What are your best pranks?

[Urban Ranger]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[Adam Smith]

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]

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]

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]

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

[Urban Ranger]

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]

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 bull**** 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]

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

[loinburger]

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.