Ah, to be a prankster. Who doesn’t love a good whoopie cushion or air-horn gag every once in a while? There is nothing more satisfying than getting that perfect reaction from your unsuspecting victim – and the good-hearted laughter that is soon to follow. However, pranks can get as intricately devilish as their designer’s desire. We may think ourselves sharp with spoofery, yet we wouldn’t even scratch the surface when compared to these tales of talented tricksters.
Pranks
1. Sweet Tooth
My mom can't tolerate sweet things. Since she can remember, she never ate sweets. When I was 6 years old, Mom left her newly brewed coffee on the table. My older brother encouraged me to put in more sugar as a prank. So, I did. Mom came back, stirred, then drank and spit out a rocket. We started laughing saying it was a prank, explaining that we put extra sugar in it. She looked at us as if we were stupid. Apparently, I had put salt in it instead. Her coffee was at sea salt level.
2. Kansas City Shuffle
My coworkers in the Chicago office asked me to bring back a phone book and the hotel stationary from my business trip to Kansas City. They were preparing for another coworker's bachelor party. The groom was known for drinking to an extent that was considered legendary. After a night of drinking, he woke up on the morning of his wedding in a hotel room.
He checked the nightstand and found the Kansas City phone book. The desk was stocked with KC stationary. His friends had clued the front desk staff in on what was happening and convinced them to answer his room phone, "Good morning and welcome to the Kansas City Holiday Inn." It was five hours until the wedding, and he was only a couple miles from the venue, but his freak out was epic!
3. Mouse Antics
I have an extra mouse in my desk drawer at work. I have the USB plugged in to the docking station of the obnoxious guy a couple cubes away. On days where he's particularly obnoxious, I take my revenge. I'll take out the extra mouse and move it around every few minutes... he has never realized because it’s plugged into the docking station and not his laptop. He has even had the laptop replaced. Never noticed... It brings me to tears silently laughing sometimes. I have to be careful not to overdo it.
4. The Garden Gnome
I made a friend believe she was being followed by a garden gnome. For years. Many of her friends are involved plus other helpers. She shows up at a B&B in Scotland (that we'd recommended) and there was a gnome in the garden, and it looked exactly like the gnome that'd briefly turned up in her yard. Then she saw it on her way to work. Then in Provence. And Germany. She always messages us saying that it looks like the same gnome. That's because it is.
5. Office Pranks
Gradually over the course of two weeks, I moved my coworker's computer monitors closer to the front edge of her desk. Like 1/4" per move. Until they were so close the keyboard barely fit.
"Stupid small desk," she grumbled, near the end.
I then moved them back, just as slowly, over a few weeks.
She never caught on.
6. The Cruise Ship
I used to work for a cruise line. A passenger asked if the crew lives on the ship full time. My coworker and I jokingly explained that no, the crew leaves every night to fly back to Miami and then returns each morning. She walked away satisfied. After that cruise was over, our manager was sharing the passenger evaluations with us and was confused about one in particular. It was a woman who had stayed on deck 14 and had complained that she couldn’t sleep at night because of the noise of the crew helicopter.
Fact 1: 1,200 crew do not leave every night; we do live on the ship.
Fact 2: That ship didn’t even have a helipad...
Question: What was she hearing every night?
7. The Principal’s Tape
My friend stole the Principal's keys to the school. We used them to break into the main office and change the national anthem, which was on an old tape. We'd sneak in and dub over the tape a few seconds into the song (so they didn't catch on that anything was wrong until it was too late). Our tamer option was Rage Against the Machine, but our best prank? Using sounds from an adult video. Still makes me laugh.
8. No Dumping
Over a decade ago, I worked in the warehouse of a Guitar Center. We dealt with inventory, shipping and receiving. We had a dumpster behind the store in a shared parking lot that people would leave random things in – even though it was not a public dumpster.
