Post Your Workplace Pranks Here

[FIRE me]

I'll go first.

My personal rules:

Never be physical in any way. Obviously, touch no one. Don't move or hide workplace tools. Don't arrange any physical mishap.

Never affect productivity.

If anyone asks “really?”, “Are you serious?”, or any other variation of that, I immediately confess that in fact no, I am not serious.

#1
I had a rather prickly coworker. I'll call him Fred. Fred caused me some trouble on the job, and to make it worse, if I failed to kiss his butt regularly, he'd do his job at a reduced performance. Which affected my productivity.

Fred had recently purchased a vacation home.

The set up: Fred was training a new hire. With Fred out of earshot, I praised Fred highly to the trainee. Told the trainee how lucky he was to have the great Fred training him.

The prank: I told the trainee that Fred had this one oddity. He had a delusion that he had purchased a vacation home. But the home existed only in Fred's deluded mind. I told the trainee that if he talked about this fantasy home, he should just humor Fred and pretend the vacation home was real.

Needless to say, Fred mentioned his vacation home, and was thoroughly upset when the trainee displayed ever increasing condescending attempts at humoring him. 

I shall forever remember with great pleasure Fred screaming at me that he really DOES own a vacation home.    :-)


#2
The company I work for makes unassembled widgets (I'd rather not be specific until I am FIRED). These widgets are not expensive, but are nonetheless very popular and desired by many.

Our Quality Assurance department makes fully assembled ready to use widgets for their testing purposes. After QA is done with them, they can't be shipped to customers.

So the tested QA widgets are periodically set out for employees to take for free. Employees can take them for themselves, or even for friends and family. New hires especially like to carry them out by the bag full.

The set up: QA has set out a bunch of widgets out to be taken for free by us employees.

The prank:
I tell a random new hire (who is grabbing free widgets as fast as he can) that there is a hidden camera, and that $1 is deducted from his pay for each widget that he has ever taken. Damn near no one believes my bullshit, but this time I had a real live one. He looked pretty upset.

Two days later, the HR manager grabs me. He asks me to PLEASE don't tell people that $1 is taken for each free widget. The HR manager said he had to spend 45 minutes with the dolt going over his pay statements to prove there was no deduction. The dolt was too ignorant to understand his own pay statement.

I guess I was pretty lucky on that one. HR was more amused than mad that I had wasted their time.

[Dee]

A couple of years ago, our whole team (we were about 7 people) came dressed as one particular team member for Halloween. He has a propensity for plaid suits, loud bow ties and psychedelic socks. He was quite amused to come in to work and see every one in his get up.

[nanu]

*posting to follow*

[Greenroller]

I worked with this real womanizer. One day shortly after he got his first IPhone and had no clue how to use it, he left it laying out in the break room. I quickly downloaded a very disgusting pornographic picture and assigned that picture to his mom's phone number. Now granted I was not around to to witness his reaction the first time his mother phoned him, but I heard about it through a mutual friend. He was super frustrated because he couldn't figure out how to get the picture off her ID.

[Greenroller]

Another one:
Same douchbag spent a crap ton of $ on a brand new truck, that he bragged about non-stop. He referred to it as "The Panty Dropper' I had a good friend who worked as a police officer. I had him arrange for this guys truck to be towed a couple of blocks from where he parked it at work. Watching him freak out after getting off of work that his truck had been stolen was GOLDEN. You would've thought his child was kidnapped.

[MMMaybe]

The worst one played on me was the time I forgot to lock my computer when leaving my desk. I was the only women on a team of very badly behaved bankers. They sent an email to this very quiet, religious IT guy proposing something quite outrageous, involving leather and whips. Of course I had no idea. I only found out a couple of years later when I asked someone why the IT guy would just about run in the other direction when I approached...

[Monkey Uncle]

Cash bonuses are rare where I work.  Many times extra effort is rewarded with a fleece jacket or blanket, emblazoned with the agency logo.  Needless to say this sometimes has unintended impacts on morale.  A former co-worker once set up an effigy of himself outside his work space, completed with stuffed legs, safety vest and hard hat.  He had the effigy holding a cardboard sign that said "will work for fleece."

