Pranks, japes and wanton cruelty to your friends

[Keith Houchen]

Just now, Teedy Kay said:

From that moment on I would get to work beforw him and swap over the 'n' and 'm' keys on his keyboard.

Looks like revenge is "Sewwt"

[Thunderplex]

A guy at work was having his Virgin Media account frozen for a couple of weeks.  He's an avid Walking Dead fan, so we conspired to let a spoiler out that Rick was having a piss in the bushes, and a zombie pops up and bites his dick off.

To just blatantly shout it out would have been obvious, so we just had conversations about it slightly out of hearing distance where he would just get the flavour of what was being said, getting snippets here and there.  By Wednesday he had nearly fallen for it, so we set the coup de grace.  One of the admin girls know for her loud bluntness shouted across the room to me "you watch that stupid zombie thing don't you". "Yes, why". "What's all this I read about some bloke getting his cock bit off on it?  Fucking disgusting.  Why do you watch that shite". This hooked him in completely.  He was hoping ape shit about us spoiling things for him.

2 weeks later got a text.  "Just watched them, have I missed an episode?"  "Why"."Ricks not had his dick bit off yet". "Really?". "Yes". "Really?". "Yes". "Really?". "Bunch of twats".

[Carbomb]

I really need to pick your brains for this sort of thing, Thunderplex. Between this, Bensons for Beds, and simply mentioning clothes shrinking in the wash leading to a bitch colleague thinking her arse had gotten bigger, you've clearly got the spark.

[Thunderplex]

It's more reactionary from a specific situation.  If I just decided to wind someone up dry, I'd have no idea.

[BomberPat]

My favourite work prank I've done myself was to the boss' kid at an old job. He was a good laugh and, knowing that he was more or less untouchable, always knew the right side of taking the piss - we worked in a call centre, and he'd usually be the one to instigate a game of crowbarring in specific phrases or words to your next phone call, or introduce himself on the phone with a made-up name, or challenge people to try and get through their next phone call in a different accent. All fun stuff.

At the same time, we had a manager whose way of teaching you not to leave your computer unlocked when you left your desk was to send dodgy emails from your PC when he noticed. He was going to do the same to the boss' kid, but I thought that was too obvious. So instead, I took a screenshot of whatever was on his screen at the time he left his desk, minimised all his windows, hid his taskbar, and set the screenshot as his background. He spent ages trying to figure it out, went to go and tell someone, and I unplugged his mouse while he was gone, so it was even more confusing for him when he got back. All a bit tame, but was bloody funny at the time, and pretty much the extent of office pranking we could get away with.

 

Aforementioned manager was a good prankster, though. He used to spend hours trying to figure out how to actually manage the "stapler in a jelly" joke from The Office. He was called Kelvin, the other manager was called Andrea, and Andrea was only working part-time for health reasons, so Kelv would spend the afternoon while she wasn't there coming up with ways to play pranks on her, that would pay off the following morning. Mostly classic stuff like gluing her mug to her desk, though he did once spend hours individually gluing all her paperclips together in a chain.

She used to get really annoyed at her stationery going missing, so he'd hide her stapler all the time. Eventually, having just got a new label printer delivered to the office, she printed off a label saying "ANDREA" and put it on her stapler, so people wouldn't steal it. He took the piss out of her all day for it so, more in on the joke than usual, she started printing off countless labels and just sticking them to everything on her desk. So her mug, her monitor, her keyboard, every bit of stationery, they all had a label with her name stuck to them.

She leaves for the afternoon, and Kelvin enlists the help of one of the supervisors - together, they remove all of Andrea's labels and replace them with labels saying "ADNREA". Supervisor prints the label, Kelv affixes to the object, so the next day, when Andrea returns and freaks out about it, they both deny responsibility without actually lying - the supervisors just says "I never stuck any labels on anything, it was Kelvin", and Kelvin says, "I never printed any labels, it was him", and they collectively try and convince Andrea that she had just repeatedly mis-spelled her own name all day. Perhaps the coup de grace came later that day when Kelvin sits down at his desk hours later and says, "bloody hell, Andrea, the sod's only gone and got me as well!". Turned out he'd snuck in an hour before work and stuck a couple of labels saying "MELVIN" on things on his own desk, to make it look like he'd been a victim of the same prank, then left, and arrived back at work at his usual start time.

The following weekend, after all that had died down, I arrived first thing Saturday morning, to find that pretty much every single thing in the office had been labelled. So every computer had a "COMPUTER" label on it, every bin had "BIN", and so on. Two years later, after Kelvin had left the company and we'd moved to a whole new office, we were still finding things labelled. I think the last one I discovered was the label printer itself had "LABEL PRINTER" printed on the underside.

[Gus Mears]

It's a Monday and I am very tired. Consequently, I have spent 90 minutes getting free carpet samples sent to my friends house.

He also forwarded me an email with his work number in it which was monumentally stupid. 

 

Edited September 11, 2017 by Gus Mears

[BomberPat]

Ahhh, that reminds me, I can't believe I went with the hilarious-at-the-time-but-tedious-in-retrospect labelling story when there was "mailing stuff" japes.

