The boss worked in a fishbowl, so office tricks were a treat Welcome once more to Who, Me? The Register's weekly walk-through of readers being just a little bit bad … but mostly getting away with it! This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Philip" who once worked in a factory where the boss occupied an office that overlooked the production line and was walled off by plexiglass …
For the benefit of younger readers, it's worth noting that this was an era when telephones did not fit in your pocket, but sat in a more or less fixed location on the desk, and you operated them using a handset that was attached with a length of coiled wire a meter or so long. Yes, it's all very primitive.
You've made me feel old!
My desk telephone is about 70 years old. It's a 1950s Western Electric Model 500, my Father's first telephone. It does everything I need a telephone in that location to do, except DTMF, which was easily rectified with a little circuitry and a couple switches and buttons. (My telco still supports pulse dialing, the DTMF option is handy for accessing voice-mail torture devices "helpfully" provided by third parties.)
A couple years ago I offered a teenager $50 if he could place a call on it.
He refused to touch it.
I made a call to show him it worked, and asked him to try again. He still refused.
My granddaughter discovered the phone when she was 5 years old. I gave her one of her own for her 6th birthday (with the same DTMF capability mine has). Almost a decade later, she's still using it. She thinks it's wonderful ... and her friends think she's weird, which she also thinks is wonderful. Mission accomplished. Thanks, Dad :-)
All phones (bar the two cans and a piece of string variety) need power. Not always a lot and, for POTS it's a battery at the local exchange (supported during power cuts, around here, anyway, by an emergency diesel powered generator).
I live in a rural area of Scotland and my router runs via a small UPS. Our mobile phones use wifi calling around the house as the mobile signal is patchy. It's not 100% resilient but, barring a county-wide shut-down, should see us through. We also have solar panels on the roof, and a 5kWh battery - but I don't factor that in as the biggest risk of power outage is when solar top-up is minimal (I could set the battery to stay topped up from the grid, but we've not reached the stage when, for us, loss of electricity for a few days would be life-threatening.
I mean, those of us that have "been around" for long enough remember the importance of running a tap from the power on an analogue phone for the combined purposes of being able to "force the line to stay open" when the other party tried to hang up, and to connect a small load (such as a lightbulb) to "force the line to hang up" when another party did the same to us.
Maybe that's a story/discussion for another day...
My newest wireless phones in the house uses the battery in the phone on the base station to keep it working for a bit in a power outage. Too bad it only works if that phone stays on the base station. Pick it up and you have to wait for the power to come back before it will work again. :-)
It's interesting for those of us who grew up with real rotary dials. It seems obvious how to use it because we know it so well but to someone for whom it's always been push-button or touch-screen the whole concept of a dial is alien and not at all intuitive. I bet most don't know why we use the verb "to dial" a number. Or "hang up" for that matter.
The dial was an ingenious invention though, essentially digital (on-off-on-off etc) via an analogue line in order to send 10 different digits.
@Jake - $5/mo and it has my old landline number. It does not like pulse dialling, so I acquired a Panasonic mini-PBX (KX-TAW848) off eBay, which does.
I have a number of telephones, including the WE 500 mentioned, and the classic Ericofon. Some are dial, some are DTMF. One is an old 3-slot payphone, into which the grandchildren love to put coins. Thanks to the PBX, they can all dial each other, and thanks to the OOMA box, they can dial out into the Real World.
Why, yes, I am an engineer...how could you tell?
// The wife insisted on using the 1941 WE302 in the kitchen, as she likes the audio quality.
// The Phone Company replaced my copper line with fiber years ago...that same fiber now provides my internet
Congrats on being judgemental without having the facts... thought I'd share the story just for you.
1: had a fling with a woman at the place I worked... I knew she 'had' been seeing some one, didn't know who, just that it had ended because he wouldn't leave his wife. It lasted a couple of weeks.
2: A couple of months later, he leaves his wife and shacks up with her.
3: he was an utter incompetent cockwomble, his only skill was creating division amongst the team to distract from how useless he was.
