When we had a load of new I.T equipment delivered to our nick, for several days there were stacks of empty boxes around in the offices. On nights, one lad opened up all the box bases, effectively making a six foot tube. He made a small peep hole and climbed inside. He spent the next eight hours freaking out the sergeant who was in the nick on his own all night (or so he thought) by intermittently moving a couple of inches

Ah, PC pranks.

We amused ourselves once with some remote control power extensions purchased from Lidls. Connected a contractor’s monitor up. Give him a few minutes working away… turn off the monitor. He fiddles with the button, we switch it back on.. he continues working. And repeat until hilarity ensues or he looks down at the power plug and sees remote device.
Funniest thing was the little noises he was making: “Hm?” “Oh” “Hm”. “HM!?”

I’m a guitar teacher, at one of the schools that I teach at my best mate is the head of music. A few months back I nipped out to the loo, when I returned the fecker had taken all of the strings off my guitar!

We’re currently mid way through a long prank on one of our event managers.

Every Tuesday, 2 of my staff are in a few hours before everyone else. The event manager whom we shall call Anna (because thats her name) never shuts her imac down.

The prank goes as follows…..

before she gets in and through the wonders of remote access, we turn on the voiceover function in system prefs.

She sits down to work and her computer starts talking to her. She tries to phone us to come look but due to internal caller ID, we ignore the calls. She comes through to our office and asks one of us to come see whats going on.

As soon as one of us leaves with her, someone else goes on and turns the voiceover off.

By the time we arrive at her office, the mac is back to normal. She swears blind that the computer was talking to her and we suggest in a not very subtle way that she is losing the plot.

I wonder how long we can keep this up?

Every winter my grandma puts a white poinsettia on a side table in the living room. One year my grandad found a very similar plant – same shape, number of flowers etc, but with red flowers and switched it. My grandma was convinced it had magically changed colour overnight, and was even more shocked when it kept changing colour every three days or so…

In a similar vein my mum’s favourite painter is Jack Vettriano, and one year my dad bought her a print of her favourite work, which lives on the living room wall:

At some point he bought another print:

And swapped it with the one on the wall. She walked past it numerous times a day for months and never noticed, so he changed it back. Again she never noticed. My brother and sister both noticed when they were at home visiting (I hope I would have done too but live overseas!) and asked my dad, so they were all in on it for about a year before mum cottoned on.

remove the 0 key from their keyboard, place the 9 where the zero should go, the eight where the 9 goes and so on until the 0 goes into the 1 position.

Similar to this I had a colleague called Michael. When he was on holiday I rearranged the keys of his keyboard so that the top line read “Michael”.

Surpirsed when his login wouldn’t work, but thinking that he’d forgotten his password, Michael contacted IT. IT got him to type in a new password. Needless to say the following morning (now with correct keyboard) his new password wouldn’t work…

I’ll skim over the geeky part that had us acquiring a colleague’s SSH keys with cunning subterfuge…but upshot was we could get into his machine remotely and setup scripts:

1) disguised as part of X-windows that would change the background to some pictures of playmobil characters he kept on his desk engaged in “unspeakable acts”. Best part was how disguised it was* so he kept thinking he’d stopped it, then 20mins later it’d be back.

2) A script to pop the CD drive open which we could trigger remotely. We triggered it every time someone closed the office door. He ended up tying string round the pc to try stop it “shaking open”

*he found the image we’d changed it to, deleted it. Pic comes back. Then he finds the disguised script that was periodically downloading the image off another machine to replace the background. Pic comes back. Took him a lot longer to find the cron job replacing the script…

Modern IT one: on an iDevice, in Settings->Accessibility, change the triple-click to Invert Colours, then triple-click the button.

When Princess Diana died, a local artist that I was friendly with thought he’d cash in by painting portraits of her to “help people come to terms with their loss”… He even convinced the local paper to run a feature.

I faked a letter from Mischon De Reya, her estate’s solicitors, demanding that he cease and desist and that he surrender all moneys made thus far, “a figure we estimate to be in the region of £40,000”. I think I even mentioned that he was effectively taking bread from the mouths of the orphaned princes!

Next thing, he’s back in the newspaper, a photo of him looking forlorn whilst holding the letter and a portrait of the dead princess. It caused quite a scandal that a big legal corporation and the Royal family were trying to ruin a lowly local artist.

