Office Pranks

dynamik · February 2010

I did the gift wrap as a warm-up before I went all Twilight on this dude. Tell me about your office pranks or give me ideas for things I can do in the future

(Yes, there's a roof there)

(Paul Boz thought it needed more chairs -- 10 in total, I hear)

Many layers of clear tape, ensuring it wouldn't come up easily:

I spent like $20 on two Twilight magazines, so I didn't want it to be ripped down easily:

It took 10-15 minutes to remove, from what I hear.

I made sure to wrap all the way underneath the desk and back around, to ensure I had a solid seal.

binarysoul · February 2010

Pure evil, but smart

But is there any actual gift there?

dynamik · February 2010

binarysoul wrote: »

But is there any actual gift there?

It depends on his perspective; I didn't use anything but his belongings. I got pretty granular though. I even wrapped each piece of his change individually. I don't think the 90 seconds it took to unwrap a penny was justifiable

Forsaken_GA · February 2010

At my old job, we were a little more pedestrian.

Our boss had a corner cubicle. He was a huge Seminoles fan, liked to talk a whole bunch of <bleep>.

So one year after the Seminole's lost a game that'd he'd been talking about how much they were going to romp, he uh took a Monday off. Apparently didn't want to face the music (or pay up on his bets!)

So we shrink wrapped the entrance of his cubicle to give it a 4th wall, and filled his entire cubicle with packing peanuts, orange colored if I remember right (which leads me to believe that they had lost to either Tennessee or Florida).

The amusing thing is that the VP of Operations walked back to our area while we were in the middle of doing this. He stopped. Looked at us. Nodded, told us to carry on, and left.

Funny thing about those packing peanuts... they get into *everything*.

At my current job, we tend to screw with new guys. If he leaves his box unattended and unlocked, a few ssh keys get dropped onto his profile and the entire NOC logs into his box and screws with him. Wallpaper changes, new favorites show up, stuff like that. If you're not smart enough to figure it out, you're not smart enough to hang with us. I do my part by redirecting all traffic from his mac address to a certain website (which I won't mention, but if I said the name buck, some of you might know what I'm talking about).

eMeS · February 2010

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

If he leaves his box unattended...

Dynamik's box is often unattended.

MS

dynamik · February 2010

eMeS wrote: »

Dynamik's box is often unattended.

Intentionally. I'm so lonely

kalebksp · February 2010

That's amazing!

I used to work for an ecommerce company. One April fools I made a copy of the website and redesigned it with animated GIFs and phrases like "Y0R$ $|T3 haz b33n h4x0r3d!!!!!!!!!". I put it on as webserver and redirect the internal DNS to my improved version. I let the owner get to the point of calling our hosting company before switching the website to an April Fools message.

Not nearly as good as yours, but still fun.

NightShade03 · February 2010

My last job the lead engineer was a huge M$ person and hate linux. On april fools we had the director of IT walk into our office and call a meeting where he announced that in order to save money next year we would be wiping all our servers and moving to linux. He went on for like 10 minutes and the engineer turn a funny white color before almost running out the door

We also link to put scripts in peoples startup folder which constantly opens and closes their cdrom drive. This gets very annoying on desktops lol

Claymoore · February 2010

At a previous company, my manager took the day off for his 40th birthday. His office had a narrow window next to the door, so we taped trashbags to the inside of the window and filled the space with packing peanuts. From the hallway outside it looked as if we filled his entire office with peanuts, and we stuffed a few under the door to complete the effect.

tiersten · February 2010

dynamik wrote: »

I did the gift wrap as a warm-up before I went all Twilight on this dude. Tell me about your office pranks or give me ideas for things I can do in the future

Huh? What prank? That just looks like my desk...

My current employer are really picky about this sort of thing so can't do anything like that here. At one of my previous jobs however, the office walls were the type that were semi movable where you can unbolt them from the floor and ceiling and move them. With a borrowed wall panel from maintenance, we took out this guys door and made it as if his office never existed.

tiersten · February 2010

Claymoore wrote: »

At a previous company, my manager took the day off for his 40th birthday. His office had a narrow window next to the door, so we taped trashbags to the inside of the window and filled the space with packing peanuts. From the hallway outside it looked as if we filled his entire office with peanuts, and we stuffed a few under the door to complete the effect.