That guy ended up taking early retirement at age 52.

[paddedhat]

I was working as an electrician, wiring a new office building. My boss was an ass kisser of epic skill. His days consisted of a whole lot of chatting and goofing off, as opposed to actually managing the project. This mean an endless stream of stressful problems for those of us actually attempting to do our jobs, such as a serious lack of material and information to work with.  One of the bosses tricks was to make sure that he had his tool belt, complete with a ridiculous amount of rarely used tools, strapped to his waist, any time his supervisor showed up from the office, for a walk of the job. Naturally he was "accessorizing" to create the illusion of performance.To make sure he was ready to put his electricians costume on, every morning he would carefully stage this silly, overweight belt, in the corner of an equipment room, ready to grab at a moments notice.
 
I got word that the supervisor was scheduled to appear, later in the day. I found the belt and carefully unloaded it. I took a Ramset tool and, reaching deep inside the pouches, shot it tight to the concrete floor. I then carefully reloaded all the hand tools. As the appointment neared, my boss was hanging near the windows, and watching for the supervisor's car. He saw the car, arriving early, and bolted for his tool belt. I got to the room ahead of him. He reached down, and with a sweeping motion, hooked the belt. The next few seconds are a priceless memory. In his mind, he was already heading out the door, and ready to wrap the belt around himself, like a gunfighter in a cheap western. In reality, he yanked the belt, lost his balance and ended up flat on his side, holding the belt like a straphanger on a bus.

I laughed so hard I thought I would pass out.

[Clean Shaven]

A couple of years ago, our whole team (we were about 7 people) came dressed as one particular team member for Halloween. He has a propensity for plaid suits, loud bow ties and psychedelic socks. He was quite amused to come in to work and see every one in his get up.

We told a new hire in a corporate office job that everyone always dressed up for Halloween.  A bunch of us spent a lot of time talking about our costumes, how cool they were this year, etc., within earshot of the new hire.

When Halloween day arrived, he was the only one in costume, in an office full of suits.

[FIREMouse]

Convinced my workplace that Comic Sans was the font of sarcasm so that if they wanted to be sarcastic in an email they should use that font and everyone would know...

[MandalayVA]

Not mine but I gave the dude inspiration--back in the day I worked for a company with an obnoxious VP who was a Jesus freak, to the point of leaving tracts on people's desks.  Our IT guy received a particularly weird Jack Chick tract and decided to get even.  I was reading Scott Adams' "The Joy of Work" and showed him the chapter on office pranks, and he went to work that night.  The next day the VP was hosting a conference call first thing in the morning--he always had his conference calls on speakerphone in his office so we could all know how important he was.  A few seconds later the fun began.  The IT guy had programmed every event on the VP's computer with a sound bite from a porn movie.  The VP couldn't do anything without setting off a moan, groan, or a loud cry of "fuck me harder."  Some people were scandalized.  The rest of us were laughing so hard we were crying.  The best part was when the IT guy actually got the VP to believe that all of it was something the VP did--"I told you not to open that folder!" 

[ImCheap]

Where to start,

We like to change short cuts to go directly to Whitehouse.com or similar.

We have one of those little bathrooms where the exhaust fan runs with the light, people have been known to take a dump in the dark (fan not running) after a night at the White Castle to let the next unsuspected person enjoy the flowery bouquet left behind.

Put the office chair on the roof.

Two people gang up on one person and park so close they can't get in their car to go out for lunch, we hold the car hostage until they agree to buy us lunch.

We host our PBX, it fun to spoof numbers of clients nobody wants to talk to.

Been with the same group of workers for 20+ years, have to have some fun and games.

[cerat0n1a]

Not quite a work place prank, but as it's in the news today

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/29/profoundly_stupid_dubliner_made_intel_hoax_call/

[Chranstronaut]

I used to share a cubicle with a really funny pair of guys and would help them brainstorm pranks, usually on each other.

We had security badges with our photos on them.  As well as opening locked doors, the badges had be inserted into your computer as a chip and pin system to log on to your account.  CW1 often forgot his badge in his computer reader when he left his desk for a while.  While he was away, CW2 took a piece of clear tape and a marker and added a tiny, perfect mustache onto CW1’s badge.  This happened at least a few times, and it always took days for CW1 to notice.