He didn’t see the funny side…

I like this one simple and effective – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PIGdhLgYG4

A Paramedic friend many years ago told me of the new lad at work they convinced to get pushed into one of the body lockers so that when another new lad was bought in he could jump up and scare him. All went well for him until they put the sheet over him, pushed his draw closed and the ‘corpse’ on the tray next to him said, ‘bloody cold in mate’.
Apparently he jumped up so fast he broke his nose on the cabinet.

My father was often away from home with work, so my mother would open any mail. When it all kicked off in the Gulf for the first time, there was a slim chance the my father would got called back to his unit (SAS) because of his previous exploits. So my father and i mailed one of those fake drafting letters to him. The sort that start off as with, “You have been drafted to serve in the Queens own suicidal regiment/the 5th kamikazi regiment, due to government cutbacks you will need to provide sturdy walking boots etc”

As my mum read this, her face grew more and more concerned. She took it all in while my father and myself remained dead pan. However, as my mum read the part where vickers were offering excellent lease deals on chieftain tanks, she looked up and said in a small voice “But we can’t afford a tank…”. Genuine ROFL.

an old housemate of ours was trying to sell his old GT frame via a German forum.
i found the advert and emailed him asking him how the frame fitted; inside leg, stand over, reach. that nicht he comes knocking and asks if he can borrow my tape measure.
told other housemate about this and he writes to the guy asking whether a child seat can be fitted.
a day or two later i ask for photos of him on the bike, specifically his crotch over the top tube. mate comes knocking asking if i can take some photos for him.
other housemate emails him a picture of a ringed child seat taken at a car boot sale amongst 20 other childseats. when asking for a closer picture he zooms 20x and sends a pixelated picutre. he also always spells the guys unusual name wrong.

our mate’s response was always so polite regardless of how bizarre the questions were.

after a week or two all our housemates/mates were aware of the wind-up. we would sit in our kitchen emailing him some bizarre request and ten minutes later he would come over and show us his bizarre email… each of us trying ever so hard not to let on.

this went on for a good six weeks. we had built up a massive collection of emails, pictures of his crotch, child seats and strangly a picture of Borat (i said he resembled Borat after one of his photo sessions). with his birthday coming up we put all of these into a book and left it lying around at his birthday party. his face when he clocked it was truely priceless…

i could dig the file out somewhere, but it’s in german so not sure if you’d get it.

again, the same guy….

he used to live in our house, No. 6, but had moved with his GF and kid further down the road to No. 16. he had been away to his aunts and had forgotten his clippers there. now he used to use his clippers to shave his chest ( :?:). anyway, his auntie sends him his clippers, but uses his old address and his package arrives at our place. i go downstairs and collect it from the postman and then inform my housemate (the one that was in on the frame) that this parcel had arrived. we ran upstairs to the kitchen, carefully opened the package, removed the razor and proceeded to fill it with last nights dinner; rice, paprika, half an onion, a sauce sachet and a fork. we resealed the box and left it on the side. that night he comes over and another housemate gives him the package. happy, he dashes home thinking that he can finally shave. he opens the box to find the healthy meal we had prepared. now the best bit was that unbekonwn to us his grandma and another aunt suffered from dementia…. he phones his mum to ask if her sister is “ok” and relays the contents of the box to her. she then relays it to other family members. luckily before he phoned his aunt his GF clocked that the parcel had been at ours all day….

Kidnapped someone to Dublin by aircraft, does that count?

I did these to the same mate.

1 – He went to India for 6 months, sent me his CV a month before he came back to ‘update’ – i did update the CV but added a few bits to his ‘hobbies’ – wearing mothers clothes and playing with oneself. CV was sent back to him to ‘check’ – i call him a few days after he landed and said did you get the CV he said “yes,thanks for that i sent it to a load of agencies”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can guess the rest.

2 – Same guy, i was bestman at another mates wedding, my mates wife got seriously drunk and was sick at the back of the reception hall in the 5 star hotel. I wrote a fake letter with the hotels logo and said they had to clean the carpets at a cost of £500, then scanned the letter and sent it to the groom who in turn sent it to my mate. he actually wrote a cheque out and sent it to the hotel!!

he has sworn he will get me back…… im still waiting

Have posted this one before in another thread
“Maximum comedy value I can remember was over a decade ago in a past life in the service of our monarch.
In our place of work was a set of pigeon holes where all the mail would be delivered to those who lived in camp.
We had been up in Scotland for six weeks the previous year and quite a few romances and passings in the night had naturally taken place.
A long night with A PC and few cans had a letter drafted, post marks forged. Printed on the new fangled Colour laser printer and the Highlands and Islands Child Support Agency was born.
Slipped into a few well chosen duckets and sit back.
I was lucky to eascape without a beating but some of the victims faces will remain with me for life.

