Favorite practical jokes

[Mitchell Andrus]

Let's keep 'em as short as possible... this might be a long list.

When My uncle worked at Bell Labs, he had a co-worker who's soldering iron somehow got plugged into a rheostat hidden under the bench. New irons worked fine..... for a while.
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[alex grams]

Not sure it is a practical joke, but my wife likes the toilet paper to unroll on the front, and I don't really care, but i always put a new roll on so it unrolls from the back, just to raz her. Sometimes I will flip them around just to see if she pays attention.

Well, one night while honoring the porcelain diety, I had a brilliant idea.

I unrolled about 15 feet of the toilet paper, then rolled 5 feet backwards, the 5 forwards, the 5 backwards, so it looked like it was unrolling from the back. Well she gets up in the morning, uses the facilities, notices it is coming from the back and switches the paper around, but when unrolled some to use it, she got past the 5', and it unrolled from the back, but unbeknownest to her at the time. The next time she goes back in she notices it backwards, then she again flips it, and so on.

After about 3 times that day she comes out to the garage (where I had been ALL day, nowhere near the bathroom) and says i keep sneaking into the house and switching the toilet paper around. I start laughing and finally tell her what i did. Her reaction was a mixture of disbelief I would actually do that, anger that I did, and laughing that she fell fool to it.

One of my better moments as a man, worse moments as her husband

[Mitchell Andrus]

That's clever. Gonna try it.
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[John Schreiber]

Short sheeting the bed is a classic, but it hits 'm when they are most tired.

Messing with computers at work is probably my favorite: from inverting the screen with software, to installing a little program which made bugs start crawling around the screen. A piece of tape under the mouse sensor is so quick you can do it while you're chatting.

[Jerome Hanby]

Back when I worked in the Test lab at Motorola (far enough back that folks were allowed to smoke at their benches), the classic joke on the new guy was to slide a length of heat-shrink tubing under their test gear from the back (benches were set up in pairs back to back) and blow cigarette smoke through the tube when the new guy was intently working on something.

We also had a plug in power supply we manufactured for powering out top end rack mounted enclosure. These things could be used in pairs to provide redundant power. They were switching power supplies and created a huge high frequency voltage in the primary and swapping all that voltage for current through a toroidal transformer to the secondary. There was a row of large electrolytic capacitors that old hands always glanced at before powwring up one of the supplies on the test bench. These were such high current supplies that the electrolytics would blow within a second if they were installed backwards (reversed polarity). That was a fairly common manufactuing error, so it was a sure bet you could always find one with backward caps in a tub of power supplies. We used a dead man switch when working on these units just in case. So any new guy was already nervous about testing one of these supplies. naturally when we were showing them how to run one of these supplies, we would always pick one that had the caps right, test it, then pick out one with backward caps for the new guy to run. They would press the button on the dead man switch and BANG.

[Bill LaPointe]

Harley riders always check their bikes after stopping for a break. I carried a small bottle of dirty oil with me on a ride in Sturgis, SD one trip. Every stop I would squirt a few drops of oil under one of my buddy's bike. Kept increasing the amount each stop. About drove him crazy.

[David G Baker]

We had an equipment repair shop at the TV station I worked at that I would visit once in a while. If the shop had several guys working on equipment I would take a diode and short it across a 9 volt battery's poles. No noise but the burning electronic smell would almost drive them out of the shop and drive them crazy trying to find the source of the burning circuit. I never let on what I was doing or I would have been banned from the shop.

[Jeff Monson]

Harley riders always check their bikes after stopping for a break. I carried a small bottle of dirty oil with me on a ride in Sturgis, SD one trip. Every stop I would squirt a few drops of oil under one of my buddy's bike. Kept increasing the amount each stop. About drove him crazy.

Thats a great one Bill, I did that to my FIL once, he had his dodge pickup parked in my driveway so I poured a couple capfulls of oil under the engine....needless to say, he borrowed my coveralls and spent the better part of 20 minutes under his truck looking for the leak.

[Ben Hatcher]

I like computer pranks the best since I'm in an office. Here are a few of my favorites.
Reversing the keyboard keys, E and R are my favories. Works great on a hunt and peck typer.

Neuter the mice, take the ball out of the mouse or put tape under the eye of a laser mouse

Loosen the connection or unplug keyboards, mice, or printers.

Take a screen shot of the person's desktop and maximize it so that it looks like the desktop. This one works great after you've done the neutered mice and unplugged keyboard trick.

Others that are a bit more cruel...
Soak their chair, put shoe polish on the earpiece of their phone, send out "I quit" email from their pc if they leave it unattended and unlocked.

[Mitchell Andrus]

I had an employee that wasn't too fast on the uptake. He went to the diner next door for his coffee in the morning... I started salting his coffee one day. Just a little bit once a week. Then 2 times.... He got to the point that he'd ask us all to taste it. We all said it was fine and I'd lay off for a while - and start in again. One of the guys even salted his own and traded cups one day.

He began bringing coffee from home. I gave him a few weeks off and began again. This went on for 6 or 7 months. Nobody ever ratted me out. He would have loved the opportunity to clobber the boss.
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[greg lindsey]

My ex buisness partner had my cable tv cut off one time, since we were in the buisness together each of us had the others info, ss numbers, address and such, so it was easy for him to fool the cable company. I was quite p***ed, but figured it was better to get even, so I waited about a month and had two dump truck loads of sand dumped in his driveway and 50 bottles (the big ones) of water delivered to his doorstep, his wife was really ticked at me since they couldn't park in the garage or the driveway untill he moved all that sand and he still has water bottles to this day in the garage, ozarka wouldnt take them back. He called a truce after that.

[Dee Gallo]

I used to work in a prison and one of the favorite things to do in the winter was to sprinkle a tiny amount of CS (like tear gas, but not) onto someone's heat vent in their truck. Then, when they started up and turned on the heat, their eyes would start tearing like mad.... guys are so mean!

But the inmates had the classic down: every once in a while, a hapless guy would walk out of the room with a "kick me - I'm stupid" sign on his back. Never fails to be funny. Once, it happened to one of the vocational instructors...even funnier!

[Dave Anderson NH]

My old college roommate was a virulent practical joker and hasn't stopped to this day. When he worked at Data General in Westboro Mass they had just inside the cafeteria door a huge stainless steel mixing bowl that each morning was filled with about 200 or more hard boiled eggs. He would come in early and slip half a dozen raw ones into the bowl and then quietly proceed to his cubicle. He never needed to actually see the results of his jokes. for him, the fun was in imagining the result.

[alex grams]

Went to school down on the coast, seagulls everywhere. Always good to put some bird seed on someones car for a weekend. They would come back and it would be caked on thick everywhere.

Also, i shrink wrapped a car before. Lots of work, but well worth the effort. It is best if you can stick some bad eggs in between the layers of wrap so that they have to be extra careful to open it.

Working for the state people used to let their car run in the summer to keep the AC going when they were in/out. Distract a guy, keep him busy for 15 minutes after someone snuck in to turn their heat to full blast.

[Jim O'Dell]

Similar to the "smoke" above, at a dealership, we have smoke machines. It's a chemical inert smoke used to find leaks in evap systems. We ran a clear hose into the Svc Mgrs office while he was at lunch hooked to said machine and the back of his computer. After he sat down with the shop foreman, we turned it on. After about 3 minutes he got real excited.