4: He was a liar and a cheat (not just with his wife), he altered paperwork submitted by others, removed booked holidays, was a male misandrist who seemed to hate other men and tried to promote an 18yr old with huge tits over the far more experienced person who had already been marked for the position through experience and seniority. He sabotaged job applications that people made to other depts and had complaints made against him, whilst encouraging everyone else to try and make complaints against everyone else.... for stupid things like a person eating a bag of crisps whilst waiting for a kettle to boil to make cups of tea for the team....
5: On the day I'd had enough and quit, he still tried to cause drama and made all sorts of outrageous claims so that HR in the end decided to let me leave that day, with full pay for the entire 2 month notice I gave.
6: He approached me in the foyer of the building as I was saying goodbye to some people and with the smuggest look on his face... held out his hand and wished me well... along with the 'no hard feelings' bollocks.
7: That's when I grabbed his hand very firmly... pulled him towards me a little and quietly said 'Of course not... and I'm sorry I shagged your mistress' with a huge shit eating grin on my face.
8: That's when he went purple and decided to take a swing at me... in front of witnesses.... it was barely a glancing blow to my shoulder... but damage done to himself.
9: That's when I asked the receptionist if she'd care to call the police... and I popped back upstairs to talk to HR.
10: Guess what happened to him?
11: Guess who tried to brush it off until I actually spoke to the police and guess who tried to force staff into not being a witness after they had already spoken to the police.... I guess shitty behaviour was just normal in that company.
12: Guess who tried to convince me to return to the job... taking over one of the teams... but after promoting the other shitty person who made a complaint about the one eating crisps whilst making cups of tea... into his role.
Rather than treating anyone like a 'piece of meat' as you ignorantly claimed... I'm damn fucking proud of my petty act of revenge that saw a shitty person get some karma.
And you're still a cockwomble, especially now you've explained at great length how you treated a woman like a piece of meat. Do you think that sordid little tale somehow _excuses_ something?
The only comfort I can take from it is that it's obvious you're making it up.
Have a few over the years.
My first place of work, I had a colleague - great bloke but a bit of a curmudgeon. He had a mug for his tea that no one was permitted to even look sideways at. It was one of those that had decades of staining.
In a moment of silliness (I really didn't think it through), when he left the workshop one day, I poured his tea into another mug, drilled a hole in the bottom of his and screwed it to the desk. I then refilled it. When he walked back in and tried to pick his mug up, the handle snapped clean off! Oops.
At college we found out that if you made an ioniser you could use it to charge things like leaves on plants, or the rim of a pint pot so when someone brushed against it, or drank from it, they'd get a jolt.
Also at college we had a couple of quite unpleasant lecturers. For one, he used to make a big thing about locking the door to the classroom despite it being empty other than a chalkboard, desks, chairs and bin.
One day the window was open so we sneaked in and stuck all the furniture onto the ceiling, exactly as it had been on the floor (inverted, obviously).
One of the guys there also used to trip the alarm in the library every single visit. Which could be painful as the turnstile was nut-height for him. Someone had taken a security strip out of a book and managed to feed it into the lining of his coat. Oh and as far as anti-theft went, they were easily defeated as I saw first hand by the student lobbing a couple of books out of a window in one far corner of the library to then go and collect.
At uni we blew flour under another students door and coated everything in there white. Another time we planted cress on the floor of a room and watered it. He was away at the time and came back to a cress lawn.
I am sure there were plenty of other silly things as well but these come to mind.
Don't know why you were down voted on this. For me, its gold.
One man's pranks are another man's bullying. Pranks are when people play tricks on each other - its a mutual thing. This guy with the special mug, did he prank Tony as well, or did Tony destroy mug guy's favourite possession so Tony could have a good laugh at him - we don't know. Tony certainly dealt out a lot of pranks, but where did he get pranked back?
My goodness.
Of course I got pranked back. In spades. In return for breaking his mug, he left a box of spiders - all neatly packed and quite professional looking from a label perspective (we did have a franking machine so not that difficult back then) on my desk to open, knowing full well I was very arachnophobic.
