sasKuach

So yesterday, my coworkers set a box full of bottle caps in one of my cuble cabinets. When I opened the door, they all came raining out. It was all in good fun, they helped me pick them up, but... I want to get them back. Any ideas for safe and funny (emphasis on safe) booby traps to rig in their cubicles. I've searched online and only found how to rig a rat trap with a shotgun shell or hang fish hooks from trees... not the most appropriate, I think.

Acceptable payloads would be silly string or puffs of glitter, etc. Think Mentos+Coke bomb.

Rob

shakran

http://www.serversunderthesun.com/tin/

Nuff said

Lady Sage

Fill their desk drawers full of styrofoam peanuts.

Cover anything that will sit still with post-it notes.

Hang paper clip chains across the top of their office.

Create a masking tape outline of a body on the floor and section off the entrance with yellow crime scene tape. (e-bay)

My personal favorite... Take over making the coffee.... use decaf. Give it 2 weeks then make a strong pot of espresso.

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sasKuach

LMAO @ the tinfoil prank

Unfortunately, everybody locks their cabinets and drawers, so it has to be external. My cabinet was open, nothing in it yet.

politicophile

Well, there's the old "change their computer startup noise to a five-minute porn soundtrack" trick. Maximum volume is a must. You can also screw around with their computer accessories. For example, if two of your targets work back to back, you can plug their mice into the other's machine. Ditto with phone lines. I personally think the best pranks involve a lot of embarassing noise being produced from the victim's vicinity.

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ngdawg

Switch just a couple of seemingly innocuous keys on their keyboards or calculators, M and N for instance.
I pulled this on my boss-I switched the keys on his calculator to resemble a phone keypad. Even though he was a CPA, he did look at the keypad occasionally while doing his books and couldn't figure out why when he hit one number, another one came up....took HIS boss coming in to figure it out...while I left the office and got hysterical laughing.
The classic is hiding a single shrimp really well and letting the smell drive them nuts...

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shakran

you in the cube next to 'em? Get a USB keyboard and plug it into the back of his computer. Type random characters, or even whole sentences (especially effective if you can see him, and you type to him not to do whatever he's doing).

Dilbert1234567

1. have fun with Microsoft word's auto correct function

2. replace basic system sound files (received mail) with porn sound tracks (bow chicka bow wow) change the actual file it's self (make a backup of the old one)

3. use a scheduled task on your system (or a second unwary coworker) to repeatedly make the change in number 2 every few hours. (admin rights needed)

4. make screen saver's time out 1 second, (registry setting)

5. make a copy of the bosses [wife|kids|girl friend] pictures, frame it and place it on their desk, make sure the boss sees it.

6. place tape on the mouse ball / optical sensor

7. mess with the host file to redirect major websites to alternative websites (C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\host)

8. place paint on their phone receiver

9. saran wrap everything.

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Ch'i

• Place a sales add in the newspaper for a coworker's home along with an "open house" date. Price to sell.

• Get ahold of their PDA (or wherever they keep their schedule) and add one or two random meeting appointments. Be somewhat vague and make it realistic. For example: Not really booby traps, but they should provide good times.

pan6467

Something very devious yet goodhearted and relatively harmless...... hmmmm

I don't know how much effort you want to put into it..... but the old shrinking growing game is fun.

Take the coworkers cubicle walls and slide something not to visible under them to make them "grow",

take the desk part and raise it 3-4 inches no more it'll be too obvious,

take the chair and lower it all the way.

When the coworker comes in, they'll notice everything has "grown" but then realize the chair was just lowered, but even when they raise it to that "normal comfortable level" it doesn't feel right for some reason..... here they may see you raise there cubicle wall... haha.... so they lower them but the work area just doesn't seem to fit right.

The next day you raise the chair up, lower the desk (below original height.... be careful to make sure the dustline or whatever can't give it away, and if they didn't catch the walls the day before, lower the walls (if possible)

They come in everything is lower than it was ohhh the chair again.... haha funny be creative.....

continue doing this each time raising the desk and wall higher than before and lowering the walls and desk than before..... until they finally have the desk below their knees, too high to work on or finally figure it out.

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I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

tinfoil

Pan, you're devious.

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Sultana

I have enjoyed changing the orientation of co-worker's mouses (mice?) to a backwards curlycue, or something like, and changing the speed to hyperdrive. When they mouse forward, the cursor shoots off all over the place!

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fhqwhgads

I once changed the I and O key on my friend's keyboard while he was on vacation. Great prank for "hunt n' peckers" who have one of those letters in their password.

shakran

good one Pan. I pulled that on my mother once when I was a kid. She was NOT amused.



Yeah. . .I got grounded a lot.

Seaver

You'll have to adapt this to being safe for work, but in the college dorm we did it in it was perfect.

We had this dorm neighbor who would go into our rooms when we were in someone else's room (our doors were always open), then would download and hide gay porn on our computer. Well, this got old REALLY fast, and it just so happened his long-distance girlfriend was coming in the weekend. We got on his computer and deleted all of the shortcuts on his desktop and start menu. We then downloaded lots of the nastiest gay porn you can find, and changed the .mpg icon to the regular desktop things. Internet Explorer, Firefox, My Computer, etc were all in reality gay porn. We also took off the right-click function on the mouse so he couldn't use that.

Needless to say his girlfriend thought it was hilarious, and he was pissed. We also mysteriously never found anymore gay porn on our computers.

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sasKuach

Awesome ideas everybody. I think I'll start simple and put tape on his mouse sensor, over the mic and speaker in his phone and tape down the earpiece button.

