I was one of a handful of student workers for my university's IT department while I was in college. My boss at the time was truly excellent, a super chill guy, easy to get along with, never talked down to us or acted like he was above doing grunt work, someone willing to go to bat for us and step in when we needed help with something. The kind of manager that doesn't need to command respect, because they've earned it; just an all around pleasure to work for. He also gave us the latitude to goof off as long as work got done and we kept on top of the ticket queue.

On a particularly slow afternoon, my coworkers and I opted to do a bit of organization and inventory so we borrowed the office folks label maker so that all our spare cables and supplies had a home. We may have gone a little drunk with power (as one does with a label maker), and got the bright idea that "really, everything should have a home. A place for everything and everything in its place, right?" So we proceeded to label nearly everything else in the little closet we called an office. The phone, the stapler, the door, the wall, all fair game; all properly labeled. I can only imagine that it looked like we were all learning English for the first time. If I recall correctly, our boss came up as we were wrapping up, he just shook his head, chuckled, and left us to it.

A week or two later our boss happened to take a Friday off and we decided that I'd be an excellent idea to label his desk in a similar fashion, but opted to prefix every with "Boss". So Monday rolls around and our boss comes in to sit down at his "Boss Desk" in his "Boss Chair" and answer his "Boss Phone". All in good fun, I don't think our boss was remotely surprised, but we got another chuckle out of him. A few years later, our boss got a job offer he couldn't refuse, so the student workers all pooled together to buy him a going away gift: a pocket knife with "Boss Knife" inscribed on the blade (he was always borrowing mine to open boxes or pop the air bubbles the new computers came packaged in) and a coffee mug that said "🏆 Word's Best Ex-Boss". I swear, we nearly made the grown man cry.

All this is merely a preamble (or more likely, just ramble) for what is probably the greatest harmless prank I've ever pulled. The student workers were all friends, we all had each other's phone numbers, hung out outside of work, and we still talk long after we've all graduated. One such coworker, is from out of town and asked me to take care of his cats while he went back to visit his family for a few days, which is when I saw the perfect opportunity for some harmless fun. By that time, I was no longer a broke college kid and could afford my very own label maker, but I didn't want to just label everything, it's been done before and it'd be far too obvious. So, I proceeded to print off precisely two labels: the first of which was for "[coworker]'s door" which I placed on the hinge side of the door to his office so that it'd be hidden by the door jamb. The second was for "[coworker]'s desk" which went on the lip of his desk, between the desk and the wall.

My coworker returned from his trip and I went about my life: work, student loans, video games I suddenly had time to play without feeling guilty for procrastinating on homework or studying, almost entirely forgetting about the ticking time bomb I'd left for my coworker.

Two whole months passed and I thought nothing of it, then I got a text from my coworker with a picture of the [coworker]'s door label and the message "this fell off the door. I spent over an hour looking, and all I found was the one behind my desk. Are there more?" I died laughing for a good ten minutes. There aren't many times in my life where I can say I full-on cackled, but this was unequivocally one of them. When I could see through the tears in my eyes, I texted my coworker back to assure him it was just those two and there weren't anymore to find. His completely understandable disbelief just made the whole thing funnier. Sometimes less is more.

My coworker and I once got a shared $100 tip. Neither of us had change, and it was an office job, so he asked that I break the bill and get back to him... Well, he didn't ask the denomination. So Monday rolls around and he got his $50, in pennies, so many rolls of pennies spread out among his desk 😂

Not so much a prank, but a nefarious scheme that worked beyond expectations. Back in the '90s I worked at the mid-west distribution center for a very large multinational corporation. It was a large center, but it was located at the edge of a little podunk town in a rural area. All the big wigs at the center lived in a nicer town about thirty minutes away along the only highway. In the winter, bad snow storms would sometime close the highway making it very hard for the bosses to get home.

One Friday morning, a coworker and I decided to start a rumor. We told a few people that we had 'heard' that a snowstorm expected that afternoon was going to be very bad and the highway was going to close. It was BS but this was more or less pre-internet so it wasn't like anyone could really look it up or anything. In reality, the storm was expected to be no big deal.