He also tried to get me to wash my hands "in the hottest water I could stand" when I first go toner on them, hoping it would bond.
Then there's the time he turned some small caps around on a piece of kit I was working on to make them go pop to make me jump.
Another place, another guy crept up behind me and smacked a steel ruler down just as I turned a piece of kit I'd repaired on. I almost shit bricks.
I fell for the old trick once of someone taking a snapshot of my desktop background and hiding my icons after setting the screenshot as the wallpaper - sadly it took much longer to cotton on to that than it should have, including a couple of reboots.
I will have to try and remember the others that I was a the recipient to.
It's probably also worth pointing out as well, that said pranks above happened over a span of around 10 years or more.
I dunno - some folks seem to want to get offended on the behalf of others without even taking the time for a little bit of critical thinking. I wasn't even always the instigator of some of the pranks, just recounting them (e.g. the security strip).
At no point can I recall anyone ever being genuinely/long term upset at any of the pranks we all played on one another. Get a grip.
Well I'm glad you enjoyed them (no, really, I _am_ glad you enjoyed them). I would very strongly not have done so, and would have tried to involve the police if any of them had been done to me. If the police weren't interested, I would have tried to undertake a private prosecution.
@Tom You're correct that pranks can quickly become bullying; however if I might quote Stevie Wonder:
"You grow up and learn that kind of thing ain't right. But while you were doing it, it sure felt outta sight".
now we see through a glass darkly ... kids messing up our lawn.
Happy Halloween.
Some people may not appreciate some of this stuff. I would have taken a few of these, but for others, I'd have been quite unhappy to have them done to me. For instance, this one:
"At uni we blew flour under another students door and coated everything in there white."
That could damage things and would require a serious amount of cleaning depending on how vigorously they propelled it in there. I'm not sure if this predated computers, but if it didn't, blowing flour into a room with a computer that was turned on would at best require completely stripping down the machine to clean it and at worst could cause a fire (flour is more combustible than it looks). Although the risk is lower, it could even do that with electrical sockets meaning you have to be careful when cleaning those afterward. If someone did this to me, I wouldn't be viewing it as "you got me". My thoughts would be a bit more angry.
"at worst could cause a fire"
At worst, and it's a likely worst since all it would take is a single spark, it would cause a dust explosion that would likely demolish half the building and kill people. It's obviously another piece of fiction, fortunately, because bombing student halls is not a prank, it's terrorism.
My father worked in a factory which made corn products, the initial process was to mill the corn in a building sized milling machine. They had very strict rules around health and safety including the use on non sparking brass tools in that area. The building was steel framed and paneled and had a panel which was deliberately designed to blow out if there was an explosion he worked there 15 years and due to very high levels of safety this did only happen once but it did cause a fatality as an engineer was hit by the panel
It is easy to demonstrate the explosive nature of flour. Take a six foot length of 4" PVC pipe. Drill four 3/4" holes around the circumference of one end, about 2" from that end. Place a votive candle on the ground, and put the pipe over it. Light the candle through one of the holes. Dump a scant 1.5 tablespoons (10g) of sifted[0] flour into the open end. On a calm day, the minor explosion[1] can be fairly loud, and the resulting smoke-ring can rise & expand far more than you might think. All sizes are approximate. I've never actually measured anything when doing this, yet it always works despite my lack of care and attention.
NOTE! While I've never had an issue playing with this toy, nor have I ever heard of anybody getting hurt or doing damage to anything, this may be illegal in your jurisdiction. Most such toys tend to get lawmakers upset, probably because they are always vaguely afraid that somebody, somewhere, is having fun. Needless to say, children LOVE it :-)
Need I say don't do this indoors?
[0] If you don't sift the flour, it might fall as a clump & extinguish the candle.
[1] Depending on pipe size, hole size & number, the grind of flour, the quantity of flour, how well it is dispersed, and other variations, the noise can range from a mild "pop" to a dull "thud" to a deep "bang". Experiment. That's what science is for, right?