On a side note about gay porn, I'll share my mine. My roommates covered my room in it one time while I was gone. Well, once everybody got a good laugh out of it, I made a big show of disposing of it, while in reality I KEPT most of it. Over the next few weeks, I hid it EVERYWHERE in their stuff. Examples include in booklets inside CD jewel cases, between pages of an atlas, underwear drawer, spare sleeping bag, cookbook, etc. Well, they kept finding that stuff for I think a year afterwards. Both with embarrasing consequences. One of them was on a trip with his gf and she found it in his atlas. The other one had his dad over to visit who insisted on using the sleeping bag...

Anyway, I appreciate all the ideas, I'll be watching this thread so keep them coming!

ironpham

Here's an old one. Take a screenshot of their normal desktop with no windows opened or anything like that. Then delete all of their desktop icons and hide the taskbar. Change the background to the screenshot you took, and watch them try and figure out why they can't do anything.

Also, I heard about this one, but I don't know how well it would work. Open up the earpiece and the mouthpiece to the phone and fill them up with something heavy like coins or something. Leave it there for about a week or so. Afterwards, take them out. The next time they answer the phone, hopefully they will smack themselves in the face.

NoSoup

I did this to a fellow I worked with. Every time he typed his name, it would immediately be replaced by "Batman" - one of the funniest things ever...

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Zyr

Oh that's genius, funniest thing I've heard in a while.

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The_Jazz

The most genius one I've ever been involved in happened after we were all out with underwriters late one night and one of my coworkers met a hot young thing at the bar. He was all disapointed that he didn't get her phone number, but he did tell us her distinctive-sounding name.

In the morning, one of us set up a hotmail address in best approximation of her name that we could get and started peppering him with emails asking him out. He was all proud of himself, thinking he'd given her his card or something and set up lunch with her that afternoon (at "her" prompting for that). Lunch was scheduled at 12:30, and he didn't tell any of us animals why he wasn't going out with us instead. There was a mention of lots of work, but he clammed up as far as telling the rest of us what was going on after he got a second email.

Needless to say, we all got to the restaurant (different than the one he thought we were all going to) about 20 mintues before the "date", enlisted the help of the manager and laughed our asses off when the manager escorted him back to our table. He didn't think it was nearly as funny as we did, but it still goes down as one of the greatest pranks I've ever been a part of.

Note: this obviously works equally well with non-coworkers.

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Glory's Sun

change their bootscreen to a picture of BSOD. They'll go mad trying to figure out why their computer keeps crashing.

Xazy

Wow, this thread rules, so many new things to try out!!

Dilbert1234567

change the spelling of the bosses name just a tiny bit is even better.

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cj2112

take a screenshot of their desktop, then hide all their icons, and use that screenshot as their background

tinfoil

Ohhh damn, I am going to try that!

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FuriousAvatar

caver

With that windows snapshot prank, you also move the start bar to a location other than the one they use.

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balderdash111

I've actually done this one to a co-worker. It takes a lot of time, so we waited until she went on vacation for a week.

Others I know of or have done:

If the victim has an office, stack (empty) boxes floor to ceiling just inside the door to make a solid wall. When she opens the door, she is presented with a wal of boxes and, theoretically, the illusion that the entire room is full of these things. From experience, you need to put in at least two rows deep so that light doesn't get through to spoil the illusion.

Cover the desk with cups of water. No easy way to clean up.

I happen to think messing with someone's computer (especially things like auto-correct) is dirty pool. You may forget to undo something and they may not realize it until they submit a report to a boss with "FUCKFACE" in it, or something.

Fill office/cubicle with packing peanuts. (for cubicle, cover the "door" with a wall of plastic wrap to keep the peanuts in)

There is bound to be something you can do with bubble wrap

Stinky cheese

If you don't mind being accused of ripping off The Office, Jim has pulled some fantastic pranks on Dwight. The stapler in jello is a classic.

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mirevolver

Cover every square inch of the floor with dixie cups filled with water. That way they won't be able to get into their cubicle without first empting/removing all the cups.

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sasKuach

OMG the quarantine prank is hilarious! But I think embedding the mouse in jello takes it.

I want to wait a good while before I do anything to this guy. He's done the falling-box-full-of-water-bottle-caps trick to a few people now, and he plans to do more. My hope is that he won't know who pulled one on him.

Dilbert1234567

staple them together

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Mister Coaster

There is always the large delivery box placed in his work area. You hide inside and pop out when he opens it. Simple, yet effective and classic.

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flstf

I once worked in a large office located on a construction site. There were two engineers who worked there and were good friends and always playing practical jokes on each other. Stuff like taping the inside of the mouthpiece of the phone so the party you are speaking to keeps asking you to speak up until you are practically yelling and one time super gluing everything on the desk down. Putting bullet hole decals on the car windows, etc.. Putting the handheld radio on broadcast mode and getting the other guy to complain about his boss so everyone on site would hear. This went on for months.

It finally stopped when one of the guys used a cherry picker to place the other's Ford Bronco on top of a large diameter 12 foot long concrete pipe standing on its end in the parking lot. When he left for the day his truck was 12 ft. in the air and the construction crews were gone. It took him several days to arrange to get it down. One of these fellows was from Iran and the other a good ol' boy from Tennessee. They stayed good friends but were told to stop with the practical jokes.

Maveric

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=4770
My favorite Jim Halpert prank was the one where he made dwight hit himself in the head with the handle of his phone...

he claimed that every day he would put a nickle into the handset of Dwight's phone until it was nice and heavey and Dwight unknowingly grew accustomed to the heavier weight... and then one day he emptied out all of the nickels...

i have doubts that this would work in real-life but i find the idea is halarious.