Posted on 09/24/2011 6:19:55 AM PDT by MNDude
My brother and his friends were the kings of practical jokes.
On Parent-Teacher night at the high school, they chained & locked up the 2 entrances to the school, locking all the parents in jail, as it were. The next year the security folks were ready for this prank. My brother’s friends lit off several firecrackers & fireworks, the security dudes all ran to the location and then my brother’s friends proceeded to lock up the gates a second time.
Their coup de grace was when they were seniors they stole the junior team’s homecoming game float. They intended to write “Eat Me” on it and drive it onto the football field during half time, like the “Animal House” movie. But they were so nervous from having stolen it, they were driving too fast and the trailer flipped over. They couldn’t get it unflipped; they were near a cliff, so they pushed it over the cliff & got the hell out of there. Then a couple of days later, another senior found the float, and decided to set it on fire. He was caught. Naturally, everyone assumed he was the one who stole it in the first place, so my brother’s friends got off scot-free.
While some friends were on vacation, we built a wall in their hallway, completely eliminating all the bedrooms in their house. Studs, drywall, paint...the works. We’re still friends.
My neighbor was afreadi to light her gas grill after a friends grill exploded. I told her that I’d liget it and went in my house to get some matches. I also grabbed an M-80. I lit the M-80 and tossed it next to the grill, stuck my head inside near the grate and lit a match. Just then she came out onto her deck. There was an earth shattering KABOOM and a louder scream.
School paper posted a pic of a bus in front of the chalked 'crime scene' and had to print a retraction the following day that a bus did not kill someone.
I did the same thing...but it was in my mom’s living room. Had crime scene tape on the door too. She freaked out when she got home and had lot’s of neighbors ask what happened at her house.
Just outside Bryn Mawr station, some fraternity people expertly painted the Lionel logo on a railroad bridge over a local street. It was so professional that Amtrak decided not to remove it. Decades later, it's still there.
I’m not a prankster, and don’t normally like them. But, sometimes...
Back when I was in graduate school, one of our lab techs related the story of a fishing trip he and several buddies had gone on. Planning to get up at about 4 am, they set up camp, had dinner, and everyone crawled into their sleeping bags for the night.
They waited until they were sure the intended victim had fallen asleep, then very quietly changed the time on all the clocks and watches and crawled back into their sleeping bags and pretended to be asleep. So when the alarms went off a little while later, they made a show of getting up, stretching and yawning, and saying things like, “I feel great! I’m ready to get out and fish!”
Meanwhile, the victim kept saying, “I didn’t sleep very well. I feel like I only got about an hour of sleep.”
So they went out on their boat and set up their fishing poles and waited. After a while, the victim looked at his watch and said, “Hey, guys? Shouldn’t it be getting light by now?”
“Naw,” they said.
A little while later: “Um, what happened to the sun?”
“Nothing. It hasn’t come up yet.”
As time went on without any signs of sunrise, the poor guy kept getting more and more scared.
They kept this up until about 7 am (by the victim’s watch).
Best prank I played was accidentally taken to another level by a co-worker.
I was hired to program batch COBOL on a mainframe in a city office. It turns out that there was a way to write to the screen and get user input. This was new to me, so I practiced it. (For all you computer geeks, it wasn't CICS, but I don't remember what it was.)
So at one point, I created a map that looked like an exact copy of the screen. So when you ran the program, it looked like nothing had happened. "Oh, it didn't work." I could say if he was sitting there, and then walk back to my cubicle.
Whatever you typed next, was greeted with " Program not found".
Usually, the person would just think he'd typed the command incorrectly, and would type it again.
"Program not found" again. Now they get a little worried or puzzled and carefully and deliberately type in the program name one letter at a time and check it was right and then hit Enter.
After which they saw:
"Look, Bud, I said 'PROGRAM NOT FOUND'."
This was followed by a few taunts and finally this request:
"Say the magic word."
If you said the magic word, it let you out (see below). Otherwise, it looped into "I'm not doing anything until you say the magic word."