CW2 had a row of 3-ring binders on his desk.  As revenge for the mustache,  CW1 started re-placing the binder’s spine labels with funny phrases.  It took about 2 months for CW1 to notice.

We had a third coworker who was not into pranks.  He prided himself highly on the awards he had won, was a bit clueless, but overall a very nice guy.  CW3 kept a foot tall stack of award plaques on his desk.  Many people won these awards, but no one had won as many as CW3 and certainly no one kept them all stacked on their desk.   CW1 and CW2 both had many of these awards and started adding them to the middle of the stack to see how tall they could get it before CW3 noticed.  Weekly the stack grew, but CW3 did not notice.  Other employees started dropping by to compliment CW3 on his awards, but CW3 did not notice.  The stack grew to 150% it’s previous size, AND HE STILL DIDN’T NOTICE.  We had to move his cubicle decorations twice to maintain the same relative spacing as the pile grew taller and taller.  This went on for the better part of a year and we realized that if he found out after all that time, he would be heartbroken.  He was so happy everyone noticed how many awards he got and came by his desk to congratulate him regularly.  Rather than tell him what we had done, we started slowly taking awards out, week by week.  It took another month or two to remove them all and return his desk decorations to normal.  A yearlong prank and he never acknowledged it and no one ever told him.

[The_path_less_taken]

chranstache- I'm glad you guys didn't bust him on that....he sounds like one of those people who would be heartbroken and really miserable...and just socially inept enough not to get over it for a long time.

The 'best' people to prank are the ones who think it's hilarious when you prank them back.

I know of a guy who takes this girls soda can and crunches it into a square can after she takes a few sips out of it....not the end of the world, but annoying.

She had her boyfriend put plaster of paris in a can one day: the guy came up and tried to squeeze the can....it felt heavy so he thought it was mainly full of soda and he ended trying with two hands to squeeze it out of shape...couldn't. She said he laughed, big time.

The people I feel bad for are the ones who can't bounce back from things.

[margarita]

In the 1980s photo i.d. badges came out and our company purchased the machine to make the photo i.d. badges.  My boss who was the manager of security had another manager take a photo of his bare ass for his i.d. but instead of his name on it, he put his boss's boss's name on it. 

He wore that badge  for about a year, "as a test of the security badges".  He said in the elevator sometimes when people were standing close they would figure out the photo was a bare ass but most of the time it went unnoticed.   

His boss noticed right away and laughed but told him don't let the big boss see it. 

After about a year he gave it to the handyman who wore it ALL the time for years.

 

[Goldielocks]

DH bought a pack of imitation roaches, and rolled them into the toilet paper at the only stall at work.

Better yet, roaches are very rare here, so freaky to all.

[10dollarsatatime]

1) My favorite... A coworker and I put a radio in another in TD's office.  We put it on top of a cabinet, in a box and turned it to a Hispanic station with the volume so low that you couldn't hear it if you were breathing too loud.

TD thought he was going nuts.  Went to staff meeting that day and told everyone that his office was picking up stations.  We went to all the other people in the building and convinced them to play along, so nobody heard ANYTHING for a week.  He finally got it out of one of the office girls, but it took him a while to figure out what was happening.  I recommend this one for anyone... just make sure you have a place to hide the extension cord.

2) After a lot of back and forth, the admin assistant had a "brilliant" idea to hamster the tech office.  Which basically meant she taped about 150 color photos of hamsters to the walls.  We were not impressed.  However, we kept them all and waited for her to go out of town.  Every single photo ended up in her office.  Between calendar pages.  In client folders.  Behind photos.  She left a year later and her replacement was finding hamsters for another 6 months. :)

3) We built a closet in the TD's office.  So when he opened his door the next morning, instead of seeing his office, he saw a 4x8 room, complete with the entire contents of the custodial closet.

[mm1970]

I had a friend who was on vacation with her dad in Cancun when a hurricane hit.  She was stuck for an extra week, mostly in shelters, not fun.  Our company had to buy her a plane ticket to get back, because her original airline stopped flying there.