One day we found a broken beach chair in an open cardboard box. The box had a shipping label on it. It was left in such a way that it was easy to assume that the chair/box combo was left by the same person. We packed the beach chair in another box and shipped it back to the customer. I wish I was there to see the person's face when they received their trash back via UPS.
9. Inspired by Jim Halpert
One night, I replaced every framed object in my boss’s office with a picture of me making a stern face. Posters, certificates, photos, etc. Took like 3 hours because he had like 30 framed things in his office. The next day, I made sure I was out doing field work to make him sit with it most of the day. He had a lot of foot traffic to look at his office that day.
10. Fast Food Prank
I worked at a fast food restaurant where the boss was too cheap to get AC installed. In the super-hot summer days, we would all sweat so much that we could wring sweat out of our uniforms.
There was this boy who I had a love-hate relationship with; we would always prank each other but my pranks were always tame, until one particular day. He left his drink in the back while he was flipping burgers, so I grabbed a vinegar packet, cut open a corner, put a straw directly into it and exchanged it with the straw from his drink... Moments later, I was at the front of the store and I heard him spit and scream my name while calling me a jerk.
He still high fived me.
11. The Mysterious Wallpaper
My mum's laptop wallpaper was a picture of her granddaughter. I copied the picture 100 times and made her wallpaper a slide show of the same picture over and over again, so the file would change but nothing would change visibly on the monitor.
The pictures would change every 10 seconds. On one of the images, I painted a tiny little curly moustache on her. So randomly for 10 seconds at a time, my niece would have a moustache. My mum thought she was either losing her mind or had a computer virus – and every time the moustache popped up, it was gone by the time she tried to show anyone.
12. The Little Snake
I remember it like it was yesterday. At summer camp my cabin's leaders found a little snake that wasn't doing so well, so they decided to put it in an old terrarium in our cabin. A few of the guys were nervous about it. So, the next day when the leaders decided the snake was well enough to release, I asked that they keep quiet about releasing it. When the other guys got back to the cabin and found no snake in the terrarium, chaos ensued.
13. Closing Time
My manager had left me in charge of the store when I was 16 years old (not legal but that’s a whole other mess) for a whole weekend. Saturday went well and I was happy with how I left the place, although my paranoid brain is always concerned about whether or not doors are actually locked. I’m the same with my house, but the store was worse.
So, I make my dad drive down to the store to double check that everything is okay. Fifteen minutes later I get a terrifying phone call. My dad says my manager and the police are at the store because the door was unlocked and people were inside. Cue to me on the floor in tears hyperventilating, while my dad is telling my mum (who had since picked up the phone) that he was only kidding and that everything was fine.
14. The Little Brother
One year, my sister had to move back into my parent’s house. I was like 15 years old and she was a little older; mid 20s. April Fool’s Day comes along, and I know my sister woke up at like 6am. So, I took out the lightbulb in the kitchen, put Vaseline on the refrigerator handle, and put a rubber band around the water gun on the sink.
I waited for her to go in the kitchen (I was in my room pretending to be asleep), and all I heard was cussing followed by more cussing... Followed by her screaming my name and waking up my parents. My parents were not happy – the floor was soaked with water and it woke both of them up. I’d do it again though.
15. Diabolical Mom
I took my SATs (college entrance exams, for those outside the US) on April 1st. (Should have known right? But apparently, I'm not that smart.) That night I went out with a group of friends, and when I got home my mom met me with a serious look on her face. She told me that the testing committee had called, that there had been an error and all test papers from that day were lost. Everyone was being contacted to schedule a date to retake the exam.
She totally sold it. Face, reactions, everything. I bought it hook, line, and sinker... and she let me believe it until lunchtime the next day. My mom is a diabolical person.
16. The Computer Lab Prankster
This happened during the early days of networked PCs; DOS and NetWare. I worked in a computer lab on campus, where all the co-workers would play pranks on each other. However, we had two coworkers who liked to loaf a bit too much for our liking. They took the lab assistant job because they thought it was easy money. They had conspired to be assigned to a classroom lab that rarely had any students in it who would need assistance for most of their working hours. They would just sit around and play games while the rest of us were, you know, working. Clearly this could not stand.