Within half about an hour, another coworker came up to us and told us the rumor that we'd started. A bit later, our boss came and repeated it to us. Then we heard someone say that a DJ on a local radio station was talking about the potential for the highway to be closed. Again, this was utter BS we had just made up. Within an hour or two, the directors who ran the facility, and lived half hour down that highway, decided to close the facility early so they could 'beat the storm.'

My coworker and I started our weekend early at a local watering hole and watched the snow fail to pile up. The highway never did get closed, of course.

I put a TSR on my coworkers machine when he left it unlocked one day.

All it did was play a quiet random barnyard sound every ~5,000th key press.

It drove him absolutely bonkers for months because there were days when it wouldn't happen at all

i did a "print screen" of a person's desktop. set it as the background image. drug all working icons into a folder and placed it inconspicuously at the bottom of the screen. it was the only live file on the desktop. Went and told IT what I had done so it wouldn't waste their time.

Preface by saying I hate practical jokes. I regularly commuted to work by bicycle and kept my bike in my cubicle. One day a coworker known for practical jokes moved my bike to the warehouse and hid it under sheets of cardboard. Took over an hour after work for me to find it. Shifted my ride time so I endured the peak of rush hour, not funny.

Next day I saw the same coworker had left the keys to his mid 70's Jeep Grand Wagoneer on his desk. Grabbed the keys, threw my bike in the back and drove about four miles away and parked behind a building in a complex of light industrial businesses. Many running three shifts so lots were always parked up. Rode my bike back to work and handed my coworker his keys and said it's within a five mile radius and good luck. Didn't stop his pranking but never pranked me again.

A coworker ignored me when I said something to him.

So I went to the office gossip and said "Did you hear Jims put in his resignation and is going to work at Home Depot" Then went to two other departments and did the same thing including the head of transport because the drivers are insane gossips.

3 hours later someone came up to Jim to.ask him a legitimate work question and he screamed at them "I'M NOT GOING TO WORK AT FUCKING HOME DEPOT!"

The bosses knew I was responsible but Jim was also an incorrigible shit stirrer and prankster himself so he got sent home with pay for the rest of the day and given a chat about "If your going to dish it out..."

Important note - many may not know this, but you can erase sharpie on a dry erase board with a dry erase marker - you just color over it and erase like normal.

I drew a massive penis on a buddy's desk white board (this was before Covid when we were in an IT office setting) in sharpie, and then finished the drawing by turning it into a cat with a similar black dry erase marker.

At some point he erased the cat, only to be left with a big hog leg he couldn't erase due to it being sharpie. He freaked out for a bit before I helped him erase it.

At my first software company job in the 90s, they had windows 3.1 on the PCs when I first got there. That version had a feature where you could configure a sound file to play, right as windows was loading and it couldn't be interrupted. I would set that to play a 3 minute long reggae song (.wav) on my friend's computer so when he came in, we would all hear that play through his tinny little built in speaker and he couldn't stop it. Took him a week to figure out how to remove that.

Around the time that the 2010s My Little Pony was getting super popular, my manager was really annoyed by it because his kid LOVED it and he had to watch it and be exposed to it constantly. He didn't mind that his kid liked it, but just like one of those songs that gets played waaaaay too much on the radio, he was just super sick of MLP at this point.

He had a little shelf on his desk with a bunch of little figurines for various nerdy things that most of us on his team were also fans of - Batman characters, horror movie characters, etc.

One day while in Walmart, I passed by an end cap display that had bins full of blind bag, tiny MLP figures for a dollar each. I immediately bought 5.

I slowly started adding them amidst his figurines on his shelf, about one per week. It took until after I placed the third one before he finally noticed and immediately came storming over with them in hand, stopped near my desk....and then turned to my coworker and just went, "Dammit Gary!!!"

A few months later for Valentine's Day I saw a bunch of small MLP valentines cards that were all connected accordion style, so I bought them and then taped them along the edge of his desk like a little table skirt. That time he knew it was me, obviously.

This happened to my dad when I was a kid.

He was a manager with a corner office, we had gone on vacation, and when he got back his employees had removed all of his office furniture and replaced it with fresh sod, a beach chair, a cooler, and a lawn flamingo.

