Your Best Gags

[crokett]

Inspired by Lees annoy-a-tron thread, what are your best gags? Mine are geek ones (of course).

Recently almost got a coworker to get his laptop reloaded. He is (well was ) in the habit of walking away and leaving it unlocked. So I went in and took a bitmap of his desktop, then set it as the background. Then I moved the real icons around and rinse/repeat until he had what appeared to be multiple copies of the icons and they were randomly functional. The next time he left I set it back to his real desktop. Then the next day rolled it back to his iconized one. After 3 or 4 days of me switching it out and him trying to fix it and finally deciding to reload it I 'fessed up.

My pride and joy is way back in the days of OS/2 it had a useful random function built in. I wrote a script that would sleep the comuter for a random # of seconds and stuck it in the startup on my dad's machine. Oh, did I also mention in the script I included that it should only execute every x times, x being random? And that I also told it to change where it got stuck in startup? And it would rename itself? The result was the macine would randomly pause during boot. My dad would start his machine not knowing if it would sleep or when during the boot. It took him 3 weeks to find it.

[Richard in Smithville]

A number of years ago when I was working in the shipping whse, one of my lift truck drivers was parked off to the side catching 40 winks. I got some rope and quietly tied it around the cab with out waking the operator. I got a call for help a little while later on the radio. Seems he couldn't manage to get his doors open.

[JoeyGee]

More geek ones for me, in the same vein...

The classic of putting shutdown.exe in a login script or the startup folder never gets old.

I also like to change the shell in Windows from Explorer to Progman, so everything looks like Windows 3.1. Again, very simple, but it doesn't get old.

[germdoc]

You guys are evil. Never come around my workplace.

I have started making JibJab videos of my colleagues using their headshots available at our website. Then I send them around to everyone I know and encourage them to send them to everyone they know. There are probably people in China who have seen my friends square dance with Oprah and Martha Stewart, or do a hula dance with Donald Trump.

They haven't quite figured out how to do this themselves, so I'm safe for now...

[Mrs. Wallnut]

Well this is one that I found funny but Mark was a little annoyed by it when it happened.

I believe it was the first year we were married so the Christmas of '95. My parents asked him what he wanted for Christmas and he told them a tablesaw. So my parents being the joksters they are had a friend make them a wooden table saw for him. It was about 12"x12", maybe a little smaller, piece of 1" thick pine. There is a fence on it and it moves just like a real saw fence. The blade is a jig saw blade, oh and there is a cord on it. They brought it over in a large box and told him that was his table saw. I thought it was funny and Mark did laugh but he was hoping for a "real" saw.

(as soon as Mark gets home with the camera tomorrow I will take a picture and post it)

[scmhogg]

My youngest doesn't fear me enough.

When he was 12, he epoxied my pencil to my work bench. I nearly lost a fingernail on that one.

I have defective red/green vision. When he was 13 or 14 he altered my computer so that the screen was red letters on a green background. I couldn't see a thing, to get it back.

Steve

[TB Roye]

I have a couple. Year ago while working as a clerk in the Accounting Section of the CHP and another clerk and I came in early on April 1st. Piled all the womens extra shoes on a table in the break room with a big sign "Shoe Sale $.10 each. We also emptied a drawer in a couple supperviosors desks and lined them with plastic and put water and gold fish in them. Lucklily most had a good sence of humor and took it well.

The second on was while I was the Suppervisor of the New Vehicle Equipping Line, we had a new employee who was loud and somewhat obnoxious. This guy was completing his new employee paperwork and was asking a lot of questions and getting pople peed off. So the guys who were helping him asked where is form was for the Pap Smear that is required of all new employees. He said he didn't have one, so he was sent into the front office to get one. The front office had our Commander, a Capitian on the CHP and 2 male program managers and 8 women. Chad went to the office supervisor and asked her in a loud vioce that he needed the paper work for a Pap Smear. About 10 seconds after he went in the Captian and program managers came out followed buy a number of women in histerics. The best was the Captian who was in full uniform with his gunbelt on and he is laying on the hood of a new patrol car convulsing in laughter. It took about 15 min for every one to calm down. Then this idiot asked what was so funning all he wanted was the form for the Pap Smear which started it all over again, then the Captian had to take Chad into his office and explain to him what it was all about. Chad was about 25 at the time. The Captian went on to higher rank and retired shortly after I did. At his retirement dinner, Chad who had since grown up and took my place as a superivor went up duing the Presentation and handed the Captian a form to sign, yes you guessed it was a form for a Pap Smear which brought the house down. I was the victim of a number of pranks so I got as good as I gave. But it finially ended when the political correct atmosphere took over, it got to dangerous as some one would get upset and cause a big stink.