My brother studied at an Agricultural College and pranks were on a larger and much more dangerous scale. This was 1980's.
Most students lived in a Halls of Residence. One night, after most had had a skin full and were very asleep, the upstairs corridor was filled with bales of straw (by the students in the rooms below) and so no students could get out of their room (except jumping from the first floor windows with an almighty hangover). Of course the Fire Alarm was set off by those getting up (on the ground floor) for milking at 04:00!
For another, (and I was partially to blame as the rigger). The Chief Mechanical Engineer had a habit of showing how easy it was to break into cars and rearranging the student carpark. His Mini was moved - to a flat roof 2 storeys from the ground. Being an Agricultural College they had the equipment on hand to get it down (just like a large Heston bale), but they never did find out how it was moved in the first place. That was the last prank played for many years as it was getting well out of hand.
The Seniors at Cubberly High School (Palo Alto) welded a complete VW bug/beetle onto the top of the School's Totem in the late 1960s. The car was running when the staff got to work in the morning. I saw it with my own eyes. You can still see the tabs the car was mounted to welded to the top of the supporting i-beams in this picture, taken over 40 years later. I can't find a pic of the car on top online, but I know they exist ... I think I still have access to the negs.
Not to be outdone, and not ten years later, we disassembled the Principle's own VW, and lovingly reassembled it in his office. He walked into work, to find it idling where his desk should be ... A man with a good sense of humo(u)r, after airing the office out he sat in the driver's seat and started in on his morning telephone calls ... later that afternoon he helped with the disassembly, transport and reassembly and then drove it home. I can honestly report a good time was had by all :-)
In my second year, the engineering students put a car (a Morris Minor, I think) on the landing on the stairs leading up to Hall in Churchill College! They also did a very ingenious arrangement with a ladder and a few other things in one of the Barbara Hepworth sculptures - it wasn't at all obvious how it was done!
My dad used to tell a tale of a guy he did his National Service with, a lazy arsed git by his account - my dad and his squad mates lifted the bloke in his bunk out to the parade ground, plus his locker and kit, in perfect placement, to be found by the CSM at first light.
After a mess dinner my snoring was so bad, alcohol makes it worse, I was relocated to the middle of the parade ground of the Infantry Centre at Singleton (Aus). Luckily I woke up at 4am to go to loo, and everything was back in its place before I got the "Sir, what are you doing in the middle of my parade ground" from the RSM.
There were a couple of "moving Mini" pranks when I was at uni (Brunel -1980's).
The first involved the rugby club carrying one down from the student carpark into the main paved quadrangle, which was at a lower level to the surrounding buildings. A biped could simply walk down a few 'steps' several feet wide, and then back up again at the other side. A car, like a dalek, was completely trapped.
A far better prank involved balancing said mini on a pair of builder's supports which were stood in the ornamental lake in front of the admin building. As it was rag week, then rugby club extorted the uni to donate a fee somewhat less than the exorbitant rates quoted by the local recovery company.
IIRC they tried this the following year, but were told that he rugby club would be shut down if they persisted. No cash changed hands any more.
After being pranked one too many times myself, I went onto campus one Sunday to rig the desk of a fellow postgrad. In short, the bottom drawer of his desk (in a communal office) was just deep enough to accommodate a large compressed-air-powered confetti cannon in vertical orientation. Using a cordless drill, I managed to attach the device to the front panel of the drawer and thread the trigger string through a hole in the back of the drawer unit, screwing it into place.
The hardest part was keeping a straight face the next morning until he finally opened it at about 11:00.
Downvoted because of what you did to the mug - I've had mugs from old companies, sounds daft, but they have sentimental value and basically you've damaged someone's personal property. Other pranks - not so much.
We also have a curmudgeon with a stained mug (but not a great bloke), so while he was away another of my colleagues cleaned it for him. Curmudgeon was not pleased, claimed that the stains added to the flavour....
I have a mug from c 1997 that was a present from Citrix during a time working for a company that I have *very* fond memories of.
