Office 'pranks'?

[Yorick]

Back in the days of Saturday Grandstand in the 80s, there were 2 presenters with about 10 or 15 staff sat working in the background.
One of my pals used to be one of the background bods doing graphics.

Anyway, they always had a coloured jumper which they all took in turns to wear when the camera cut away.

[Horse]

One room we used had a single aircon unit. Regular battles between those who liked it comfortable and those who liked it horribly cold (you can guess my views). One bloke was really concerned that, even though it was turned down low, he was still feeling hot.

Took him two or three shifts to realise that I'd stuck a false dial on.

[MrLongbeard]

you can guess my views

So you're either waiting for your telegram from the queen or a woman

[Horse]

you can guess my views

So you're either waiting for your telegram from the queen or a woman

The former. But, luckily, I'm very patient.

[Silly Car]

Years ago when PDAs were first a thing, I managed to get a bootleg copy of Tomtom so of course my boss wanted it on his device. Obviously being a dutiful employee, I sorted it out for him along with the sweary Ozzy Osbourne voice file.

Under normal circumstances he would have laughed it off but not when his mother, wife and young son were told to turn right at the end of the fucking road. I suspect his wife gave a greater bollocking to him than I got

I often did the rotate screen thing around the office.

[Horse]

Not so much of a jape as a hobby, we built crossbows.

Tape together several 18" plastic rulers to make the bow and a couple more for the stock, then string with elastic bands.

And use etal handled scalpels as bolts. They would go quite a long way.

[Pirahna]

A bale of hay given to someone as a secret Santa present. They removed the name tag and left it in meeting room, it was there for months before the cleaners removed it.

[JackyJoll]

I guess you had to be there.

These are the most depressing jokes I’ve ever seen.

[Bigyin]

I guess you had to be there.

These are the most depressing jokes I’ve ever seen.

I'll try and do better

1) Some colleagues on another work team all used wipes when they went for a shit rather than toilet roll like most adult(yeah weird i know) ...one of them didnt buy any and always picked up a packet from the desk of whoever wasnt there at the time which annoyed his mates.

One of said mates decided enough was enough and managed to scrape some chili flakes onto the top 2-3 wipes and put them back in the packet for the unsuspecting freeloader.

About an hour later the inevitable happened and the packet was swiped and everyone else knew bar one..... he came back and looked fairly uncomfortable for about half an hour. They then get called out on a job and during it he has to run off to a toilet which involved disposal of underwear. The agony continued for a 10 hour shift and finally a pot of yoghurt was bought from a local shop

2) Another freeloader used to help himself to other peoples packs of cereal when he thought others were not aware. So a packet was left of honey nut corn flakes laced with ground down laxatives that we all knew about bar one ....... sure enough the packet went missing then reappeared. Not long after that the freeloader disappeared and then came back a tad sweaty and uncomfortable.... again and again.

He didnt nick anybody's stuff again

[Horse]

I guess you had to be there.

These are the most depressing jokes I’ve ever seen.

Fair enough. What do you have to show us all up?

[GuzziPaul]

Tape over the bottom of an optical mouse.
Print screen of the home screen and then set as the monitor background.
Supergluing a mouse mat slightly out of position with an old mouse superglued to the mat.

We got a big job out in Dubai, I was out there a number of times before any of my mates were going out as a group. I mentioned to one of them, that out in Dubai they didn't use toilet roll but used their left hand instead, so make sure to bring plenty of toilet paper unless you want to do the same. He didn't realise till he was in the depature lounge at Heathrow when he asked the rest of the group travelling out how many toilet rolls they were taking for the 2 week trip? He had four for the two week trip.

[Horse]

A bale of hay given to someone as a secret Santa present.

What to get for the lady in the print room for Secret Santa? Bloke had no idea, but passed a fishmonger while walking into work.

So bought her some kippers.

She wasn't impressed.

[Horse]

I guess you had to be there.

These are the most depressing jokes I’ve ever seen.

Fair enough. What do you have to show us all up?

Ah, responding using the art of mime. Much funnier than I had expected.

[Yorick]

Too busy for pranks these days, the best ones I saw were when I worked in A BT repeater station - lots of idle time:

Make the apprentice hold the earth bar, you hold the ringing bar then touch youth between the eyes making his pupils pulsate in time with ring tone

They told us less than 500mA wont kill you so we took that as license to play name that voltage with the apprentices, tie wrap them to a chair and don't let them go home until they guess correctly

A colleague use to build electronic ignitions for racebikes. An interesting spin off was a picture of a naked woman with pants / bra made from conductive material and an opto switch.You knew someone had peeked under the bra / pants when you heard the scream

He also did a big sparking happy christmas out of electrostatic chart rolls which was cool

We used to fill balloons with chads and put a broken bulb inside so you can burst them remotely with a battery

We used to 'datapost' people lockers to other repeater stations around the country. One lad even had his mini moved up to the 11th floor in the goods lift

Potting resin was an endless source of amusement filling mugs, tool boxes etc

Drill a small hole in the bottom of a cup with a pcb drill then plug it with soap, it would hold tea just long enough for you to sit down then spray it all over your lap

We got a basic toolkit as apprentices. The training officer would check them to make sure you hadn't wrecked/lost them. Naturally we gave someone the number of an STD clinic and told him to ring up for a tool check

Nothing personal but I didn't understand more than 5% of that.

