At my first software company job in the 90s, they had windows 3.1 on the PCs when I first got there. That version had a feature where you could configure a sound file to play, right as windows was loading and it couldn’t be interrupted. I would set that to play a 3 minute long reggae song (.wav) on my friend’s computer so when he came in, we would all hear that play through his tinny little built in speaker and he couldn’t stop it. Took him a week to figure out how to remove that.

Important note - many may not know this, but you can erase sharpie on a dry erase board with a dry erase marker - you just color over it and erase like normal.

I drew a massive penis on a buddy’s desk white board (this was before Covid when we were in an IT office setting) in sharpie, and then finished the drawing by turning it into a cat with a similar black dry erase marker.

At some point he erased the cat, only to be left with a big hog leg he couldn’t erase due to it being sharpie. He freaked out for a bit before I helped him erase it.

This happened to my dad when I was a kid.

He was a manager with a corner office, we had gone on vacation, and when he got back his employees had removed all of his office furniture and replaced it with fresh sod, a beach chair, a cooler, and a lawn flamingo.

We got a new side yard lawn out of it!

Damn… Better than I got, but I still had fun.

On my way out from my mostly office job in the military:

• Each desk had an overhead cabinet with cabinet doors that opened upward. One of my coworkers was constantly complaining and trying to fix a speaker wire that often fell out of his overhead drawer and hung down. So, first, I took a sheet of paper and wrote “Make it rain!” on one side. I then taped it very securely to the back of the cabinet door, with the writing facing down. On top of the paper, I placed hundreds of old pennies that had been collecting in a desk drawer for some reason. And then for a finishing touch, I made sure that annoying wire was hanging out so he’d want to open the cabinet immediately and fix it. With the inevitable result that he’d yank the door open, pulling the paper out with it, and once the pennies were past the edge of the cabinet, they’d fall and scatter everywhere, leaving the paper hanging there and reading “make it rain”.

• Boss’s desk had a deck of playing cards on it that were never used. I took those and hid every single one of them in various places around the office. Underneath keyboards, between the pages of technical manuals, taped to the bottom of desk chairs, amidst the clutter in desk drawers, inside a coworker’s lunchbox, in the freezer of the office fridge, behind computer monitors, under the wiper of the boss’s car outside, on top of high cabinets, etc, etc, etc. Oh, and of course one sitting with the pennies from the previous prank, to fall down with them. Some of them would be easy to find and be noticed almost immediately, like one tacked to the office bulletin board, some would be nearly impossible to find and would probably only be noticed years later, if ever, like one tucked up into the ceiling tiles. But every single card in that deck found a new and innovative hiding spot.

As I was on the way out, I never got to see these come to fruition. I was gone by the time anyone noticed. But I did get a text message a day later that only said “You beautiful bastard”. That was satisfying.

Not so much a prank, but a nefarious scheme that worked beyond expectations. Back in the '90s I worked at the mid-west distribution center for a very large multinational corporation. It was a large center, but it was located at the edge of a little podunk town in a rural area. All the big wigs at the center lived in a nicer town about thirty minutes away along the only highway. In the winter, bad snow storms would sometime close the highway making it very hard for the bosses to get home.

One Friday morning, a coworker and I decided to start a rumor. We told a few people that we had ‘heard’ that a snowstorm expected that afternoon was going to be very bad and the highway was going to close. It was BS but this was more or less pre-internet so it wasn’t like anyone could really look it up or anything. In reality, the storm was expected to be no big deal.

Within half about an hour, another coworker came up to us and told us the rumor that we’d started. A bit later, our boss came and repeated it to us. Then we heard someone say that a DJ on a local radio station was talking about the potential for the highway to be closed. Again, this was utter BS we had just made up. Within an hour or two, the directors who ran the facility, and lived half hour down that highway, decided to close the facility early so they could ‘beat the storm.’

My coworker and I started our weekend early at a local watering hole and watched the snow fail to pile up. The highway never did get closed, of course.

We went out to the bosses car and attached cable ties to his drive shaft so when he drove off his car started going ting tang the faster he went.

We finished at 5 him at 4. He got out the gate stopped then went then stopped and came back and brought it into the workshop. We “looked at it” couldn’t see anything wrong test drove it and said we had no idea what he’s on about.