When she got back, she found her cubicle trashed.  A picture of Wilma Flintstone, some palm fronds all over.

A few years later another guy got engaged in Italy.  When he got back he found the cab to his pickup full of pasta.

A few years before that I was the unlucky soul in charge of the company picnic and they wanted "games".  So I sent out a questionnaire for people to fill out.  One guy was delinquent.  So on a Saturday (we were required to take turns on Saturday), I gave him a donut and said "fill this out". He said "I will".  He still didn't.  So on Monday or Tuesday, I made 2 dozen copies and taped them all over his desk and computer.

A few days later, I came into work and found...two dozen donuts, on individual plates, all over my desk and computer.  And a single, filled out, questionnaire. :)

[fallstoclimb]

I wish I worked with all of you.

[StockBeard]

We told a new hire in a corporate office job that everyone always dressed up for Halloween.  A bunch of us spent a lot of time talking about our costumes, how cool they were this year, etc., within earshot of the new hire.

When Halloween day arrived, he was the only one in costume, in an office full of suits.

Ha... that's kinda mean but pretty funny :)

[cautiouspessimist]

We told a new hire in a corporate office job that everyone always dressed up for Halloween.  A bunch of us spent a lot of time talking about our costumes, how cool they were this year, etc., within earshot of the new hire.

When Halloween day arrived, he was the only one in costume, in an office full of suits.

Ha... that's kinda mean but pretty funny :)

Yeah, this one seems a little over the top to me. Could be absolutely mortifying. I can picture it now...new guy gets pulled into the office, sets his Mickey Mouse head down on the floor. "Did this really seem like a good idea to you?"

Poor guy.

[Cromacster]

A simple/quick one is as follows:

1) take a screenshot of someone's desktop on their computer
2) use that image as the person's background picture
3) move all desktop icons to a folder (located anywhere except the desktop)
4) autohide and move the toolbar/windows start button from the bottom to the side or top
5) watch as the person can't figure out why they can't click on any icons or the windows start button and they end up restarting their pc 2-3 times

Haha we did this to a roommate in college.  Poor bastard resorted to reformatting his PC before we could tell him what was going on.

[Cromacster]

3) We built a closet in the TD's office.  So when he opened his door the next morning, instead of seeing his office, he saw a 4x8 room, complete with the entire contents of the custodial closet.

This one has got to be my favorite so far.

[Reynold]

When I was at a small, privately held company, 30-50 people, the CEO had monthly meetings to go over all the financials of the company. He would start them out by introducing any new employees, then asking them while they were standing to start us all off on the company song.  There was no company song. . .

He also liked to sneak up behind people who had won a big contract for the company, which he would find out about before they did, and ring a gong while they were working away at their desk to celebrate it.  I know at least one person who installed a small rear view mirror on his desk. 

He had a great sense of humor, though, and loved it if someone pulled pranks on him.  He got a pie in the face at several company events. 

[Clean Shaven]

We told a new hire in a corporate office job that everyone always dressed up for Halloween.  A bunch of us spent a lot of time talking about our costumes, how cool they were this year, etc., within earshot of the new hire.

When Halloween day arrived, he was the only one in costume, in an office full of suits.

Ha... that's kinda mean but pretty funny :)

Yeah, this one seems a little over the top to me. Could be absolutely mortifying. I can picture it now...new guy gets pulled into the office, sets his Mickey Mouse head down on the floor. "Did this really seem like a good idea to you?"

Poor guy.

It was a corporate type office, but everyone important was in on the prank -- i.e. there wasn't a Big Boss who was going to call in the new guy and reprimand him; there was no way this was going to reflect negatively on him.  It was more embarrassing than anything else.

[RysChristensen]

When I was at a small, privately held company, 30-50 people, the CEO had monthly meetings to go over all the financials of the company. He would start them out by introducing any new employees, then asking them while they were standing to start us all off on the company song.  There was no company song. . .

Am I the only one who would gather all the new employees and make up a song and set it up so that when he said that, one of the new people pulled out a pitch pipe, hit a note, and they all launched into the song?

[DirtDiva]

**Gross out alert**

I work in an oncology practice.  A patient with tongue cancer brought me a piece of tumor in a ziploc bag that had fallen off her tongue the night before.  Not Kidding.