Hah. Nice one

RTmarc · February 2010

At one of my previous jobs we decided one day that we wanted to learn how to tear phone books in half. So, we did. Started with the old ones we could find around the office. Much to our benefit, the local telco delivered an entire palette of phone books at some point. The phone books were, for some reason, going to be replaced; apparently there were some print errors or something like that. Either way, they were going to be thrown out. We decided that we would take them off their hands. We ended up tearing at least 100 phone books.

Well, a week later we still have torn phone books stacked up outside our area (too lazy to throw away I suppose) and one of our partners in crime decided to go on vacation. We took care of his little cube area for him while he was gone. We took all of the phone books and spread the pages around his cube and desk like confetti. It ended up being nearly a foot deep of torn pages. It took him nearly an hour to get it cleaned up when he got back.

CompuTron99 · February 2010

We found out a co-worker had a doctor's appoinment and which doctor's office is was. We called the co-worker saying we were from the Doctor's office and that he needed to bring a stool sample to his appointment. I don't know what was better, his embarassment or the receptionist's face when he handed it to her in a bag.

arwes · February 2010

Back in the DOS days, I'd change the DOS prompt to something like 'Stack overflow in sector 8675309. Please restart.' and do a CLS. I'd hear people coming back from break rebooting their computers.

I'm thinking of deploying the Annoy-A-Tron somewhere in the building, but I just can't decide on who to annoy. Although, now I see they have the EvilTron which also is quite devilish.

laidbackfreak · February 2010

back in the day we used to set colour setting to black, desktop, fonts, screen savers the works.
The amount of times you would get people start to rebuild pc's before they figured it out.

I still do it now but only on my pc when I leave a company.

RTmarc · February 2010

I may or may not have been part of a group that busted stink bombs in an office environment. I hear that if you wrap the vial in a wad of paper towels before busting it that the lovely aroma will fill the air for hours.

exampasser · February 2010

If someone leaves their machine unlocked you should edit their hosts file, which can be amusing.

One time in a class where the class recently installed Windows xp (did not have SP2 on it) I sent out a net send message to everyone and half of the class freaked out.

In my server class we had a folder permissions war happen in which we would create folders on other people's domains and make it difficult for the domain owner to remove them, very entertaining and educational.

tiersten · February 2010

laidbackfreak wrote: »

back in the day we used to set colour setting to black, desktop, fonts, screen savers the works.

Back in the days of Windows Active Desktop, you could do things like take a screenshot of their desktop and set it as their background then hide their icons. People would go crazy clicking away on the desktop wondering why nothing worked.

laidbackfreak · February 2010

tiersten wrote: »

Back in the days of Windows Active Desktop, you could do things like take a screenshot of their desktop and set it as their background then hide their icons. People would go crazy clicking away on the desktop wondering why nothing worked.

oh god yeah id forgotten about that one love it

unsupported · February 2010

Wow, many office pranks in my day.

We filled a managers office with packaging peanuts, loaded through the drop ceiling.
Took a supervisors office supplies and encased them in Jell-o and also duct tape (not at the same time).
Put tape all over the call center floor in family a Circus style path.
The multiple emails saying "I've lost my NT registry keys, report them if found"
Changing backgrounds of unlocked computers to various boy-bands.
Pressing the hot key combination to set the desktop to high contrast.
Anyone who left the department got saran wrapped to a chair and a ride in the elevator while being sprayed with silly string and water at each floor.
Finding a naked picture of a co-worker on a shared drive and distributing it all over the office.
Taking the department/company news letter and reproduce it with a demotivational Dilbert theme (I got real flack for that one).

That's about all I can think about right now.

down77 · February 2010

That's awesome work!

Last job the VP of IT wanted us to start thinking about "green computing" so we replaced the furniture in his office with a fully working Styrofoam desk and chair. It took 4 engineers and many cups of coffee to pull it off.

For a project manager we replaced his computer and monitor with an etch-a-sketch, crayons, and a dummies guide to project management.

My favorite however was for the 50th birthday of a company president.. we asked our graphics team help create the design for a bobble head doll and superman poster where we superimposed his head instead. We printed the poster and the entire company (all 300 employees) signed it. We also decorated his office with batman, spiderman, and underdog party favors with the poster hanging on his wall. Somehow he figured out the IT guys were behind it and took us to lunch as a thank you.

rsutton · February 2010

In the past I worked for companies that were more fun, current company wont stand for anything. We used to change desktop backgrounds to the BSOD or a screenshot of their original desktop. Way back in the day we used to change the DOS CLI to some sort of an error message. That was fun.

dynamik · June 2010

Wow, the OP really sucks at sizing images appropriately.

