Talk of the Annoy-A-Tron in another thread fondly reminded me of the days that I had time for pranks, and wondered what evil you guys have done to that unsuspecting/deserving cow-orker, friend, roommate or family member.
I’ll start us off:
The first real one I pulled at work was on my friend in the next cube. While he was away from his desk I swapped the M and N keys on his laptop keyboard, and then sat at my desk sniggering. When nothing happened, I was a bit puzzled - and then remembered that he’s using an external keyboard! So when he went to the bathroom I swapped them on that as well.
The effect was hilarious, and made even better by his later admission that he was momentarily baffled after comparing the keys on the laptop with the external.
A roommate asked me to wake him up early one morning, and I agreed.
He was even more difficult to wake up in the morning than I was. He was also a pretty buff guy and was known to (unconsciously) take a swing at anything that disturbed his rest.
So the next morning, at 5 a.m., I bent down near his ear and yelled “Fire!” really loud.
He was upright and halfway across the room before he knew what was happening. I grinned and said, “Oh good, you’re awake.”
@moufassa - your prank probably wouldn’t work on me, since I touch type. About the worst I’ve ever done to someone was change the mouse settings to left handed. The reaction was worth watching.
Zipped a corporal up in his fart sack, took him up a flight up stairs, pretended to take him up another while actually going back down a flight and then throwing him over the railing on the ground floor.
My roommate changes the wallpaper of any of his students who don’t lock their computers. His classes all say that someone got “Biebered” when it happens, since he changes the wallpaper to a Justin Bieber picture. It’s good training.
When I was on the swim team in HS the guys and girls teams practiced together. One of the guys had Toyota pickup similar to the one that one of the girls has (same body style and model year). One day he discovered that his key would start her truck. So he began moving it across the parking lot after practice.
A guy I knew in high school had a solution for this. He was usually a “revenge is a dish best served cold” kinda guy, but with a twist this time… He got up in the middle of the night and took a dump on their windshield. If my memory is correct, it was in the winter and the deposit was frozen in the morning, bonded to the glass.
One of my favorites is [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[DownArrow] on any coworkers computer. Have fun working upside down.
Especially fun, since a majority of my coworkers at the time only know what buttons to push to do there job. Computer literacy is not a requirement at my work.
Key swaps of course. Swap the top row of a keypad with the bottom row. It makes it look like a telephone which registers in your head as correct so it usually takes a while to figure out.
Mouse shenanigans. The trick of screen shotting a desktop and then making it the wallpaper is always good. If someone has a wireless keyboard or mouse, you can sometimes hop onto the signal and move it with another one. Back in the days of sending network messages, we used to change the name of a server to GOD and start sending messages to users.
My favorite prank was even sanctioned by management. Back in the early 00’s, someone got it up their butts that Solitaire was impacting performance so they wanted it removed. The problem was it was fairly easy to download again from the MS website. So my solution was to write a script and call it sol.exe and deploy it to everyone’s systems. The script just shutdown their computer. Want to play a game? Desktop shuts down. Call me for help and then try to explain why you were trying to use unapproved software. Eventually, it got turned into a message that would pop up, but for a while it was great fun.
The guy who lives in the house diagonally behind and to the right of ours is a right bastard who throws rocks and sprays weedkiller at the neighbourhood cats because they disturb his precious garden.
So all this summer, in a plastic box under our patio table, I’ve cultivated weeds. Some of them are obscure weeds that I actually went out of my way to find. I cultivated them until they seeded, and then overnight I would blow the seeds over our section of shared fence. Some of them have already developed, the rest will lie dormant until spring.
Spraying water works just as well without harming the cats. I bought something like this a few years ago to keep my cats out of my garden beds. The hardest part was getting the aim right.
Oh, if he used something like that it would be fine. I use a hand-held spray gun filled with tapwater when I see one digging and squatting but otherwise I just get over it and throw it in the back of the composter. He uses one of the pressure-pump things filled with something similar to Roundup that he uses on his stone patio. That’s why I’m deliberately sowing weeds on his garden
Um, dog and cat feces is NOT recommended for compost, if you are growing anything meant for human consumption. Here in the US, the Department of Agriculture has specifically recommended that it be put in the trash, because contaminants can be transferred to the plants you grow.
Ah, sorry, colloquially we refer to the “brown lid” garden waste bins as composters. Because it’s like having a compost heap, only they take it away when it smells
Back at Boeing, the syasdmin group pranked our manager by taping off his window and making it appear as if his office had been filled with packing peanuts. I have some pictures around here somewhere. Let me find them.
Edit, several minutes later…
The preparation: taping up the glass to create a giant pocket to contain the peanuts. Some back-of-the-napkin math revealed that we needed 22 cubic feet of peanuts, so we ran out at lunch and scoured the city for mail supply stores. Cost was about $20, plus the paper and tape to build the foam containment structure.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t there when our manager got back and found it all, but I am told he sort of sat there and stared at it for a few minutes, then closed his eyes, took a breath, and opened the door. There was much laughing
What got him in the end was that he was trying to type “command” but it was coming out “connamd”.