[v8-powered]

Where do i start? Was and still am a dickhead

Filled a colleagues car with cast iron train brake blocks on nights, car was sat on bump stops ready for him to go home in the morning
Picked up stores Sherpa van with forklift and put it between 2 Portacabins, storeman spent ages trying to do a 10000000 point turn to get it out.
Stores had an electric call bell, storeman used to like to sleep on nights so unplugged bell. Wired bell in to 9v cell battery with wires ran on to building roof so we could spend all night waking the lazy shite.
Swapped keys over on keyboard so colleague kept misspelling every word he typed.
Chained colleagues car to lamppost in car park
Removed big stickers from side of rental van and placed on to both sides of colleagues car.

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

Nothing personal but I didn't understand more than 5% of that.

<sigh> Its the Nottingham accent we all sound like Sue Pollard

Sadly I understood all of it

[Horse]

Was and still am a dickhead

And that's the daft bit. Although, as a team, we did a lot of pissing about, we also did a huge amount of world-leading, innovative, work.

[Yambo]

Pranks were a way of life in the army. This story is a little long so maybe tl;dr.
As a quartermaster sergeant I had access to lots of kit and it always seemed a shame to not use it. I had booby trapped a couple of squadron vehicles with smoke grenades, usually to get the flappers flapping and it was good fun, no-one got hurt and the only damage was a discoloured chassis or 3.

Then the OC of 36 Squadron, renowned for being a bit of an arse, slagged off my Sqn and my OC. You can’t have that can you, so I decided to shake him up a bit. On the next regimental exercise, I left my location late at night and headed to 36 Sqn’s location. Leaving the bike about a k short I walked the rest of the way, got into the location past the sentries and found the CP. Outside the tent was the OC’s Landrover as I’d hoped so I got underneath it, taped a smoke grenade to the chassis cross member, straightened the pin and tied the end of a bit of string to the ring. I looped loads of string over the chassis cross member then taped the other end to the prop shaft. With the job done, it took about half an hour working quietly, I slid out from underneath the Rover and left, retrieved the bike and went to bed.

And then nothing. No screaming and shouting, no reports, nothing.

A couple of months later I had to see PB, 36 Squadron’s Sergeant Major. I’d served with him in Ireland and we knew each other fairly well. Over a coffee we discussed our business and still desperate to know if the grenade had gone off or not I asked him if it was right that his OC had given up smoking. He got up, closed the office door, said “I fucking knew it was you Yambo!” and came towards me. I thought he was going to smack me but he didn’t, he just opened his exercise kit locker door and showed me his red webbing.

Of course I pleaded ignorance and asked what had happened. “It worked a treat,” he says “we must have been 100 metres down the track when my driver shouts “There’s red smoke coming out the back sir!” and I told him to stop. Bad move as all the smoke came into the vehicle.” I told him that he probably wasn’t the intended target but as both the OC and SSM use the same LR he was just unlucky. “You’re the unlucky one” he says, my OC wants you court marshaled!” I suggested that wouldn’t be a good move as first there was no evidence and to tell the world and his dog that your LR got booby trapped whilst on a tactical exercise would not put him in a good light. PB had already told him that (it’s what sergeant majors are for after all) and told him to leave it be as the only damage apart from reputation was to two sets of webbing, PB’s and the driver’s. I said I would sort that and a couple of days later, this young 36 Sqn driver came into my office with the two sets of red webbing which, being an SQMS, I was able and happy to replace with nice green kit.

I never admitted to doing it but remain a bit pissed that it stayed pretty much a secret and that I hadn’t got the OC. PB and I are both members of a couple of ex regimental facebook pages. I might just remind him one day that stopping the LR had been a bad move.

[Taipan]

How could I forget "rickroll"!

Also back in the days of Windows NT, there was a little script you could send people in the form of some interesting looking link and if you clicked on it, it would say are you sure you want to delete all files and when you hit cancel it would display all your folders and look like it was deleting everything! Scared the crap out of a few people with that one !:D

[Yorick]

How could I forget "rickroll"!

Also back in the days of Windows NT, there was a little script you could send people in the form of some interesting looking link and if you clicked on it, it would say are you sure you want to delete all files and when you hit cancel it would display all your folders and look like it was deleting everything! Scared the crap out of a few people with that one !:D

There was one that asked if you wanted your disk cleaning.
Then PC went into washing machine mode followed by a spin cycle