Pranks!

[MadMike]

I thought I remembered there being a "Pranks at work" thread, and for some reason, I just remembered this one.

This is another one from the supermarket. The store manager used to carry a ring on his belt that held many keys, which rattled every time he took a step. You could hear him approach from several aisles over, so if you were goofing off, you knew to start looking busy.

One night, he left early, and one of my coworkers decided to go into the back room and take a nap in one of the bays. So I waited a few minutes for him to get settled, walked back there myself, got out my keys, and rattled them while I went thru.

I never saw that guy move so fast in my life.

[Andara Bledin]

The thread you're thinking of, Mike, is the Hazings, etc one. I forget where it was, though.

^-.-^

[Emmeileia]

The past two summers I worked in a park, both as campground staff, and as a camp counsellor.
The camp was the best for pranks. For one, we had the kids believing so many stories! Like that there was a crazed axe murderer loose in the woods who would hack you to death if he caught you leaving your campfire unattended. (Gee, guess why we started that one?) The story is so scary kids have wet themselves, thrown up...yeah. This story has been going for at least 50 of the 93 years this camp has been running. The owner has a scar on his neck from back surgery that he tells the kids is from "where the axe murderer almost got him." On canoe trips, the counsellors will get up at ungodly hours of the night to chop wood near the kids tents, and since the axe murderer has a blue canoe...they take blue pastels and smear it on the rocks when they get to a portage.
In fact, on year my BF who also worked at the camp took a portable radio and he and his boss ran around the island "chasing the axe murder" while all the while the kids who were at campfire could hear it over the owner's radio. We had eigth graders in hysterics.
Also, sent one of the kitchen assistants all over the island looking for a swiss cheese hole punch. She DID NOT GET that it was a joke. She spent HOURS looking for this thing cause she thought she would be fired if she didn't find it!
At the park office, we also had walkie talkies which caused a lot of pranks. I hid one in the mainteneace workers truck and then told them a story about how some campers lost their cat (True). So when they went to the truck, I meowed through the walkie talkie.
They got me back though. We would always call each other dumb names over the radio, so later that day when I needed them at the office, I called something like "chocolate fudge to chunky monkey" over the radio.
A *very* annoyed voice came on and asked who was on the radio. They said to get off the ranger frequencey and gave the call number that belonged to the head warden. I thought our walkie talkies had somehow gotten on to the CB radio frequency the rangers used, and I was in shit!
Later that day they fessed up and we had a great laugh

[Kitten in the box]

prank wars

One time when it was raining outside a few years ago some co-workers decided to buy a crap load of flour at my work and take it outside and pour it ALL OVER a fellow co-worker's car as a joke. When I went outside to get something I saw flour all over his car and I came in laughing. The co-worker whose car got floured (he didn't know it yet) asked me what was so funny and I said "Some dude got his car antiqued (had flour all over it) so I feel for that guy." My buddy laughed with me and went out to see how bad it was...he came in REALLY PISSED and demanded that the guilty party remove the flour from his car. (they didn't only because he started the prank wars by covering one of the guys' cars with shrink wrap)

[Starlord]

I used to be a deputy sheriff, and our district sergeant was usually referred to as Sgt. Schultz (as from Hogan's Heroes.) We had a party once for his birthday, and one of the guys found a ball cap that seemed to have been designed just for the sergeant. It had two bills set at a 45 degree angle, and the cap itself said, "I'm their boss, which way did they go?" He never even tipped to the fact that the cap was making fun of him, and wore it often on his days off.

[MadRocketScientist]

This was done to our LT and our Craftmaster at my unit.

Back in the day, when I was in the Navy, I was a mechanic on a Navy hovercraft (see pic). One of the normal maintenance tasks on these hovercraft was to give them a real good bath in order to wash off all the salt that built up on them from the sea spray they generated. This bathing was generally done with firehoses.

Hovercraft

One of the features of a hovercraft is a bow thruster, which is a big air nozzle that sits above the lift fans and uses some of the air from the lift fans to push to front of the craft around (if you look at the pic, the front of the craft is on the right; right behind the part that has the writing LCAC-33 is the lift fans, on top of that you can see a curved grey nozzle pointing foward, this is a bow thruster). Bow thrusters can turn a full circle so they can point forward or backward. Of course, if you are off cushion, all the air from the lift fans goes out the bow thrusters and can reach speeds of 250 MPH.

Now during a cleaning, you need to clean off the props and the lift fans and this is best done by starting the main engines and getting the lift fans and props turning. The you just spray the firehoses at them and give them a good rinsing.

So one day we are cleaning the boat, and our LT comes out to talk to our Craftmaster. The engines on the boat are running, so it is noisy and the LT and the Chief step off the boat and walk some distance away from the front of the boat to talk while we cleaned. I'm, of course, running a firehose across the boat getting it clean when my boatswain told me over the headphones to start cleaning the lift fans. I start doing this and after a few seconds I hear the boatswain and the craft engineer laughing their asses off over the coms system.

Seems while I was spraying water into the lift fans, the engineer had reached over and started rotating the bow thrusters to point forward, and the laughter was due to our chief and the LT running hell bent for leather to get away from the sudden monsoon of water spraying out of the bow thruster at them. And what was worse was the engineer aiming as they ran.

Kept us smiling for days (and the chief and LT were good sports about it).

[DannyboyO1]

I think my favorite prank was one my uncle pulled at his school. He'd been teaching there for years, and was going to shave his beard off. But he's from a family of smartasses, and decided to do it a little differently. I believe the principal was in on it, and he knew it'd never fool his students... but when he shaved, he dyed his hair a bit and wore a nicer shirt than usual... and went as his own substitute teacher. Since he'd done decent ventriloquism in his misspent youth, I have no difficulty believing he could keep up a voice and mannerisms not quite like himself, for one day.

Keeping a straight face for that day... that would be the real challenge.