One of my sons cracked it rendering it unusable.
Did the mug hold sentimental value? Yep, but if it was *that* important to me it would have been stored away somewhere out of danger.
Things are just things. Someone wrote my car off a couple of weeks ago. I loved that car. No one was hurt so beyond the slight inconvenience it doesn't really matter. They're just things.
What I cherish more from my days at various places are the memories I have and the friends I made.
You also seem to have missed the part where I said I regretted what I did to his mug because as a callow youth I didn't think it through beforehand but hey-ho.
One day the window was open so we sneaked in and stuck all the furniture onto the ceiling
I call bullshit! (mainly because furniture legs have very little footprint area to stick with ( and also everything ive ever tried gluing has fallen apart) )
is there an icon for that?
I was gonna reply "so how did you di it ? chewing gum? "no more nails"? gaffer tape? "angle steel and screws?"
Then I saw you'd already replied with "Sticky pads"
I'm sorry but even if I close my eyes and try really hard i cannot imagine any type of furniture that would work on (except possibly the fisher price plastic toy seats for the under 2's) let alone the steel box section you describe.
re the polaroid: You cant post pics here, but there's imgur etc , and if you can remember the brand of the magic sticky pads we'd all be very interested .
I've got some welding to do on my car this week, maybe these pads could save me the bother.
Maybe JB Weld, an epoxy, that I have used to repair a burnt out camp oven. Its advertised as being able to repair engine blocks. Unless you get a primal satisfaction in seeing a good seam done by yourself it might work in place of welging if you have time for the curing. This brings to question of how chairs were supported such that equal strain was applied at the points of contact during the initial phase.
we planted cress on the floor of a room and watered it. He was away at the time and came back to a cress lawn
In pursuance of a long-standing* but mostly inexplicable feud between Trinity College and next-door Balliol College in Oxford, a group of Balliol undergraduates turfed the Trinity Junior Common Room with grass from the quad outside**.
* It was long-standing in 1967. I've no idea if it still exists. Today's pranks probably come with trigger warnings.
** I never saw the result myself, and I expect it was elaborated in the telling, with a few sods of grass turning into a wall-to-wall greensward complete with daffodils.
we planted cress on the floor of a room and watered it. He was away at the time and came back to a cress lawnI did that to a co-worker's keyboard once. (Membraned/water resistant, so little chance of structural damage) We put cotton batting under the key caps, seeded the batting, and misted it regularly while the co-worker was on secondment for a few weeks.
In one occasion, we sent an email purporting to be from a PFY, who had called in sick, to his manager, with an "X-ray" attached proving is sickness (it was a fake x-ray of a penis, showing a broken bone - NSFW, but those where different times)
Another great prank we did was sending a fax to the office's fax machine purporting to be from a dance school and confirming a colleague's ballet classes booking - we laughed about that one for long, everyone pretending to believe our colleague, who was a bit of a macho bully, had really booked them.
I was a bit more pedestrian with my office pranks. One time there was some all-company meeting where they were giving away drinks from Jamba Juice. It was supposed to be one per person, and one of the engineers took two, one for her fiance who she was on the way to be picked up for lunch by. Some of us saw her and gave her a good natured ribbing on the way out of the building. Later I found a template for an old west wanted poster, swiped a photo from her Facebook page, and slapped the two together. Then I convinced someone to tape it to her office door while she was at a doctor's appointment.
It was always a treat to watch that engineer at work. She was like 5ft 5in, maybe 100lbs soaking wet, but she could intimidate people who had over 6 inches and 100lbs on her. People would literally see her coming and decide they suddenly had something very urgent to do in the opposite direction. But she was actually a really nice person... as long as you weren't holding up one of her projects.
(Anon for obvious reasons)
We're doing the planning for a major system upgrade. The vendor specced wireless keyboard and mouse sets. We rejected this, as having 4 wireless keyboard and mouse sets for 4 different industrial control computers in a control room run by folks who are not great with computers is going to cause a lot of trouble calls...