Mate of mine’s wife is a budding artist. One year, she asked him for an easel for her birthday.

A couple of days later, my mate comes home, “hi honey, I’ve just got back from the pet shop.”

“Pet shop?” she enquires, “what where you doing there?”

“Oh, I’ve just ordered that weasel you wanted. I’ve been to look at them, they’re really expensive but dead cute, you’ll love it and I’m really excited about it too now.”

“Oh. Er. Yes, I’m sure it’ll be… lovely.”

She didn’t want to tell him about his ‘mistake’ for fear of hurting his feelings. He milked it for a fortnight, until her birthday came around; by that point they’d been pricing up cages, rearranging furniture to make space for it, he’d suggested perhaps getting a second one to keep it company, hey, maybe we could breed them…

Needless to say, she loved her easel. Eventually.

I used to work for the local authority in Rochdale.At the time the handyman was Tony Baloney who had arrived with nothing from Malta in the fifties.Such was his loyalty to the authority for giving him a job that when he severed a finger mowing the lawn he refused to claim compensation.
When he was finally forced to retire we had a presentation, after the speeches and tears I offered my own little gift.I proffered a match box which I asked him to open saying I had found something he might want.Inside, through a hole in the bottom, on a bed of red cotton wool was my finger, which pulled away when he tremously touched it.

Here are a couple:

When 4 or 5 houses were to be built in the village the surveyors pegged out the site. I then moved the pegs a few feet here and there. The houses were constructed and found not to be the right shape with few right angles, problems fitting things in, non square rooms and the garages would not fit on the side.

As a student I got hold of University headed paper and sent out a few letters evicting people from halls of residence for not paying bills and also kicking people off their courses for plagiarism in exams. The key was always to make sure that some of the recipients were in on it so they could help the victims realise the horror of their situation. Some people can get really grumpy with you for these sorts of things!

In a mountain hut in Switzerland; One of our number was a bit of an annoying numpty and hadn’t done any climbing for a few years but brought all the kit and books for the trip, one of those all the gear and no idea types.

Anyways after a couple of eye-wateringly expensive beers and grub we start talking about what we were going to do the next day and bringing Numpty Bloke up to speed.

Looking around the table and spying energy and cereal bars, I made up a couple of names of knots, namely that well know a Torq break knot and the Corny hitch, which he duly remembered from climbing 10 years ago but couldn’t quite remember how to tie them. When he popped out for a piss we quickly got a length of accessory cord out and cobbled together a couple of passable looking fake knots to show him- “yep” he said “I remember now”!

Cheers,
Jamie

I was a victim of a good one…

A few years ago I was single and working shifts that weren’t particularly compatible with a good social life, so I spent a lot of my spare time mountain biking, hiking, wild camping that sort of thing. Anyway I’d not seen my kayaking friends for a while and there was a big trip away which I’d not been able to go on due to work, but I caught up with some friends afterwards. They were all wearing matching northface t-shirts. When I asked about the new uniform they told me they were now sponsored by TNF as they’d met a north face manage whilst paddling and had helped him out with some jobs, in exchange he had given them “loads of kit” and was going to take them paddling on a promotional trip. I was well gutted, I asked if they could get me in on this sponsorship deal to, they said they could but I’d have to prove that I was “outdoorsy” enough….

Challenge set, I went down to Wales that next weekend to have day or so of biking/hiking/climbing/surfing etc. I was keeping a diary of all my outdoors activities with photos and was making big plans and dreaming of funded adventures. I even asked a friends sister who was doing media to make a promo film of me being outdoorsy (as my friends suggested this might be a good idea).

They kept building me up with these wild promises until eventually someone pointed out that one of our mutual friends had just been appointed as manager of the local north face shop, and my friends had helped him move house, so to say thanks they’d all gone paddling and he’d given them promotional t shirts from the shop dummies.

Kinda wish I’d made that film, just so i could laugh at myself years later being really serious and gullible!