SO....I called the oncologist and told him what happened: "What do you want me to do with Mrs. Smith's tumor?"  He asks:  "Where is it?"    "It's in a ziploc bag right next to your coffee mug on your desk".


We also enjoyed thinking up unpronounceable names, putting them on a "new patient chart" and sending the new hires out to the waiting room to call the patient back. 

[HPstache]

I got owned pretty good at work a few years back.  The office prankster snuck into my office once a week in morning before I arrived and moved my desk the smallest fraction of an inch closer to the wall.  Everyone knew it was going on and he even kept track of the progress.  This went on for MONTHS and moved well over a 1ft closer to the wall making it super  to get in and out of my desk in my HUGE office.  Haha, great innocent prank.  I finally noticed because there were marks on the carpet of it moving :).  Kind of like a frog getting boiled, so gradual you'll never notice!

[rockstache]

DH bought a pack of imitation roaches, and rolled them into the toilet paper at the only stall at work.

Better yet, roaches are very rare here, so freaky to all.

Wait...is this roaches like the joint, or roaches like the disgusting bug?? Either way, yikes!

[Goldielocks]

DH bought a pack of imitation roaches, and rolled them into the toilet paper at the only stall at work.

Better yet, roaches are very rare here, so freaky to all.

Wait...is this roaches like the joint, or roaches like the disgusting bug?? Either way, yikes!

Plastic rubbery insects.

[englyn]

*posting to follow*

+1

[northernlights]

One of my fellow department heads put clear tape over the optical mouse for all his office staff, causing them to be unable to do anything. I helped them retaliate by switching the left and right buttons on his mouse.

[Proud Foot]

I got owned pretty good at work a few years back.  The office prankster snuck into my office once a week in morning before I arrived and moved my desk the smallest fraction of an inch closer to the wall.  Everyone knew it was going on and he even kept track of the progress.  This went on for MONTHS and moved well over a 1ft closer to the wall making it super  to get in and out of my desk in my HUGE office.  Haha, great innocent prank.  I finally noticed because there were marks on the carpet of it moving :).  Kind of like a frog getting boiled, so gradual you'll never notice!

Dwight, is that you?

[HPstache]

I got owned pretty good at work a few years back.  The office prankster snuck into my office once a week in morning before I arrived and moved my desk the smallest fraction of an inch closer to the wall.  Everyone knew it was going on and he even kept track of the progress.  This went on for MONTHS and moved well over a 1ft closer to the wall making it super  to get in and out of my desk in my HUGE office.  Haha, great innocent prank.  I finally noticed because there were marks on the carpet of it moving :).  Kind of like a frog getting boiled, so gradual you'll never notice!

Dwight, is that you?

Did not know that was a prank on the office show!  Makes sense though because all of his other pranks that he did to me were copies of the show... guess I never saw that episode!

[JrDoctor]

Messing around with bleeps.  Go to an area with a phone number one doesnt recognise with your mate, sereptitiously bleep him with the number of the phone you want him to ring with.  I've had a guy spend 10 minutes swearing that the phone he was bleeping (and also ringing from) was constantly engaged. 

[realityinabox]

During my first year at my current company, the president announced that he wanted to build a fun work environment, so during our monthly all-employee meetings he encouraged people to play friendly pranks on one another.  My personal best prank involved a USB extension cable and a spare keyboard I found laying around. I was an intern at the time, so I sat in a row of desks with three other interns.  Three of us were from the same school, so we knew each other pretty well.  The forth guy came from another school, and was all business all the time, so he was the natural target. I ran the USB extension cable from my desk over to the other guy's desk and into the back of his computer. The cable ran along a wall behind both our desks, so he couldn't see it at all. I plugged the keyboard into the extension cable and kept the keyboard concealed on top of my computer tower out of sight.  I ramped up slowly, at first only inserting random spaces into his code while he typed.  I would randomly hit the caps lock button, or maybe hit tab a few times.  I did it sparingly, only a few times the first day.  I could see his face turned confused each time I'd do something, but it took him a while to get suspicious.  After a day or two, he got real quick at switching the caps locks back off, so I resorted to holding down the shift key for random intervals of time. This really confused him. I also started hitting the windows key so that the Start Menu would pop up randomly. After about day three or four, he started to get really suspicious.  Every time it would happen, he'd glance over at me.  He started opening the task manager after the strange occurrences, apparently searching for some sort of script running.  By day four or five, I had a hard time keeping my giggling to myself, so I started getting even more brazen.  When you hit the windows key, the cursor automatically jumps into the little search field, so I started typing him short messages.  There was one time where he stared right at me as I typed, "Hi Will" into the start menu field.  By the end of the week, the joke had played itself out, so I revealed the secret to him.  He says he thought I was hacking into his system and doing some sort of remote desktop thing.  I assured him that I wasn't smart enough to do that and showed him the USB cable.  I don't think he ever quite forgave me for that one :)