Trichlorotriflurothane (tape cleaner, not sure if I spelt it right) on the seat - sit down, you'd get wet trousers for a few minutes until it evaporated. We all went through that back in the day.
New joiner "policy" was to get shut in the generator room for the duration of the generator test (about an hour on a Friday evening) - you had to be quick to get to the door before (or at the same time as) everyone else.
One new guy - bit of an odd ball, joined the same time as me. Used to ride a moped and wear bright yellow sou'westers even at the height of summer. We came out one day and someone had put his moped in the skip....
Oh, and used to be able to watch what the boss was doing, so every time it looked like he was logging in, we'd look for and then terminate his session.
I first mis-read Chlorotrifluoroethylene as Chlorine trifluoride, and that scared the hell out of me .
> Cellphones have one advantage - it is no longer possible to reliably "cut the phone lines" before invading a home
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/30/paul-pelosi-attack-called-911-from-bathroom
"Paul Pelosi, ..saved his life after secretly telephoning for help from the bathroom.
"... a man broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s California home and severely beat her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer. Paul Pelosi told the alleged intruder – identified by authorities as David DePape – that he needed to use the restroom. Paul Pelosi’s mobile phone was charging in the bathroom at the time; the 82-year-old then made a surreptitious call to 911, and remained connected.
"The emergency services dispatcher, Heather Grimes, heard an exchange between Paul Pelosi and his attacker... A suspicious Grimes then notified police for a wellness check."
(911=999=112)
honest... most of the 'pranks' listed above would find the pranker in the dole queue if tried where I attend* on a daily basis
Or worse yet........ the pranker has now listed him/herself as 'open for business' with regards to the rest of the staff..... so if their still at first job status , they'd get sent down the stockroom for a long weight
while more advanced creatures would find their chairs screwed to the floor... or missing one leg or have the airhorn tied to the gas cylinder, along with having some of the dialog texts changed to "XXXXX is a dong, please check part length because XXXX is a dong"
Right upto the ultimate prank...... the dreaded 'oil leak' they have to solve
* I'm supposed to do work or something.... most of the time today has been spent teaching the PFY howto fill out an expenses claim form so it generates lots of cash yet is still completely believable....
"most of the 'pranks' listed above would find the pranker in the dole queue"
Or prison.
"they'd get sent down the stockroom for a long weight"
I worked on a building site in school holidays. Boss sent me to ask the carpenter for a long weight. Carpenter was too busy fixing sash windows to play, and gave me a sash window weight to take back. (If you haven't seen one, they're long cylinders...)
Love the fact the carpenter did that, that's always occurred to me when someone says the 'long weight' joke. (Grew up in a victorian house so well aware of the things). And yeah, some of the pranks listed above are 'just a bit of banter' as they say in the trades.. which is extremely harmful to peoples' wellbeing, I don't react well to practical jokes, never have done, and for those who say 'it's harmless and you're being too soft'... glad you can cope with it.
My first job as an apprentice engineer after school... they tried a few of those on me without any success... Long weights... line manager came looking for me after I came back and said they didn't have any and then disappeared down there again 10 mins later for a cup of tea with the stores guys... when he asked what I thought I was doing... I replied... they didn't have any long weights, so I thought two short ones would do instead.
They tried 'sky hooks' and I laughed at them... then they sent me down for some Shell No 13 'pneumatic oil'... which back then... didn't exist and I only heard 'shell No 13'... apparantly they did actually use a 'Shell No 12' oil... stores took pity on me and offered a cup of tea... and that's where my line manager found me... again.
They stopped trying after that.
But when I went to another dept for a few months... they got me good. Sent me down to the other end of the huge site (about 2/3 of a mile from one end to the other) lugging a massive cart to pick up a crate... Something about '2 parstels for a 209 compressor)... I had no clue... just was told to go somewhere and pick something up and did so... I was the apprentice, I got the grunt work.
So I lugged this huge crate back on a hand cart for 2/3 of a mile... and they ask if I checked it.... 'I don;t even know what the fuck it is, how am I supposed to know if it's what you need, or in the right condition?' was my response.
