Your favourite pranks

[Captain Colonial]

As it’s April Fool’s Day, I thought we could share our favourite pranks and learn from each other’s deviousness… 😈

 

My favourites:

 

I have a friend who constantly banged on about his Range Rover and how great it was, although he never took it off road.  After months of listening to his drivel at the pub, I used an old trick and attached a harmonica to the front grille with cables ties.

 

Sure enough, he was soon puzzled as to why it was making weird noises that got louder the faster he went.  He eventually went to the local dealer as it was under warranty.  They found it - I’m sure it gave them a good laugh.

 

Funny enough, my friend never mentioned it, just that the dealer had “sorted it”.  I was kind of irritated by that after my hard work, so the next time I had a chance, I put a thick long cable tie around the Range Rover’s prop shaft, leaving the tail long so that it slapped the floor with each revolution.

 

Surprisingly, he took it back to the dealer again, and they sorted it out.

 

He stopped talking about his Range Rover after that.

 

 

[jeff oakley]

We had one of these in our workshop. It was used to sandblast spark plugs then you used to test the spark by pressing the button.

 

We regularly used to run a wire to the door knob and when someone, none workshop tried to open the door, they held the knob, we pressed the button and sent them a shock. On certain people they seemed unable to let go of the knob whilst screaming. 

 

A quick pull on the wire and they had no idea why they got a shock. The sales manager even had a sparky come in to look at the door.

 

Never got old that one to our inner child

 

[corsechris]

A few from my youth.
 

Van de Graaff generator wired to the door handle at college. Made our tutor jump when he came in. 
 

I cooked up some ammonium tri-iodide and planted it under some newspaper in the threshold of the 6th form common room. Produced loud ‘cracks’ and puffs of purple smoke as people came in. This one backfired a bit though. Once I thought all the fun had been had, I gathered up the newspaper and put it in the bin. The following day there was a bit of a scandal as the cleaner had emptied the bin and it exploded…..other than iodine stained fingers and the shock, she was fine, but I was mortified. For the record, I did fess up and apologised to her. 
 

Converted a traffic cone to remote control and had it perform laps behind the headmaster during an important speech.

From work, not much opportunity for nonsense really, so they tended to be pretty lame. 
 

When doing password resets I had a habit of picking stupid ones for certain people.

 

In the early days of our work network running Windows clients with network cached user profiles, again, for certain ‘special’ people I’d edit the user data so when they logged in they got all the desktop colours set to black, and the origin of the main display set off-screen so nothing was visible. 
 

Again, for some ‘special’ people I’d install tweaked system sound effects. 
 

 

All very nerdy and mostly harmless….

 

Not mine, but memorable, a much loved staff member was leaving. Our site was at the top of a hill. Someone wired the horn on his car to the brake lights. You can imagine the result as he rolled down the drive honking as he went. 
 

Another one not mine but very good. A colleague was notorious for being late for work. One of his shift ‘mates’ got an exceptionally loud ‘ahoooogha’ style klaxon, hid it in his workbench drawer and wired it so it sounded when the guy came in and hit the breaker. 
 

Another staff departure, got a roll of giant bubble-wrap, cut a strip about a foot wide and 19 foot long, bundled it up above a front tyre and gaffer taped one end to the tyre so when he drove off, the bubble-wrap got pulled under the tyre. Made a fantastic noise and got the desired reaction.

 

I was the recipient of a good one on my 40th birthday. A long time mate shot and edited an entire fake news piece about me, local footage, interviews with people, the whole works, then cut it into a real news program and finished it off with a ‘happy birthday’ message from the well known presenter. The final trick was to set up a perfectly timed replay and put it on screen so I could be called to watch it as if it was live on air. Had me going for a short while when I saw my home village and then house on the TV on what I thought was that days live news. 

[Captain Colonial]

Another few…

 

High school teacher had a Volkswagen Beetle.  We took the domed hubcaps off and sellotaped some ball bearings to the inside.  They worked loose once he got up to speed and went round and round inside the hubcaps, sounding like the wheel bearings had failed.

 

Same teacher, we put rice down the air vents in front of the windscreen.  Once he turned the interior vent fan on, he was promptly pebble-dashed.