Soent that last hour of the day gaslighting the boss that we couldn’t hear the noise and have no idea what he’s on about.

Then cut it off and sent him on his way.

Few months later did it again

My favorite pranks were from back in school, where I wrote a very basic program I wrote that could bring a (single core) system to its knees by sending the system beep character faster than the system could actually beep, so it would just beep ever slower until you killed the power. I used to randomly swap out the old Firefox icon for that program when certain people in class annoyed me. The best part was I never got caught doing it, even after I snuck it into the ghost image the IT guy (who was technically my boss since I helped out in the computer lab) used across a bunch of systems.

For actual work pranks, it was just the standard screenshot the desktop and hide everything sort of pranks, other than the time I got a couple annoy-a-trons into my dick manager’s drop ceiling, and it drove him nuts for months, and he didn’t find them until well after I left and the batteries in them died. I think that IT actually found it when running new Ethernet to his office.

I put a TSR on my coworkers machine when he left it unlocked one day.

All it did was play a quiet random barnyard sound every ~5,000th key press.

It drove him absolutely bonkers for months because there were days when it wouldn’t happen at all

Around the time that the 2010s My Little Pony was getting super popular, my manager was really annoyed by it because his kid LOVED it and he had to watch it and be exposed to it constantly. He didn’t mind that his kid liked it, but just like one of those songs that gets played waaaaay too much on the radio, he was just super sick of MLP at this point.

He had a little shelf on his desk with a bunch of little figurines for various nerdy things that most of us on his team were also fans of - Batman characters, horror movie characters, etc.

One day while in Walmart, I passed by an end cap display that had bins full of blind bag, tiny MLP figures for a dollar each. I immediately bought 5.

I slowly started adding them amidst his figurines on his shelf, about one per week. It took until after I placed the third one before he finally noticed and immediately came storming over with them in hand, stopped near my desk…and then turned to my coworker and just went, “Dammit Gary!!!”

A few months later for Valentine’s Day I saw a bunch of small MLP valentines cards that were all connected accordion style, so I bought them and then taped them along the edge of his desk like a little table skirt. That time he knew it was me, obviously.

I added a functional SWAG key to a coworker’s obnoxious mechanical keyboard.

https://ch00ftech.com/2015/04/12/xx_mlg_keyboard_xx-swag-yolo-420/

Preface by saying I hate practical jokes. I regularly commuted to work by bicycle and kept my bike in my cubicle. One day a coworker known for practical jokes moved my bike to the warehouse and hid it under sheets of cardboard. Took over an hour after work for me to find it. Shifted my ride time so I endured the peak of rush hour, not funny.

Next day I saw the same coworker had left the keys to his mid 70’s Jeep Grand Wagoneer on his desk. Grabbed the keys, threw my bike in the back and drove about four miles away and parked behind a building in a complex of light industrial businesses. Many running three shifts so lots were always parked up. Rode my bike back to work and handed my coworker his keys and said it’s within a five mile radius and good luck. Didn’t stop his pranking but never pranked me again.

The movie The Matrix Revolutions just came out. This company had no software or any terms that could be confused with this movie name. I trasfered to IT from sales, I discovered that in our internal software I could trigger a pop up alert tied to user login. So I made a pop up linked to my old teammates login that said “If you proceed this will destroy The Matrix”. Then I gave it just an OK button.

She called me in IT about 1.5 seconds after I deployed and was like “I don’t know what I did, I don’t want to break The Matrix”.

i did a “print screen” of a person’s desktop. set it as the background image. drug all working icons into a folder and placed it inconspicuously at the bottom of the screen. it was the only live file on the desktop. Went and told IT what I had done so it wouldn’t waste their time.

One of the techs at the MSP I was working for several years ago got a fancy new company laptop which he was over the moon about. One afternoon when he had left his desk with the laptop open I went in and installed the BSOD screensaver and set it to default.

I left it and didn’t think much more of it for the next few months and he didn’t say anything about it. I forget how it came up, but I eventually asked him how his new laptop was, if he was having any problems with it (wink wink). He tells me all about how it’s crashing all the time, he’s been removing and reinstalling drivers, refreshing the Windows install, all kinds of crazy stuff. So I finally own up to the prank. He thought it was pretty funny when I showed him the screensaver.

deleted by creator