I rewrote a piece of code where if either of them logged on in a PC in that particular remote classroom, the code would drop an image of two naked dudes having fun with each other on the monitor for a few seconds and reboot the PC. Much hilarity ensued for the next two semesters.
17. Revenge
I was 9 years old. My dad just had hernia surgery the day prior and was recuperating on the couch. Before I left for school, I put the Martha Stewart channel on and left the remote just beyond his reach. He spent eight hours learning how to arrange pillows on a bed. He exacted his revenge fifteen years later.
I’d just had my emergency c-section. My dad put Frozen on and left it on a loop while the entire family left for the mall – and he left the remote just out of my reach. Revenge is indeed a dish best served cold.
18. The Annoying Coworker
I had a friend (and coworker) regularly bring up how annoying it was when another coworker would walk by him just... so uncomfortably close. There was plenty of room between the back of his chair and the wall, but daily he'd feel this guy walk past him. The guy wasn't trying to be a creep, but just had a lack of self-awareness in the office, clearly.
My friend tried doing a few things to get this guy to notice it was annoying, but of course he never actually spoke to him as the dude was more senior and he was intimidated. Luckily for him, that's when I had a brilliant idea.
Every day, he'd pull his desk back towards the wall a little bit closer. He knew it wasn't going to work immediately, but after a few weeks of slowly moving the desk, annoying-coworker would have to shuffle sideways by to make it. My friend would often busy himself and not help, or make a really big deal of getting out of his way.
Eventually, the annoying-coworker started taking another route through the office, where no one was inconvenienced, and my friend slowly moved his desk back to its original spot.
19. The Ad
This dude was harassing my ex-girlfriend because he used to have her cell phone number, so I created an email address, signed up to Kijiji and placed an ad offering an 80" 3D TV for free with some excuse about a bad breakup and not wanting her to get it... I asked people to only text or call.
I then went to bed and forgot all about it until the next day at work I get a text from my ex asking if I had "done something on Kijiji." The dude was begging her to take the ad down and apologizing. I checked the email and there were five pages of responses even though I had told them not to email but to call or text... Dude’s phone must have been ringing constantly!
I took the ad down and she never heard from him again.
20. Going Postal
I worked in the local library as a teen in the late 1970s, and some guy did something that angered my coworker/best friend. So, we started harvesting blow-in postcards from the magazine section. Every magazine. And hand wrote the jerk's name and address on hundreds (at least) of postcards.
Free subscription? Sure! Collectible plates? Yep! Columbia records? Enjoy your free dozen Albanian opera records. Book of the month? Silver spoons? Travel offers? Cruises? Bring ‘em all on. It took a couple months to kick in, and several more months for the tsunami to really hit. USPS stopped delivering to his house. Police were called, but the processing houses evidently didn't keep the postcards, and my prints weren't in the system yet anyway.
We stopped after a Christmas break flurry... until right before school started the following summer. One last blast of probably 50 more postcards with the most bizarre and offensive offers we could find. No one ever suspected us.
21. Catch and Release
I was working in a hot factory, and our supervisor and job planner had this enclosed cubicle with a window AC unit in the middle of the shop – it was a nice 68 degrees in there while we sweat our butts off in 95 - 110-degree Fahrenheit heat.
There were always flies around; I kept grabbing the flies alive, walking into the cubicle to ask a legit question or say “I’m just cooling off” and opening my hand behind my back. I put 14 of those guys in there in one shift. He never did catch on that I was doing it and the planner was furiously swatting around because there were so many flies in there. The supervisor was cleaning out every crevice thinking some food source was supporting life somewhere.
22. Scary Anatomy
It's been years since it happened, but I'm still proud of this one. I used to work at a science tutoring center in college. One of the things we taught was anatomy. So naturally, we acquired a few skeletons and various skulls. Well I was closing one night, and I knew my co-worker was opening the next morning early, so before I locked up, I assorted ALL of the skeletons and skulls in a sort of... welcome party near the front door.