Handed me a crowbar... told me to check it.
What I found.... several breeze blocks... the ones with 2 square holes in them... and a note that said '2 Post Holes for a 209 Compressor'
had to laugh at that one... they learned I wasn't easy to fool with the usual pranks and came up with something better.
When I was an apprentice, the favourite was to send someone down to the stores to ask for "a packet of sparks for the grinding wheel". After a while the storeman cottoned on and prepared several paper bags full of finely ground iron particles, which he gleefully handed to the victim to take back to his supervisor.
"I've never understood the point of sending someone for something that doesn't exist."
It gets the uninitiated out from under foot for a period of time.
And yes, there can be a hazing aspect. It's the same "us" vs. "them" thing that allows religion to flourish. Or Fraternities (of all kinds). It's human nature, probably embedded in our very genetics, like it or not.
"electrolytic capacitor (which had been pinched from the production line) between two filing cabinets and wiring it up, in reverse, to a 25-amp power supply. The capacitor usually expired quietly"
I would not have thought that even a small electrolytic would give up the ghost quietly when AC is applied.
Get a lab group of students to wire up full wave rectifier on protoboard - 21 gun salute :)
A relative worked for a radio station many, many years ago. Folks on tours were told quite firmly not to touch ANYTHING. As this often didn't have the desired effect (stopping errant hands), the engineer would charge up electrolytic capacitors and set them on the counters, wires up. A passing tourist would go "hey, what's this?" and pick it up... and learn their lesson.
i worked in a lab for 20 year when i first started my line manager was a great laugh and we caught him with a few good pranks. Signed him up to a fetish and bondage shops mail order catalogue which was delivered to the office every month. But the best one was on his 40th birthday, we found an old security pass photo of him form years back he had a big bushy moustache, I decided to set it as the wallpaper on about 1/2 dozen PCs in an open access area used by the boffins in the lab, you'd login and have this big ginning face staring at you. But it got better, the room had one whole side that was glass, it was right opposite our office. I was around the lab doing something and went back to my office when out of the corner of my eye I saw the picture projected about 8ft sq on one of the walls of the open access room, they had a training course being run in there and the trainer had hooked up his projector to one of the PC's!
He was also quite gullible. We were going to another site which required an early start, I didn't have a car and couldn't get to our office early enough so he offered to come to my house and pick me up, which was nice of him as it was 25 miles from where he lived. We had a whole discussion about my address etc the week before we were going, my house at the time had a distinctive name it was called Take-It-Easy so people generally didn't forget it. Anyway being a golf fan my boss decided to take the Friday off to play golf and so on the Thursday before knocking off time he asked me my address AGAIN, so I said surely you haven't forgot the name of the house, yep he had, ffs ok it's called Bell End, is it, yep ok I'll see you Monday morning 8Am. He didn't flinch. Anyway Monday morning comes, no sign of him, then about 8:15 a knock on the door it's our village postman, are you waiting for someone? yep, I was stopped by this bloke asking if I knew you and where Bell End was!!!!!!!! he's parked up down the road. I nearly soiled myself front and back with laughter, I went down to find him and he STILL didn't get it for a while!!!!!!! LOL
Old enough to remember when it was OK to smoke tobacco at work. One cigar smoking electronics technician had a long piece of plastic tubing that he liked to run over to other technician's desks. Suddenly smoke would begin to rise from the gear being worked on. Tended to only work once per victim because cigar smoke is quite pungent.
Nobody pranks like firemen. Imagine a group of young men with a lot of time on their hands and 24-hour shifts.
I know a few and one of the more elaborate pranks I heard of involved cutting a hole in the ceiling precisely along the dimensions of the ceiling tile so it was effectively invisible and positioned right above the victim's bed. A hinge, and a catch were added. A bucket was cemented to the other side in the attic. A spring would pull the entire contraption into the ceiling and the catch would lock it in place...if the bucket was empty. When the bucket was filled with water a string run down to another bed to release the catch produced the nearly perfect crime.
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