we don’t do pranks.

However, for a while a couple of my staff thought it amusing to use the font bassackwards on things that they were sending out. www.fonts2u.com/bassackwards.font

9 Spice ups
7

Sent an email to a co-worker using GhostMail that appeared to come from the VP of Human Resources with the subject -“Need to discuss a personal matter”.

The co-worker had the hots for the VP’s daughter. Co-worker was sweating profusely for a couple of hours before I finally told him right as he was leaving to meet with the VP.

18 Spice ups
8

When we got new electronic doors I had to take pictures of everybody for their door badge. One lady (blond) in accounting I took pictures of her face and then also (secretly) the back of her head. My boss, the VP of technology, personally took the card to her and told her the door records when you are coming and going. To come use the front of the card, to leave you must use the back…

59 Spice ups
9

https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/3102-when-an-it-staff-leaves-their-computer-unlocked-starter-kit

Evil code for the lulz.

15 Spice ups
10

I witnessed an amazing one a few years ago. It was blindingly simple…

A colleague (M) was going on holiday for a week. He decided to plug his wireless mouse dongle into another colleague’s computer (D) and tape the mouse upside down to the underside of D’s desk with enough slack that it could move around a little. It took a day or two before D became frustrated that the mouse seemed to be playing up - but it was so minor that he assumed it was a problem with his mouse or mousemat. The more frustrated he got, the more he would hammer at the desk, causing the mouse to jerk more and more. He would also be constantly nudging it with his leg without being aware. He had loud arguments with our inhouse support team (it was an MSP but we kept our own support separate, only a small group could connect to our sessions while we had a lot of freedom with our cleints) - in the end, M returned a week later and pointed out the mouse that was practically resting on his knee.

16 Spice ups
11

Outlook > Rules & Alerts > New Rule > Apply rule on messages I receive > with specific words in the body > “Hello” > play a sound > “Hello - Lionel Richie.mp3” > Next > Next > Finish

52 Spice ups
12

We put one of those air horns under the phone guys chair at my last job. I do think I have ever seen anyone move that fast before.

12 Spice ups
13

Probably the single meanest thing I ever did was while I was in the Army, we got new Platoon Daddy in. Anyway, before he really got the lay of the land, we set things up where we had a young lady come in posing as the wife of one of his soldiers. They’re talking, and she’s saying how much it would mean to her if her husband could get promoted and so on, and while he’s trying to explain to her that he didn’t have enough time in grade, she stands up and slowly begins talking off her blouse, all the while she’s still talking.

He starts objecting (and he’s tripping over his tongue more than I care to mention), and about the time her dress hit the floor, we walked in on them with a lot of, “What the heck is going on here’s” being shouted". He’s red in the face, can’t talk, and she’s playing the part to the hilt by trying desperately to cover herself. After about five seconds we couldn’t keep it up and everyone dissolved into laughter.

He later admitted that if the office hadn’t been on the first floor, he’s probably have jumped out the window.

41 Spice ups
14

I must plead the 5th!

5 Spice ups
15

Back when I was doing aviation maintenance we would pull some pranks almost weekly. Some of my favorites were replacing the batteries in the inspector’s flashlight with petroleum jelly, running a wire from the brake switch to the horn in their vehicle, finding an unlocked toolbox and placing a can of open sardines in it before wrapping the whole thing in cellophane wrap, taking anti-seize and running it around the ear piece on a phone so that when the boss answered it it would leave a nice black ring around his ear (bonus if he switched ears during the call), and taking a screenshot of the display during a test on the big testing unit and then setting it as the background before minimizing out the actual test window. That way when the tech running the test came back he thought the program was hung (of course we would always send the boss in to ask the tech how the test was coming to which he would always give him a thumbs up before frantically trying to figure out what was wrong once the boss walked out).

Yeah I know, we were assholes. But what else do you really expect from a bunch of ex army dudes when we get bored.

10 Spice ups
16

My last boss pulled some mean pranks on the office so I pulled the printing a horror eye picture and taping it above a ceiling tile prank on him. It took two week for him to notice the “eye” in the crack in the ceiling tile above his desk but when he did, oh boy! Fell out of his chair, ran from the room and out of the office. We blamed it on the maintenance crew being funny as they were working on the air ducts at the time. They got a kick out of it too.

It looked a lot like this:

816184cd2b24c545d68911bad56c1b2e.jpg

32 Spice ups
17

I may or may not have the following link bookmarked to remind me why I should never, EVER mess with IT Pros: A GoPro and 4 desktop missile launchers are up for grabs from PCM and Lexmark!

1 Spice up
18

I have 2 memorable pranks.

The first was more a prank war that started with fish oil on my coworkers keyboard and mouse, followed closely to all the keys to my keyboard being left in a pile on the actual keyboard ending up with a gold fish in my water bottle.

The other one was twofold:

  1. Flip all the fancy ergonomic chair levers up completely resetting it for one particular stuffy coworker each day before I left.

  2. For the same stuffy coworker set the Accessibility Settings to read the screen and set the speed and pitch of the Narrator voice to different levels as often as I flipped the levers on their chair. This left us all rolling in the morning when we came in and they were logged into a different computer.

I’m giggling as I’m writing this. I know I’m evil.

8 Spice ups
19

Made me look. Nope, just a crappy mouse.

I posted this .

1 Spice up
20

When somebody lost her wallet during a drunken work night out, we decided to use it as an opportunity to get some payback on the office prankster: a guy who’d tormented pretty much everybody at one time or another.

One of my colleagues had a buddy in the police and arranged for him and a colleague to call at the office and, well, basically accuse Mr. Prankster of having stolen the wallet. They took him into a side office, set up a video recorder, Mirandized him and started the interview. He was asked some routine questions and then things got interesting:

Detective: We have a statement from Brett Jeffries. He says he saw you take the wallet…

Prankster: WHAT?

Detective: He says he saw you take the wallet from Olivia’s purse while she was up dancing.

Prankster: He’s a f****** lying b*******. I did NOT take the f****** wallet. What the f****? This is f****** unbelievable.

Detective: We also have a statement from another one of your colleagues, Kim. She says she saw you taking cash from a wallet matching the description of Olivia’s and using that money to pay for drinks at the bar.

Prankster: This is f****** crazy. She’s f****** lying too. I didn’t take the f****** wallet. I am NOT f****** going down for this. This is f******* ridiculous.

They spent some more time putting him through the wringer, told him they had statements from other people, accused him of stealing money to fund a prostitute addiction, threatened to arrest him if he continued to use profane language and then left saying that they’d be back in touch soon.

Prankster came back onto the floor, saw everybody’s shoulders jiggling as they tried to stifle their laughter while staring intently at their screens and immediately realized that it had been a setup. The air then turned very, very blue…

The best part, however, was that the police gave us the video of the interview which, needless to say, was played at each every Christmas party after.

22 Spice ups