The best part was that to turn on the lights, my co-worker had to reach down and come face to face with some lifeless skeleton skull in the middle of the shady opening. Needless to say, she screamed, and it was loud enough to make our boss come to see if she was ok. I woke up to some colorful texts.
23. Hand-Picked
One summer in college, I worked in the registrar's office, registering all the incoming freshman. A professor who was a mentor to me was teaching freshman seminar and asked me to hand pick a class for her. Straight A students, high SATs, whatever. So, I did. 15 students, all named Sarah.
24. Pranking the Prankster
My friend Neil wanted to prank a mutual friend of ours who was traveling abroad at the time. While this mutual friend was in Sweden, Neil texted everyone in his phone book and told them all that this mutual friend (Chris) had West Nile Virus. (It was a well-known, media-scare disease at the time.)
Well, people went INSANE. This mutual friend Chris was waking up to hundreds of missed calls and texts asking him how he was and if he needed anything while he was in the hospital. Anyway, Neil took a quick break from swarming people’s inboxes with West-Nile-News, and I swiftly changed my contact profile in his phone to, “VERIZON WRLSS” (and deleted all of our texts).
After about an hour, I started secretly sending texts to Neil stating, “Your data usage for this month is nearing the maximum on the account.” This was back in the days before unlimited talk and text, so going over the monthly data plan meant a butt-whooping from your parents.
“Woah, I sent so many texts that Verizon said I’m using almost all may data for the month!” Neil said, and he put his phone away... “OK, I’m done for the night...”
I waited about five more minutes before sending about ten messages in a row.
“YOUR DATA USAGE FOR THE MONTH IS NOW AT MAXIMUM USAGE, ANY ADDITIONAL CALLS OR TEXTS WILL INCUR A NEW COST OF $10.00USD PER MESSAGE/CALL.”
Before he could read on to the second message I sent, he was already in full meltdown-mode.
I just kept sending, “YOUR MONTHLY BILL HAS NOW INCREASED TO $249.99 for February.” And with every text, his eyes watered and his blood ran cold at the thought of his dad seeing this bill... all for a harmless prank...
By the end of the night I had sent a running bill up to $790.00 before finally telling him it was all a joke. His mixed look of relief, hatred, appreciation, and impressed was something I’ll never forget, and he even brought it up at his wedding ten years later.
25. The Dub-Dubs
I was in Kuwait on the way to Iraq, when our bird got delayed for three weeks. Well, Kuwait has these things called dub-dubs. A dub-dub is a lizard about the size of a small cat. They’re utterly harmless, but when they get angry, they hiss loud as heck and do this whole threat display thing. Looks really scary.
Well... being the enterprising marine that I was, I quickly set about catching them and placing them in any of the Airforce guys’ stuff I could find unattended. Backpacks, lockers, desks, toolboxes, glove compartments, sleeping bags. You name it. I must’ve planted at least 3 or 4 dozen dub-dubs in my boredom.
Some guy would go into his office, you'd hear a drawer open HIIIISSSSSSS, "OH GOD I HATE THESE THINGS SO FREAKING MUCH!"
I was suspected as the dub-dub prankster, but it was immediately dismissed by the Airforce guys because, "He's a Marine, he's too stupid."
Yes, yes, I am... suspect nothing and enjoy the new pet I left waiting for you in your pillowcase.
26. The Year 2000
My best New Year’s was that of 1999. When I was 9, my dad and I pulled off the greatest prank in history. A few minutes before midnight, I synced up a wrist watch with the countdown on TV. My dad pointed me in the direction of the breaker which was in our garage and showed me the lever to pull which would cut all power to the house.
Now I don't know if you remember the hype, but the year 2000 was supposed to destroy all of our computers and technology sending us back to the stone ages. So, the moment grew closer as I watched the seconds tick by on my wrist watch, and it soon became apparent that I wouldn't need it, as I could hear all my relatives inside counting down 10, 9, 8... 2, 1!