The first person I pulled this on then gave me a mean idea before he tried it on someone. I added, at the end,
"You didn't sound sincere." for an added giggle.
I also had it check for user id, so I could tailor "Bud" to the handful of user ids I knew at the time.
He tried it on the woman who had trained us, who had a great laugh at it. So she immediately went to her friend's computer and launched while he was in the computer room.
HOWEVER, he comes back with a bunch of people including a woman who updated the network and (I think) took care of security. It was some kind of group talk going on about all sorts of things, and the woman, Valerie, sits down at this guy's computer to look something up.
And the fun begins. Joyce (the woman who trained me) is quietly sitting in the background watching the fun). The rest of them are totally perplexed at the prompts and don't know what to do.
Martin, one of the system guys, hears the commotion and walks over. "Martin, help us!" they call him. He reads the screen, "Say the magic word".
"Martin, please help us" she responds, not actually understanding what she had just said.
Martin apparently didn't get it either as he was ready to take the entire system down to get rid of this virus. Did I mention that this was a city agency. A NYC government agency. One that prints out lots of checks and stuff. Not a good thing to do without a good reason.
Joyce finally stopped it when she thought it was about to spin out of control. And Martin was a tad worried about me because he thought I'd actually found a way to hack the system after only two months there never realizing that they weren't actually in the system at the time.
We put a microphone in a porta-john and waited for the first woman to walk in. After a moment we yelled “hey lady, we’re working down here” and waited for the results.
In 9th grade, I used to torture our poor band director. Our band room used to have a hugely long display case with about 20 bust heads of famous composers - Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Holst, etc. One day, I stayed late after school and took some jump rope from the gym. I then fashioned about two dozen hanging nooses and got to work! Wasn’t the greatest prank, but it was a memorable visual of 20 hanging composer heads - and the stunned, ashen look on our director’s face as he entered the band room.
I’m really not a prank person, but I did see this in the parking lot of the supermarket by us and I thought it was quite clever.
There was a car there completely covered in post-it notes. On close inspection I saw each one had something written on it, some were really quite mean.
I don’t know who the car owner had p*ssed off, but it did seem like a harmless way to really, really, irritate someone.
I suppose you could even use it a different way, and write positive things on the post-its, but you’d still have the annoyance of having to take them all off the car!
One of my better math students in our high school got bored and faked a seizure, falling out of his desk and all. When I figured out it was faked, I decided on my revenge.
We had a test coming up. So, I carefully taped “Test, Chapter 5” to the top of what was actually Chapter 6 test. Photocopied it.
Got the entire class to fake finishing their Chapter 5 test in about 15 minutes. A couple of students thoughtfully commented that they were surprised how easy the test was.
Of course, my student with the wrong test was hurting. The problems looked similar to what we had been studying, but enough different that he couldn’t solve them.
I told him that the class had to advance, so he could go to the classroom next door and finish the test, while the rest went on the Chapter 6.
By the end of the day, he had been booted from the other room and ended up in the reception to the principal’s office, still struggling to do the test.
Finally, I let him in on the trick. We’re still good friends 9 years later.
Sorry for taking so long to get back. I have to say it was great. When the boss asked who did it I fessed up right away. When he asked me why I told him I was just trying to keep her harmlessly occupied and out of my hair.
Do a screen print on your friend’s computer desktop, then make it his wall paper. Then put all the real icons into a new folder. He will click away at the icon pictures and wonder why nothing works.
So I was in my early twenties and there was a MD Scientist -the head of a department - a big shot. I had a meeting with him on a grant program he was starting. It was just he and I in his office. He had a reputation.
Anyway, he was walking around while we did some planning for this project; I am in a chair. All of a sudden, he’s behind me and from behind, he grabbed my boobs. I threw my papers and books at him and ran. The men in my office wanted to go beat him up and the women wanted to harm him. But my female Jamacian boss had different plans.