Same job as mentioned before, was in customer service/admin for a mail order bedding plant company. We took on a bunch of temps one summer to work in the call centre, while I was managing the email department, so I got shunted off my usual desk to free up a phone, and went to work in the same office as the Horticultural Director.

He had pretty much no interest in the customer service side of the business, so as long as email complaints didn't reflect badly on his plants, he found them hilarious. The angrier the better - he loved a disproportionately angry response to a slightly mishandled box, and I'd always share the funniest/most OTT with him.

 

Once, I told him about one customer who had ordered from us for years, and had practically everything she'd ever ordered either replaced or refunded, and said she's clearly just scamming us, but there's very little we could do about it. I then said that, on my last day with the company, I really wanted to put through replacements on the system for every shitty customer that had annoyed me over the years, sending them the least appropriate thing we could see. After a short deliberation, we decided the best option was 5kg of mealworms.

This escalated, as a couple of months later we started supplying live nematodes as biological pest control, and I suggested they would also be a funny surprise replacement to send to dickheads. His response was, "Ah, that'd be nothing, Pat, the company we get them from sells bees too".

 

Fast-forward to a works do, we're at the bar after a few too many tequilas, the new director - the least liked person in the company - has got on our nerves. So the horticultural director takes out his phone, and brings up www.IWantBees.co.uk, and orders a shipment of mail-order live bees to her address. Sadly, I never heard the fallout of that one, but conceptually it's probably my favourite prank ever.

As much as I know they're sent in slats or whatever ready for a hive, the mental image is of them just being loose in a cardboard box, and the unsuspecting victim opening it, only for hundreds of angry bees to come flying out.

[Gus Mears]

That's very good. I also have looked at the bee website, but balked at actually purchasing anything. That was the time where I ended up sending the person 20kg of bird seed instead. 

I wish I had more money, because honestly, the one I have always wanted to sign someone up to is the Moss of the Month Club. I mean, it sounds like a total pisstake, but it's real. Unfortunately, I don't have $90 for sodding moss and then international shipping on top. 

 

Quote

Here it is everyone...you asked for it! Now every month you can expect a new sandwich bag full of assorted moss and lichens. (May be alive or preserved).It will include some of everything I sell here on Etsy or my web site...it will always be an exciting adventure when you go to the mailbox and see what you have. NEVER mix Live & Preserved Moss/lichens together or it will cause mold and death to the moss.

I will include a variety of items and your sandwich bag will always be a great value well worth at least $10-$15 a bag. With the membership the longer the membership the less cost per bag.

I will keep a list of what that person gets each month so there will be no duplications.

Give this as a gift for someone who is HOOKED ON MOSS! It is great for the Winter months when it is so cold and dreary outside...you can play with this beautiful green stuff that is NOT affected by the snow and ice...so I ship all year long.

Give as a Christmas gift or even for Birthday's Wedding's etc. The possibilities are endless here.

I have been selling Moss and plants for over 14 years...so know that customer satisfaction is very important to me...you or the gift recipient will be very happy with their monthly gift.

You pay for the shipping ahead for these when you purchase this item so there is never an additional cost to that person or to you when it ships each month. 

Shipping for this and the 6 month membership then will be a total of $90

"The possibilities are endless"

Edited September 11, 2017 by Gus Mears

[BomberPat]

That is extraordinary.

There's a few sites that send people glitter and whatnot, but I'm sure you're aware of them. And carpet samples is massively funnier to me than glitter anyway.

[Tommy!]

On 11/09/2017 at 5:36 PM, Gus Mears said:

. That was the time where I ended up sending the person 20kg of bird seed instead. 

 

[Gus Mears]

On 11/09/2017 at 3:58 PM, Gus Mears said:

It's a Monday and I am very tired. Consequently, I have spent 90 minutes getting free carpet samples sent to my friends house.

 

Few more days of curtains to go. Then the carpets begin arriving. 

Edited September 13, 2017 by Gus Mears

[Thunderplex]

I'd fucking kill you!  Hilarious.

[Surf Digby]

It's nice to see there's still some mileage in the classics. We used to sign each other up for all sorts when we were in our late teens because you'd get little catalogues through the door that were literally nothing but things to sign up for. 

 

Someone missed the point in pranking me, as they signed me up to a bunch of mail order porn companies (this was all pre-internet). Every fortnight I'd get catalogues, contact mags and pamphlets trying to convince me that they were selling hardcore (still illegal at this point).

 

I'm not sure how they thought it would bother me as a) it came in plain envelopes, and b) I lived alone.

[PunkStep]

Gus, have you read David Thorne's books/website? Plenty of inspiration for you there, especially if you want to wind up some poor fuckers at work.

[I Bent My Wookie]

Wanted to cheer myself up, thanks to the brilliance of Gus my mate is now receiving carpet, curtain and wallpaper samples for the next few days. Just the pick me up I needed, this thread has the ability to be gold.