 

…

 

At work one day, the whole office was having a bad morning thanks to our two 💩💩 bosses and everyone was very down emotionally, so I thought we all needed a bit of a lift.

The bathrooms were tiny, single occupancy units, about 4' wide by 7’ long.  Each one had a loo, a sink, a mirror and a hot air hand dryer with a rotating nozzle so you could also point it upwards and dry your hair - which no one ever did, of course.  I emptied all the hole punch machines in the office and took the thousands of paper dots in a paper cup into the ladies room, turned the hand dryer nozzle towards the ceiling and filled it up.

What I thought would happen is that one of the ladies would go in, do her thing, wash her hands, go to dry her hands and rotate the nozzle downwards, and all the dots would fall out and make a big mess.

What actually happened (from later reports) was that the female office manager went in, dropped her drawers, sat down, and to cover the sound of her peeing, hit the button.

So there she is, knickers around her ankles, interfaced with the toilet, and suddenly in the middle of a violent snowstorm.  Of course, the fan is on a timer and won’t shut off for 20 seconds, so the snowstorm lasted a bit.  According to her, the dots got EVERYWHERE.

 

Next thing I knew, she flew out in a rage, leaving a cloud of dots in her wake.  For some reason, she immediately blamed me even though everyone was laughing at her anger.  No idea why - I’m so innocent. 😇

[evosteve]

Two guys on a opposite shift to me were always pranking each other. Two stick in my mind. Guy walks to the carpark after a 24 hour shift only to find his drivers seat missing. Another time to find his car full of Flowpac, filled through to sun roof, Flowpac blowing around for months afterwards. Always just between themselves.

[pistonbroke]

As a TV service engineer for a large national rental co. the depot I was at had 15-20 engineers all with company Ford Anglia vans . every morning began in  the canteen while we waited for the daily worksheets . Some of the tricks we got up to with each other were jacking 1 rear wheel off the ground so you got into your van and tried to drive off but went no where , swapping plug leads around was a favourite . In summer fish in the air vent . horn activated by a large nut hanging on the end of wire which made contact with "earth" when cornering . spuds up the exhaust pipe , loose wheel nuts , flat tyres and best of all using a length of tow rope to tie the back axle to the nearest lamp post !

 

 

[Arm]

Tipping a bucket of water under the loo door in the workshop . Then atomising that water from a high pressure airline. It turned the loo into an instant shower room and soaked anyone daft enough to have gone in without disconnecting and taking the air line with them.

[BigSkyBrad]

People are always been sent off to get a left-handed screwdriver or a two-tone spray can and the like.

 

When I was in the Airforce, there was a young newbie in my trade who was sent up to the Medical Flight to get two fallopian tubes - he was nicknamed Tubes for the rest of his days.

[Mark Stanton]

Usual drawing office japes of sending junior to get a long stand and weight for our drawing board. They always thought circle template was a joke, it wasn't. Asking for a Drafting Licence application from the post office. Detailing a sky hook.

 

Once when delivering a large pack of drawings to an Architect, our junior was also issued with a pack of four bricks, to take with him (he didn't know they were bricks) ....... when arriving at Architects who were in on joke they told him that they were wrong colour brick samples and he need to take them back ..... he wasn't happy and dumped them at Leeds train station ........ on arriving back he was asked for bricks so that we could change them with suppliers rep....... "double hit" as he tried to make up every excuse he could.    Brimingham to Leeds is quite a journey with 4 bricks in hand 

[Jim RS]

We used to hire out corrugated workman huts and one day the works people decided to lock inside the young trainee as he'd been a bit mouthy. They then put the water hose in through a gap and soaked him. He didn't twig until later that the hut had no floor and was light enough to be lifted. He got the last laugh as he had to be sent home early as he was soaked.

[BigSkyBrad]

My dad tells a story from when he was a stockman back in the '60s. He was working on a 10,000 acre farm which was large enough that there was a certain turnover of stockmen/shepherds/farmhands, so there was always a new guy. One of the initiations was to lock the newbie in the 8ft round concrete slaughter hut, which when the door was closed was pitch dark, the only reference being the walls and the sometimes hanging carcass in the centre. But on this one occasion, unbeknown to everyone involved, two wild cats had got in through the offal drain. By the time they had got the new guy back out, he had been shredded!

 

Incidently, my dad, rolling a smoke...