Tom

[Alex Franke]

Along the same lines as leaving things like incriminating (but totally fake) print-outs on shared office printers (don't print them there -- far too trackable -- just bring them in), we used to like to go around to white boards and draw up charts. Some boxes had vaguely familiar initials, some were crossed out, some connecting lines were re-routed, and different colors here and there, as if a couple of execs were brainstorming or planning a huge re-org.

[Knottscott]

1. The funniest gag ever played on me was an April Fool's joke by my devious 11 year....now 21. He dampened my underwear ever so slightly, stuck in the freezer over night, then placed it back in my drawer while I was in the shower the next morning.

2. This one was mean, but pretty funny at the time....we cleared off the desk of a co-worker on a downsizing notification day (before he came to work). It was the "earlier" days of downsizings at Kodak when it seemed more of a novelty, and we had good inside information that he wasn't "impacted" this time around. He walked in, spotted his desk and turned white as a sheet....he stood there for a few seconds in disbelief, then stormed out really ticked off, and left us speechless and doubting our judgement. He stuck his head back in the door within a few seconds, and said "Gotcha back, you SOBs!" . We had him for a second, but he recovered in grand style and turned the tables on us.

3. Brand new supervisor took over at work. Within a week of his arrival, I made up some phony fax document from Communist China that had Chinese written all over it, and just enough English to determine that it was a subpeona for a chemical spill on something we shipped over there. Worked like a charm. The guy was trying to keep his composure, but he was sweating bullets for a while...until we exonerated him.

[leehljp]

When my middle daughter was about 10 yrs old, she added salt to the sugar bowl to make it about 1/4 salt and 3/4 sugar. Coffee time for me was an eye and taste bud opener. It was salty enough to know that something was wrong but sweet enough to be on track. I poured the first cup out and got another cup of coffee, same thing. Tried a different creamer; same thing. It took me the third fresh cup to catch on.

[gsmittle]

I used to build scenery with a guy who liked to climb on top of tall platforms and take a nap. Once we caught him sleeping atop a 12' tall platform, flat on his back. Four of us snuck up on him with air staplers and stapled him to the platform. By the time he was awake enough to figure out what was going on we had stapled all around his clothes, including the inside of his jeans and under the arms of his T-shirt. Then we left.

g.

[messmaker]

I did not pull this one but I was lucky enough to see it. Some engineers were checking out their work at the edge of a new landfill. One of the guys was monster of a man who was always teasing but he had one crack in his armor. He was afraid of snakes. One of the guys attached a fishing hook to one end a 15' piece of fishing line and the other end to a 5-6" section of the black flexible shielding that you put around wires. They slipped the fishing hook on his belt and one of the other guys came with the statement"Wow, look at that snake over there". The sight of that giant running back and forth across that landfill with that plastic tubing following behind him makes me grin to this day.

[Mrs. Wallnut]

I did not pull this one but I was lucky enough to see it. Some engineers were checking out their work at the edge of a new landfill. One of the guys was monster of a man who was always teasing but he had one crack in his armor. He was afraid of snakes. One of the guys attached a fishing hook to one end a 15' piece of fishing line and the other end to a 5-6" section of the black flexible shielding that you put around wires. They slipped the fishing hook on his belt and one of the other guys came with the statement"Wow, look at that snake over there". The sight of that giant running back and forth across that landfill with that plastic tubing following behind him makes me grin to this day.

Okay this was mean. I am very very very afraid of snakes also and would have done the same thing.

(but also had me LOL when I read this)

[twistsol]

Back in high school we copied about four minutes halloween horrors and screams album to 8-track and left the rest of the tape blank. We tied it into the school's PA system and left it in the ceiling above the AV department. The horrors and screams were broadcast for a few minutes about every half hour for four days before they finally found it ... I was suspended for a week.

[Sawatzky]

In college we hid a bunch of alarm clock in one or our roomates rooms to go off at different times during the night. So, when one would go off, he would have to find it and then turn it off. After he finally went back to sleep, another alarm clock would go off somewhere else in his room. It was hilarious, but I don't think he thought it was very funny,