I pulled the lever at the perfect timing and everything went black. The first thing I heard was from my aunt, "OH MY GOD, IT HIT! Y2K HIT!!" I was only going to leave the power out for 10 seconds or so but the lever was stuck and I couldn't get it back up for about 2 minutes, while the whole time I heard my family freaking out... then eventually they looked outside and started to wonder why our neighbors still had power...
27. The Skateboard Ramp
When my brother and I were in middle school, my brother liked to skateboard with our next-door neighbor. One day, my brother and the neighbor took the sheet of plywood from under my brother’s upper bunk bed (no one slept in the upper bunk) out of the house and started making a skateboard ramp out of it in the neighbor’s adjacent yard. My parents had explicitly told him that he wasn’t allowed to do that.
I started to craft an utterly evil plan. I hoped my brother would consider it belated payback for all the merciless teasing my brother had put me through. I ran to the upstairs window and yelled down at them, “[brother’s name], guess what?!! Mom knows EVERYTHING and she is SOOO mad.” Then I slammed the window shut and ran to the stairs and waited while watching my mom read the newspaper.
A few moments later, my brother walks in the front door looking worried and says, “Mom, I’m so sorry.” My mom (who had no idea what was going on) said, “About what?” While slowly putting the newspaper down. “For making a skateboard ramp out of the wood from the bunk bed.”
“YOU DID WHAT?!!”
At that moment, a wave of shock and realization swept across my brother’s face and our eyes met. I let out the evilest little sister cackle and ran into my room. We are adults now and still laugh about it from time to time.
28. Shaking it Up
Growing up, I had a friend that wasn't exactly that bright. One year when we had to be about 12 years old, he decided for April's Fool he was going to play a prank on his family. His prank was going to be something quite simple: It involved the salt and pepper shakers on the family dining table.
He decided that he was going to move the salt from the salt shaker, and relocate it into the pepper shaker; and the pepper would be moved into the salt shaker. Basically, just a simple salt and pepper switch-a-roo. But he didn't realize one crucial thing: Both of those shakers? They were clear see-through glass.
29. Lesson Learned
A friend kept trying to steal my sushi off my plate at a sushi restaurant. So, while she wasn't looking, I stuffed it full of wasabi, put a bit of fish back on top to cover my tracks, and pretended to not be looking when she started reaching towards it. She tossed it into her mouth, started chewing down, and I just swung my head towards her to say, "You messed up."
Five minutes of coughing, muffled screaming, and copious amounts of water later, she had learnt her lesson.
30. A Beautiful Marriage
I don't know what it was about my dad's digestive system, but anything he ate came out smelling bad. REALLY bad. As in, after he was in the bathroom no one else could go in there for at least a half hour – longer if he forgot to open the window. Heaven forbid you be the one Mom sent in there to open the window when he forgot.
One night, Dad came home from work (night shift), got in bed, stuck his butt out of the covers and passed a really rancid one then pulled the covers up over his head so HE didn't have to smell it. But he didn't realize what he was in for: Mom had eaten something for supper that was just as noxious on its way out. She waited until he got his head under the covers and got a good seal on it... then let one rip.
She said he came out from under those covers like a SHOT, gagging the whole time.
31. Tied Up
In high school, there was a girl that was acting foolish and laying on top of a table that me and some friends were sitting at. Mind you, this was one of those plastic, folding tables... and we were in the Junior Reserve Officer’s Training Corps class in the rifle range having some end of the year free time.
I then took it upon myself to fulfill a lifelong dream and tie her shoelaces together. The results were better than I could've ever imagined... My JROTC instructor entered the room and told this girl to get off the table and that's when it all came together. She hoisted herself off the table with full confidence that her legs would work as they always do. Her uneven weighting of the table caused her and the table to flip over while me and the guys were just sitting there.
At first, I was the only one who knew of the shoelaces and was dying of laughter. My friends noticed and started laughing and the instructor laughed some and then told her to do push-ups for causing a commotion.
