Your Best Gags

[LCHIEN]

i can't say i had anything to do with this one but the best one i recall was in the tech fraternity (geek greeks to you now) where there was this one obnoxious guy who also had money (a bad combination) so he had all this high falutin' MacIntosh electronics and I can't recall what expensive speakers and he was always letting people know how good it sounded. So the other guys snuck into his room one day when he was in class and fished the speaker wires out from behing the bookshelves and spliced a 1N4005 rectifier diode into one side of the speaker wire on each channel and dropped the wire back behind the shelves. THen they all took turns for the next few days walking by and making comments about how his high-$ sound system wasn't sounding so good. The rectification made it sound distorted and gritty...
He listened and checked stuff and even put an oscilloscope on the outputs of his amp and couldn't find anything wrong.
they let him suffer for a few days before it magically corrected itself. I guess after that he wasn't quite so boastful...

[lrogers]

Well, as I was the victim of "shipyard pranks" a few times, I hate to admit that I was also the insitgator a few times. I had one apprenetice that worked with me that was freash out of the backhills of NC. I'm sure he had not even worn shoes before he had to wear the steel toe boots.
Well, I had him scared to death of "bilge turttles" (nasty little beasts ), he was convinced he couldn't cut a piece of flat bar with my hack saw because it was a left-handed hacksaw and he was right handed and he spent a good part of a slow afternoon crawling through bilges looking for the "golden rivet".
Years later, after he was a 1st class mechanic and had an apprentice working with him, I admitted what I had done to him.
He told me he found out that there were no bilge turttles, no such thing as a left-handed hacksaw, but was appalled to find out that golden rivet was also a prank.

[leehljp]

I think I posted this before, but I will do it again.

# 1 (30+ years ago)
A handyman friend (and big prankster) came over one evening around 6 PM in the summer to help me dig post holes for a fence. He didn't do much work but just talk. He left around 8 PM heading home, about 20 minutes away.

Just after he left, I called his wife and asked where he was. She said: "He is supposed to be at your house helping you."

I replied: "I haven't seen him, the rascal was supposed to dig some post holes."

About 9:30 PM I called again. He WAS IN TROUBLE! And then his wife got MAD and me too! But everyone in our little town was ecstatic over the incident.

#2
Similar but different (about 10 years ago):
A co-worker from the southern/western island of Kyushu came up to Tokyo for a three day conference. It was over mid morning on Saturday and his flight back to Kyushu was not until around 4 PM, so we went to the world famous electronic district called Akihabara. While there, he made note that his wife said he better not come home with a new computer. He left around 3 PM to the airport and took his 5 PM flight.

Around 7 PM, a good hour before he was to arrive back to his house, I called his wife and asked if he were home yet. She said he had landed but was about an hour away from home by train.

I said: "Well tell him that I got his computer on the overnight express truck. It should be there tomorrow afternoon." and then I hung up.

A couple of hours later, I got a call demanding that I tell his wife that he did NOT buy a computer!

[JSUPreston]

I don't pull too many pranks myself since I don't have the time to think them up, but I did help on a great one years ago at college.

We had this real obnoxious guy who thought he was the greatest singer in the music department and the man that all women wanted...obviously he was neither.

One night after he went to bed, some friends of mine and I taped Saran Wrap over his door frame. Pulled it REAL tight so that you could hardly see it. Did I mention that the paid folks at the dorm AND the night guard were in on this too?

The next morning, he was running late for class. Pulled open the door and ran right out into the wrap and was completely enveloped.

I didn't get to see it myself since I was in class, but I heard that everyone that saw it was rolling on the floor. He didn't find it very funny, and he never did find out who did it.

[prlundberg]

Had a couple good ones when I was working at the carwash back when I was in school.

First one was putting the rear wheels of a co-workers truck up on blocks. Just high enough to get the tires off the ground so it wasn't noticeable.

A classic is taking a hose outside and spraying a car down with water. When the temp's below 0. Course, those were the days before everybody had remote locks, which take some of the fun away.

[pierhogunn]

The perennial favorite in my office is to start up the BSOD screensaver from sysinternals, it's always nice to remind someone not to leave their system unlocked

[crokett]

First one was putting the rear wheels of a co-workers truck up on blocks. Just high enough to get the tires off the ground so it wasn't noticeable.

My highschool had telephone poles on their sides around the edge of the parking lot so you dind't drive on the grass. We did something similar once with a pole and getting a car's front wheels over it.

[BobSch]

Back in HS one of the more-disliked teachers drove an Isetta http://www.worldcarfans.com/5050328....the-bmw-isetta
one day after school a bunch of us grabbed his car and put it on top of the pool pumphouse. After looking around for about twenty minutes he finally spotted it.

Not a happy camper, but he could never prove who did it.

[prlundberg]

That reminds me, I almost forgot about the time in college when we picked up the back of a buddy's little Dodge Colt and turned it sideways so he was pretty well trapped in his parking spot.

[Hellrazor]

My pride and joy is way back in the days of OS/2

Convincing an OS/2 user to cntrl-alt-numlock-numlock as a way to fix some stupid problem. For the non-os/2 users... that dumps your memory to floppy disks

[DJehlik]

A teacher at my high school had a Model 19 Teletype machine, complete with blank paper tape(s) and Western Union Telegram forms. We prapared and delivered a telegram to the principal with the following message: " Please ignore previous telegram. " It was signed as if from the Internal Revenue Service. He worried about that "telegram" for weeks. I don't think anybody ever fessed up to it.

[Rand]

There was a latino guy named Danny Manrique who filled parts orders for the company I worked for. One day he set the screen saver on the parts PC to say something particularly stupid. I don't remember what but I changed it. This irritated him so he changed it to say something derogatory about me. I changed it back and made the .ini file read-only. (This was back in the Windows 3.1 days). He figured it out, changed it again. We went back and forth until I wrote an invisible program that would update the Marquis screen saver every 60 seconds. I named it something like network.exe and loaded it on windows startup. Borrowing from Cheech and Chong I made the screen saver say "Danny Manrique flunked spanish in high school." He asked me how I knew that!!! He could never change it back after that.

We had another kid that worked there as a PC technician. He had a rechargable Milwaukee screw driver that he could not live without. He literally would walk clear across the building to get that thing even if there was a regular screwdriver at hand. One evening I was working late and I saw the driver sitting in it's charger. I took it apart and reversed the wires on the internal battery. So now forward was reverse and vice versa. After a couple days, he hadn't said anything so I switched the wires back. This went on for a couple weeks, every 2-5 days I'd reverse the wires.

Finally, he showed me it running backwards one day. I asked him how long he had owned it. Then I told him that when Ni-Cad batteries get old they sometimes reverse polarity. He bought it!!!
Unfortunately, he got fired shortly after. I can't remember what direction his screwdriver was running when he left. I imagine someday he'll tell somebody else about reverse polarity Ni-Cad batteries.