So the next day he shows up for work and had a lovely vegetable arrangment on his desk, on his secretary’s desk, on his conference table - a big squash sticking up with two complementary tomatoes. In fact, every time he had a meeting with any man or woman in my area, he was graced with same arrangement on the conference table, especially when we had out of town guests. My boss would coo at him because he was such “pretty boy.”
We also referred to him and “Dr. Hotty” even at meetings in front of his peers. When they asked about it, we would tell the horrified pervert to let them in on the joke. He never did. We got hours of laughter out of that. Sexual harassment is not all it’s cracked up to be. He got a new job.
LOL.
I was working in an office environment, and for some reason my wife bought me a “screaming golf ball”. The little ball had two metal terminals on it, and if you touched the two terminals the golf ball would emit a woman’s scream.
I had to go into the office on a Sunday, and had the ball with me. I showed the thing to a co-worker. He had the idea of attaching two ends of telephone wire from a huge spool to it. When we touched the two other ends of the wire together the ball still screamed.
So we put the screamer in the suspended ceiling of another office and ran the wire down the hall in the ceiling to my office halfway up the hall from the target office. When you touched the wires together in my office, the ball screamed in the victims’ office, and you couldn’t tell where the heck the sound came from.
Once the office had settled down for the day, we set the screamer off. They came bounding out of their office in shock. We all searched the office and found nothing.
We only set if off once more that day. But over the next few weeks we would make it scream several times a day.
One of the office managers figured out my buddy and I were somehow behind this, just from the grins on our faces. We showed her how it worked. She told us to wait till she got down there and to set if off again.
The thing screamed in their office, and the manager stormed in. “I don’t know how you two are making this weird noise, but it stops right now. I don’t want to hear this again!”
The professed their ignorance, but she wouldn’t hear it. She told them this was their last warning. She slammed their door, and I immediately touched the wires together making it scream. She jerked the door open, “WHAT DID I TELL YOU!!!” All they could say was “We didn’t do it.”
Someone called the exterminator, thinking a possum had somehow gotten trapped in the walls. He didn’t find a thing.
Heh. We did that once to a guy.
He would come over and be a black hole of a party guy, as in, he couldn’t converse well at all, would get your attention and be unable to really complete a sentence as he got weird when the center of attention. Strange dude. Nice enough but strange.
One night he dropped by around 6 pm or so, and fell asleep on the couch about 7:30 ish. It was winter so it was dark. We set the clocks to 2:45 a.m. and posed like we were sleeping. One guy “woke up” and shook weird guy awake and told him he needed to go home. He left thinking it was the middle of the night.
I had a fellow employee that for some reason went out of his way to personally aggravate me every day, so I took a dead fat mama shrew and stuffed it into the defroster duct of his Peterbilt concrete mixer in the middle of summer, and then I poked a pinhole in the air line to his seat so it would deflate and slowly drop lower and lower forcing him to constantly having to push the button in increasing air.
I still have my job there, he is long gone and history.
But I would have to also agree the biggest and most expertly executed prank in history is beyond and doubt the election of Barack Hussein Obama who wouldn’t even allow the MSM to print his middle name. Or that he was a Moslem.
And the glaring fact that he failed to qualify but was installed into office anyway.
And now everybody is falling over each other condemning Obama for failing to convert America into a pseudo-socialist/Islamic nation.
We used to put a string of fire-crackers in the school court yard with a cigarette “delayed fuse”. Always fun to be 5-10 minutes into class waiting for it to go off and rushing to the windows with everyone else to see what happened!
Two older kids were always getting in trouble. Their best prank was one guy holding a pair of cowboy boots outside the third story window - like he was holding somebody upside down. His buddy was down in the courtyard yelling “don’t drop me!” When the teacher came in the kid at the window quickly dropped the boots and slammed the window like “Nothing to see here!”
By the time the teacher gets to the window the other kid is sprawled out on the ground below!
Those two kids were kicked out of school for good when they had a dirt-bike race inside the school. Up and down stairs, etc.
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