32. Dish Devil
My sister doesn't keep anything in her kitchen that she doesn't use. Extras go straight in the trash or to charity. So I started buying duplicates of things she'd gotten rid of and hiding them in the backs of cabinets. Over a year and a half, I slowly drove her insane. She had plates with concentric circles, blue on white. I found one with a slightly lighter shade of blue and she wondered if the dishwasher had faded it somehow. Then there was one with the same blue but different rings. And then one with the right blue rings but a different background shade.
She was getting very concerned. I finally confessed when she went to switch out her dishes for the seasonal, holiday ones and had more cups than she'd packed... now with saucers she hadn't had the year before.
33. The Computer Hacker
I pulled a computer prank on a college friend. I replaced a single system sound file (the click for the mouse) with a 5-minute version. It started off normal, then there were 4 minutes and 50 seconds of silence, and at the end, my masterpiece: it would play my voice screaming. Now if another system sound would play, it stopped playing the previous sound.
So, he would use his computer, and then when he would walk away, it might scream 5 minutes later. He did come to me, but it was for help since I was pretty good with computers. While he was explaining what was going on it was difficult to keep a straight face.
He tried to show me, but I would make sure to never let the time hit 5 minutes... except for right before I was going to leave. Then I pretended to be all interested. I made up a story about how it could be a nasty virus, but then said it only came from really bad and illegal adult video sites. He was mortified, but said he only looked at normal adult videos. That is when I lost it and had to come clean.
Looking back, it was a dangerous bluff. But those were more innocent times.
34. Incremental Prank
The AM supervisor at my office is a short little man who likes to work from a laptop on a rolling adjustable desk. For over a year I gradually raised the height of this desk and watched as he went from sitting on a stool, to an adjustable tall task chair, to standing. Last week he removed the wheels from the desk to lower the height. He doesn't realize it's adjustable.
35. Locker Lunacy
In high school I knew a guy who had one of those locks for his locker that just goes in 4 directions, not numbers. One day I was zoned out, and happened to see him put his combination in. I wrote it down immediately. It was too good of an opportunity to miss.
I noticed the locker next to his was empty. The next day after class, I waited until he went home. I took everything in his locker and moved it exactly one locker over. Everything was in the exact same place, same shelves, and then I locked it back up.
Next morning, he came in to class so confused, and said quietly, "I think... someone moved my locker." Needless to say, all his friends said he was crazy since nothing was stolen, and everything was in exactly the same place that he left it. The fact that he had written down his locker number in his planner was attributed as a mistake in writing, and was ignored.
So, the next day, I moved his locker five more over...
That was a fun meltdown to watch.
36. The Artist
My best friend and I were roommates for a few years and sometimes when I was drunk, I liked to draw caricatures of us. They were usually on pizza boxes and I would leave them outside of his room so it would be one of the first things he saw the next day. Eventually, he and his girlfriend decided to get their own apartment together closer to their jobs, so our time as roommates had come to an end.
I decided to leave him one last parting gift. He left his wallet out on the coffee table, so I took his ID and taped on little drawings of him where the pictures typically go. A few months later I hear from him about it. Him and his girlfriend were visiting some friends out of state and they were going to this bar.
Apparently, he handed his ID over to the bouncer like that and the dude laughed at him because of how ridiculous it was. I was honestly surprised it worked, I totally expected him to notice long before that, but I guess he didn’t.
37. The Oscars
My brother lives on the west coast, I live on the east coast. One night we discovered that there was about a five-minute delay for a "live" show. I saw it on broadcast TV about four minutes before he saw it on Dish satellite. During the Oscars, I called him and screamed at him to turn the Oscars show on. He asked why and I screamed at him again to just turn the show on. He said he was already watching it and I told him to keep watching it because SOMEBODY BLEW UP THE OSCARS!