I'm bumping this because we just got a new team member, and a cube is about to be vandalized again. Does anyone have any interesting ideas they'd like to see carried out? I'm not just going to fill it with packing peanuts or wrap his things in foil. It's going to be unique. I have a few ideas, but I'm always open to suggestions.

Devilsbane · June 2010

dynamik wrote: »

Wow, the OP really sucks at sizing images appropriately.

I'm bumping this because we just got a new team member, and a cube is about to be vandalized again. Does anyone have any interesting ideas they'd like to see carried out? I'm not just going to fill it with packing peanuts or wrap his things in foil. It's going to be unique. I have a few ideas, but I'm always open to suggestions.

I wish my workplace was more prank happy. I enjoy having a good time.

tiersten wrote: »

Back in the days of Windows Active Desktop, you could do things like take a screenshot of their desktop and set it as their background then hide their icons. People would go crazy clicking away on the desktop wondering why nothing worked.

I did that with my mom's hearts game years ago. She played that game hundreds of times a day. Needless to say, I was nearly grounded. She feared that I had deleted the game.

Even after the hearts game was restored, she was still furious.

odyssea · June 2010

ok what about
-swithing keys on a keyboad round
-taking mouse rollerballs out (not so easy nowadays, bl@@dy infa-red!)
-and my personal fave - sprinkling cress seeds and finely torn cotton wool under their keyboard? It grows but the most amazing thing is the keyboard still works!!

Devilsbane · June 2010

odyssea wrote: »

ok what about
-swithing keys on a keyboad round
-taking mouse rollerballs out (not so easy nowadays, bl@@dy infa-red!)
-and my personal fave - sprinkling cress seeds and finely torn cotton wool under their keyboard? It grows but the most amazing thing is the keyboard still works!!

1. I did that in middle school, to someone who struggles with computers already, it may be funny. For someone in IT, that is easy to spot.
2. I haven't seen a single workplace mouse with a ball in it in ages.
3. To me this seems a little too destructive.

networker050184 · June 2010

Devilsbane wrote: »

1. I did that in middle school, to someone who struggles with computers already, it may be funny. For someone in IT, that is easy to spot.
2. I haven't seen a single workplace mouse with a ball in it in ages.
3. To me this seems a little too destructive.

Well you're no fun.....

rogue2shadow · June 2010

Easy one. Put a Sticky note under an optimal mouse = win. Its stealthy too.

SephStorm · June 2010

Lol, not quite prak material, but I was in a MS SharePoint class for work, it was a few of us enlisted IT guys and a few officers. Well the instructor figured we knew what we were doing and pretty much left us alone. We spent hours logging into each others websites, redirecting, adding javascript and other code. Someone would go to a site as part of the assignment and would burst out laughing when hundreds of popups appeared. Everything was cool until like the day of the test. The instructor claimed somebody hacked his website, and we all denied it. I think he did it on purpose, those officers were not happy...

Devilsbane · June 2010

SephStorm wrote: »

Lol, not quite prak material, but I was in a MS SharePoint class for work, it was a few of us enlisted IT guys and a few officers. Well the instructor figured we knew what we were doing and pretty much left us alone. We spent hours logging into each others websites, redirecting, adding javascript and other code. Someone would go to a site as part of the assignment and would burst out laughing when hundreds of popups appeared. Everything was cool until like the day of the test. The instructor claimed somebody hacked his website, and we all denied it. I think he did it on purpose, those officers were not happy...

Kind of sounds like some of the labs I was in in college. My neighbor would be plugging away, and his server would shut down. The magic of a shutdown command used over the network.

DevilWAH · June 2010

When I first found PSEXEC from sys internals I was having a field day!!

My first was a script to un-mute sound card, turn volume to 100% and then play a sound file... Really good for the old "computer says no!!" when some one asks a dumb question. or getting a work mates PC to play thrash metal at 500db every time the boss walks in.

Then came changing the backgrounds remotely was fun. or flash an image on the screen as the boss walked to there PC.

And if you really wanted to be anoying setting a loop to lock there PC ever 30 seconds. (this one you tune over a few attempts untill the just cant manage to unlock, and get in to stop you doing it before it locks it again). Just don't get the wrong PC and do it to your boss.... I can tell you they don't like it!!

Yep PSEXEC is a great little tool.

oh and for a laugh if you haven't seen it, go to the sysinternal website and get the BSOD screen saver.. i have seen people sit and watchh it for ages actly believing there computer is stuck in a reboot loop.

Office Pranks

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