There was a python script floating around the office for a while that would let you spoof emails to others within our domain.  You could send emails from whatever dummy account you wanted to.  I used it a few times to send fake emails to friends around the office, posing as managers, etc. By far the best prank was pulled by another guy though.  The owner/president of our company is known to be a pretty big Trekkie, so this guy crafted an email "from the president", wherein the president made a new office rule banning all red shirts from the office because he was concerned about company moral (for non-trekkies).  Somehow the management figured out who sent the email.  They pulled the guy into the office of one of the VPs and convinced him they were considering firing him due to his stunt.  Apparently the guy broke down crying before they could tell him they were just messing with him.  The president instituted a new rule saying managers can't make people fear for their jobs as part of a prank after that.

[irishbear99]

The nature of my work requires coworkers to be out of the office for weeks at a stretch, and it's become tradition to "decorate" the cube of the coworker who is out of the office. We've done some great ones - cubes full of balloons, turned everything you could lift upside down, fishing wire everything together so when the coworker pulled out his chair, a drawer would open, too, etc.

But the absolute best one was the time we hid shredder paper all over this guy's cube. We have the industrial-strength, classified shredders that cut paper smaller than grains of rice. We took that stuff and hid it all over his cube...in desk drawers and cabinets he didn't use much, in the pockets and hood of the jacket he kept at work for when the office was cold. You get the idea. Every few days, we'd hear him cussing when he found a new hiding spot full of shredder paper.

This went on for a few weeks until he seemingly found all our hiding spaces. About six months or so after he'd gotten back, he and I were in the boss', boss' office pitching something or other. I look over to my coworker, and I see him trying to discretely corral a small pile of shredder paper on his lap. Bad time to find out we had used some of his file folders as hiding places for shredder paper.

[Jakejake]

We used to get stacks of marketing fliers for overpriced fundraising crap to hand out to our students. But the company would send so many! I would get maybe 50 to hand out to a room of 20 students. And the students never wanted them, they would either throw them out or leave them on their desks for me to clean up at the end of the day.

Eventually instead of passing them out, we would save them and put them in one fellow teacher's mailbox. So he would get his one stack of 50 fliers for 20 students. Then later that day another stack would be in his mailbox to hand out. The next morning, another stack, and so on.

The office secretary probably had it the worst, because she had to try to keep a straight face while listening to his outbursts about why we got so many of those stupid things all the time.

[arebelspy]

Great thread, subscribing!

Eventually instead of passing them out, we would save them and put them in one fellow teacher's mailbox.

My wife and her coworker (teachers also) did a similar thing; anytime they got generic junk in their mailbox that didn't have their name on it, they'd stuff it in a third coworkers mailbox rather than toss it.  He ended always getting extra copies of union newsletters, requests to meet with such and such financial adviser, spammy magazines from for-profit online colleges advertising master's degrees, etc.  His mailbox was always stuffed with junkmail due to this. 

The rule became "Anything I don't like or don't want goes in Jeremy's mailbox."  Eventually they started grabbing the recently discarded junk mail off the top of the recycling bin and stuff it in his mailbox.

He finally became confused enough to ask the (very crabby) office manager about it, wondering if all the mail he was getting was supposed to go to someone.  She sent a sour email to the whole staff about not messing with people's mail.

They told him, and all had a good laugh, and he didn't tell that it was them, since they were all friends.