I then started narrating what was on the screen and pretending like I was talking to a family member who was in the room with me. "I've never seen so much blood!" "Whose arm do you think that Harrison Ford is holding?" "Oh! That's Brad Pitt, without his arm. It's got to be his." "So. Much. Blood!"
My brother asked me what happened when it all started and I described the light and sound of a bomb going off. I could hear my brother excitedly telling his wife what they would be seeing. He asked me when it happened and I told him the last thing that was on the screen was particular part of a song and dance number.
On his TV that moment came and went and he sounded surprised and said that nothing happened.
"Yeah, I made it all up. Love you, bro."
38. Feral Cats
My parents worked nights when I was in middle school, and I stayed at my friend's house while my parents were at work. This friend loved to torment me. One day, his 13-year-old brain thought it'd be funny to pee off the deck onto the feral cats in the yard below.
I told him I was going to tell his mother, went inside and told her, "When Trevor walks in, just act disgusted." He walked in, she told him how disappointed she was in him (having no idea what he did), to which he replied, "I swear to God mom, he's lying; I didn't pee on those cats."
Watching his face as he realized I told her nothing and he just told on himself was one of the highlights of my youth.
39. Marker Maniac
During my freshman year of high school, the big craze was this fifty pack of Crayola markers. A friend of mine had a pack that she was obsessed with. She had them organized in the pack in a perfect color gradient order. So, of course, any time she left the room I’d mix her markers up so she had to fix them when she came back.
This went on for a month maybe? And one day in the study hall she leaves, and she before she leaves, she turns to me and she says, “Don’t rearrange my freaking markers” So, I didn’t. I got an even more nefarious idea. I rearranged the caps.
You see, these markers were solid white apart from the caps and a little tiny nib at the other end. She got about halfway through “fixing” them when she noticed she was holding a marker with an orange cap and a turquoise nib. I can’t tell you the joy I experienced when she looked at me and said, “You didn’t even move the markers, did you?”
I laughed so hard I was asked to leave the study hall. She didn’t talk to me for two weeks. 100% worth it.
40. Name Switch
I convinced a coworker that the guy she had sat next to for 3 years was named Jay, not Dave. They worked in different departments, but sat 3 feet away from each other for years. I got the guy in on it. And his manager. Then later his supervisor, group manager, division manager, and entire department.
They bought him new nameplates for his desk, changed stuff in the system, so his name would print as Jay, etc. The only thing they didn't change was his phone number and email. She thought she was going crazy, and when I finally told her, she sucker-punched me in the stomach and dropped me to my knees (she was a personal trainer in her off hours, so she got me good).
Totally worth it, and I still laugh about it a decade later.
41. The Swim Meet
At my sister’s swim meet, I found an ice machine tucked away in a garage looking thing. So, I started collecting the ice and somehow managed to put ice in nearly everyone’s shoe at the meet. It was a wild beautiful moment of pure confusion and chaos. Everyone started freaking out and no one knew it was the little shy girl who secretly enjoyed turmoil...
42. The Proof is in the Pudding
I saw a post about switching around mayo and vanilla pudding, so I emptied out a mayo jar, cleaned it well, filled it with a few pots worth of vanilla pudding and took it to my university. My university is very lax about eating during the lectures, so I waited until midday when I was sitting in the middle of all my friends and they were all eating their lunch.
Cue me taking out the jar of "mayo" and a spoon, popping the lid and taking a big ol' spoonful with a grin. At first, only the closest ones noticed, but after the third spoon it was like everyone was frozen around me. Pin-drop silence. After the fifth spoon, someone faux-retched and the spell was broken. The looks of sheer terror and disgust was well worth the pain of eating vanilla pudding (I'm a chocolate kind of gal).
43. Women’s Health Cereal
Well, when I was 16 years old and my twin brothers were 12, one of the twins was eating all of the delicious yogurt clusters out of my “women’s health cereal” like a monster. So, I decided to become a monster. I got my mom in on it and I told her how I needed more of my “women’s health cereal” for my female development and period support, knowing my brother was next door within earshot. My mom explained what female hormones do and we went on our way.