Ah, PC pranks.

Going further back in time.

I wrote a CICS COBOL programme that mimicked the logon screen. Trainee (always picked on their first day) input username and password which was then saved to a file that we could access. While they were having 3 go’s we’d logon as them and change their password. After 3 go’s it would say that their logon had been verified offline.

The bet was how long to took them to call their Supervisor for help, about a week if I remember… 🙂

Successfully got the civillian telephonist to tannoy “Mike Hunt to the front desk” at a Belfast police station.

I wrote a CICS COBOL programme that mimicked the logon screen.

Yeah, I wrote one of those back at college. Difference was, I faux-crashed the terminal to mask my logout once the password had been snaffled. So the victim reset the terminal and logged back in normally, none the wiser, and you’ve got indefinite access to their accounts. Quite handy when lecturers had rights to do things like increase your miserly disk quota.

Unless anyone from college is reading this, in which case it wasn’t me, it was one of the BTEC lot. Erm.

This sort of thing was so rife there that most of the Computing students ran second login programs; a program that runs on login and prompts you for another password. It then turned into a game of bypassing those programs instead.

Fun times.

An technically inept work colleague was always complaining about his PC. He left his PC unlocked while away from his desk (ironic since he defines security policy), so I had a play…

I too a snapshot of his desktop with its litter of icons. And then set it as the wall paper.

After a couple of days, he started complaining that he had duplicate icons, he could not drag duplicate icons to the bin, double click didn’t work etc. IT support arrived and surprisingly could not work it out either!

His OS got re-installed 😳

I just pulled the C Lyon prank.

I got my colleague Mat to ring a local pet shop and askfor C Lyon.

The owner of the shop (I found out afterwards) said “you should try the sea”,

Mat said “yeah yeah very funny, I need to speak with C Lyon please”

“I think someone might be pulling your leg mate”

Priceless 😆

Cougar WRT your Weasel story…

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ezel

It would work better in Dutch!

The call up letter reminded me of this one…

I was at college during the first Gulf War and some of my classmates were worried that if it carried on too long the govt might resort to conscription. We identified someone suitably gullible and sent a letter requesting he report for interview at a recruiting centre. It was mostly quite believable except for the bit about testing his aptitude for active service in a bomb disposal unit. Apparently he arrived at college and told the first teacher he met of the situation – the teacher shook his hand and wished him luck before heading off to inform all the other teachers. I was never sure who told him the truth but it was all over by mid-morning. Fortunately the lad in question took it very well.

Black tape on the bottom of a colleagues optical mouse always amuses me.

Also, print screen, paste into word and expand the view so it looks like their desktop but is only a picture

Oh how I loved working in an office

Once, we phoned the pub we were in and asked if Michael Hunt was in the bar.

Oh how we laughed when the barmaid asked if anyone had seen him.

Managed to rig the secret santa name draw the one and only time we had it at our office. Replaced all the names in the ‘hat’ with just one guys name. Much confussion on the big present swap day when about 10 people turned up with presents for this one guy. Everyone saw the funny side, but the woman organising it didn’t bother the next year. Result!

The visual indicator and user acceptance for SMS remote control can easily be removed though a couple of registry keys. Then you can take over someone PC’s without their knowledge. Subtle mouse moves or all out control. So many options.

Another one was to edit someones auto correct file. The best of those was our IT trainer, Marie. Changed ‘the’ to ‘Marie has a fishy cat’. Well about a week later she goes balistic as it auto changed during a training course when her screen was on the big white board. Obviously hadn’t typed ‘the’ during the previous week.

There was one contractor who thought of himself as a big practical joker. Well that made him a big target for us. He got the remote control thing a few times before he figured out what was going on. CD tray popping out was another we used to get him with. Or playing wav/mp3 files remotely on his machine while he was on the phone. Not really practical jokes as he knew what was going on and who was doing it.
Did get him on a good wind up once. Had a sound board of a guy giving someone a hard time for chatting up his gf. Called up the contractor and used the sound board to have a go at him for messing with the guys gf. Saying stuff like ‘leave her alone’, ‘I know what you did’, ‘I know where you live’, etc. Only had a limited number of phrases to use, but managed to make the conversation with him flow quite well and he fell for it hook line and sinker. After a couple of days of him looking over his shoulder we came clean. I’m surprised he had cottoned on to it being us, especially as it was shortly after we’d advertised his laptop for sale in the local paper.