Later I found, I legitimately terrified my brother. I caught him looking in the mirrors checking his chest. For almost a week he’d put things around his chest and I caught him googling estrogen effects. It was especially funny because he was starting puberty and his voice was cracking. It went on for about a week before my mother made me tell him.
44. Revenge is Sweet
Many years ago, I had a boss who spent most of the day on the phone, chatting to friends and avoiding work. The rest of us in the department worked very hard, but he didn't really appreciate us. I ended up having zero respect for him.
On his birthday, he received a memo from the big boss (who worked in another town). It said that from now on, phone calls were limited to one hour per day, incoming and outgoing. Any calls exceeding that time limit would be personally charged to them. I made the memo look very official; I used their letterhead, time-stamped it, etc., but down at the bottom I put a note that basically said, "Ha ha! Just kidding."
He didn't make it to the bottom. He called HQ immediately and started complaining about "today's memo." To his surprise, they hadn't received it yet! I heard him talking, so I went in and said, "Pete, you do know that was a FAKE memo, don't you?" He said "What? You can't do stuff like that!!" He was the laughingstock of the company that day.
45. The Lifeguard Prank
I was a lifeguard through high school. One of my coworkers ordered Chinese food but it was her shift when her food came. I immediately got hold of her fortune cookie, carefully pulled out the fortune, printed off a replica with the exact size and logo on it and even had the numbers on the back. I carefully put the fortune in the cookie. Then I got a plate for her, put the food on it (like the nice guy that I am) and made it look presentable.
There was a priceless look on her face as she read, “Lifeguarding is not for you.”
46. The Attention Seeker
I was about 6 years old. I was the baby of the family until my mum gave birth to the baby. Suddenly, I assumed position of “big sister” and I had to constantly be a big girl. I didn’t want to be a big girl – I was tired of the baby getting everyone’s attention. I was jealous of the baby; this was my gig! I was ROBBED.
One day, we had a huge family gathering at Grandma’s, where we’d see all the family we’d not seen in month. All the cuddles and kisses and cooing that was usually given to me, was now all for the baby. Now all I got was a high-five or head ruffle. Well, I was tired of being the big girl in the baby’s shadow – it was time to steal my thunder back. I had a plan.
I went outside into the yard where all my cousins were playing and did a cart wheel. I used that opportunity to fake crash land onto my head and completely “knock myself out”. I lay on the ground, out cold. My cousins all gathered around me and tried shaking me and yelling for me to wake up, before panicking and running inside to get an adult.
A few second seconds later, everyone comes rushing out to help me. Grandma, Grandpa, Mum, Dad, uncles and aunts, all there at my aid, all for me... it was then in that moment I realized: I’m the baby. I had all the attention. The baby became nothing more than just a pudgy flesh ball strapped to my Mum’s chest. I basked in the attention. I lay on the floor pretending to be really hurt and dazed. I remember someone asking if they should phone an ambulance.
My dad refused, he just picked me up and had me in Grandma’s bed the rest of the day whilst everyone bought me lots of ice cream.
47. No Days Off
At my last office job, we would prank people if they called in sick after a night of drinking. For one guy, we stacked a bunch of Solo cups into his cubicle, so even after he knocked them all over it would still be a hassle to pick them all up. With another guy, we covered his cubicle with cobwebs and rigged it so when he pulled his chair hundreds of paper cutouts of him as a spider would rain down on his head.
Even I wasn't immune and had my desk and everything in it covered in tinfoil. In my defense, I didn't even want to go out drinking that night and told everyone I was sick and woke up with a very high fever.
48. Lucky Charms
This is the greatest prank ever, and if you want to do it, it'll only set you back $4. I picked out every last marshmallow from my sister's box of Lucky Charms. Then I took a photo of myself eating a bowl of just marshmallows, printed it, and put in the bottom of the bag. I then sealed the bag back up, hot glued the box and back into the pantry it went.
Sources: Reddit,