Was a Vehicle electrician in the army.

In Belfast in 2003 when we had to prep all the snatch landies that were spare so they could be sent to Basra. Had a
Sparkie straight out of training who constantly came over to ask how to do this and that. I decided to get rid of him for an hour or 2 so I could crack on. Changed the side light and indicator rubies over on a snatch over the far side of the vehicle park. Told him the side lights were flashing when the indicators were on and the indicators were staying on permanent. Didn’t see him for 4 hrs. He still hadn’t figured it out.

Out in Norway I was bored, so while my mate the mechanic was servicing a BV206 I thought it would be a great laugh to wire the brake lights to the horn. You could turn it off with a wee switch under the dash. Anyways dropped the wagon off with the battery and flicked the switch. Turns out it was the CO’s. After a day being driven around the ranges, he was nearly deaf. When I got posted out of the unit I went up to the hanger and flicked the switch again.

At Uni, a mate of mine figured out that all the PCs had an instant messaging system. You could send a message to any other PC in the lab just by reading the reference number printed on it and using that as the “address”.

So the game was to wait until you spotted someone looking at something they shouldn’t / playing games / etc., then send them a message from the “University Technical Disciplinary Panel”, stating that they had repeatedly been detected making inappropriate use of University IT equipment, that they were in serious trouble and that they should remain in their seat until a panel officer arrived.

Some absolute classics there, seems as if there is still humour in the workplace.

I once rang the local radio station up with a guess of the year of the top ten at 10 using the name Miballsa Ritchie and they read it out…..

At work I wound up one of the students once. A few where with me at the time who were all mates and one called Kelly said her mate Claire had asked her what a saddle junction is. Well its the name of a roundabout near here and on the sign it says Saddle Junction, just like magic roundabout in Swindon and so on.

Anyway, between Kelly and me we decided to wind Claire up by telling her its a junction that horses have priority on and you have to stop for them no matter what. She was only driving with me and no one else so I wouldn’t have let her stop if we did happen to meet a horse on the roundabout.

For weeks she kept mentioning that nowhere in the theory did it mention these junctions and no one else knew about it and we finally let on before she went and did her theory. She was not happy…..

Had one girl who was really rough on the controls like the indictor stalk ( nearly snapping it off when indicating ) and in the end I jokingly said to her ” be carefull, if you indicate the wrong way when cancelling the indicator more than 3 times in an hour it sets the ejector seat off on the drivers side ” can’t believe said believed me as I was only joking so I carried on with it till she was ready for test. Thought is better tell her it was a joke as she was so gullible she would probably use the indicator to escape a crash…..

Local radio station (Beacon fm in west mids) used to hold a competition called phantom phone box. They’d describe a phone box somewhere in west mids and the first person to go out and find said phone box and answer it would win a prize. Listening at home, I heard a phone box being described that I recognised and happened to have the number for. Called it up just as the radio station were going to and gleefully told the chap that answered that I was sabotaging the competition. They did call back though and I left it so he could finally get his prize! (In fact the guy worked at race co cycles in Stourbridge iirc so may be lurking on here…)

Student house share in Clifton, Bristol in the mid 90’s. Clearly too much time on our hands…
1) Pound coin + superglue = instant fun. Best response was bloke out walking dog, returned 10 mins later without dog but with hammer and chisel! and a defiant look at the house.
2) Lots of fun with prank calls to the payphone round the corner which nowadays would probably get us arrested. Usually involving trying to convince the person answering the phone that they should take the proceeds from the deal now stashed in a pizza box ontop of the said phone box. Contents ranged from instructions on where to find the money to very old food
3)The usual pranks of swopping all the CDs in someones collection into different boxes, cling film on the toilets etc, chilli powder in milk that you come up with
4) our finest hour involved a bit of an obsessive chap whose door was always locked and had his own fridge etc in his room. We ‘liberated’ a dry ice/smoke machine one evening when we were out and then made a funnel out of paper and sellotape so we could blow dry ice into his locked room through a half centimetre gap. Half an hour before he got home we filled his room and waited for him to come home. On opening the door he lost it and started throwing all his possessions into the hallway, shouting for help and wondering why we weren’t helping…we were apoplectic with laughter. Took him ages to calm down. Not sure he ever forgave us!
Happy days