We got a new side yard lawn out of it!

We went out to the bosses car and attached cable ties to his drive shaft so when he drove off his car started going ting tang the faster he went.

We finished at 5 him at 4. He got out the gate stopped then went then stopped and came back and brought it into the workshop. We "looked at it" couldn't see anything wrong test drove it and said we had no idea what he's on about.

Soent that last hour of the day gaslighting the boss that we couldn't hear the noise and have no idea what he's on about.

Then cut it off and sent him on his way.

Few months later did it again

Doubt I can top that but I got one for you.

We had a restaurant server, Fabian, who was perpetually high on his own farts. Everyone hated his attitude.

One day he comes to work and drops his bag on the floor and goes to take a piss.

We stole one of his dress shoes and hid it in the back.

Dude comes out to get dressed and can't find one shoe. He's trippin. "Fabian, what's wrong?!?"

He can't find his shoe. "Who forgets ONE shoe at home hahahahahaha!"

Dude had to wear a pair of dirty old shoes from the lost and found. Only size he could find that fit him were several sizes too big. Clown shoes all night.

Then when he finishes his shift and goes to get changed we sneak the stolen shoe back into his bag.

He finds it and absolutely FLIPS OUT freaking that he had to wear dirty shoes all night how could he have POSSIBLY missed his other shoe in the bag?!?

This was over fifteen years ago and we still laugh when we gather. He carried some psychological issues from that one for several years.

One of the techs at the MSP I was working for several years ago got a fancy new company laptop which he was over the moon about. One afternoon when he had left his desk with the laptop open I went in and installed the BSOD screensaver and set it to default.

I left it and didn't think much more of it for the next few months and he didn't say anything about it. I forget how it came up, but I eventually asked him how his new laptop was, if he was having any problems with it (wink wink). He tells me all about how it's crashing all the time, he's been removing and reinstalling drivers, refreshing the Windows install, all kinds of crazy stuff. So I finally own up to the prank. He thought it was pretty funny when I showed him the screensaver.

The movie The Matrix Revolutions just came out. This company had no software or any terms that could be confused with this movie name. I trasfered to IT from sales, I discovered that in our internal software I could trigger a pop up alert tied to user login. So I made a pop up linked to my old teammates login that said "If you proceed this will destroy The Matrix". Then I gave it just an OK button.

She called me in IT about 1.5 seconds after I deployed and was like "I don't know what I did, I don't want to break The Matrix".

When my coworkers go to break I'll take a roll of skrinkwrap and cover their forklift with it it until it looks like it's ready to be shipped via truck.

One time, one got me back by picking up the propelling wheels of my forklift with their forklift and driving away while my back was turned. He did a lap around our work area.

My favorite pranks were from back in school, where I wrote a very basic program I wrote that could bring a (single core) system to its knees by sending the system beep character faster than the system could actually beep, so it would just beep ever slower until you killed the power. I used to randomly swap out the old Firefox icon for that program when certain people in class annoyed me. The best part was I never got caught doing it, even after I snuck it into the ghost image the IT guy (who was technically my boss since I helped out in the computer lab) used across a bunch of systems.

For actual work pranks, it was just the standard screenshot the desktop and hide everything sort of pranks, other than the time I got a couple annoy-a-trons into my dick manager's drop ceiling, and it drove him nuts for months, and he didn't find them until well after I left and the batteries in them died. I think that IT actually found it when running new Ethernet to his office.

I added a functional SWAG key to a coworker's obnoxious mechanical keyboard.

https://ch00ftech.com/2015/04/12/xx_mlg_keyboard_xx-swag-yolo-420/

Damn... Better than I got, but I still had fun.

On my way out from my mostly office job in the military:

• Each desk had an overhead cabinet with cabinet doors that opened upward. One of my coworkers was constantly complaining and trying to fix a speaker wire that often fell out of his overhead drawer and hung down. So, first, I took a sheet of paper and wrote "Make it rain!" on one side. I then taped it very securely to the back of the cabinet door, with the writing facing down. On top of the paper, I placed hundreds of old pennies that had been collecting in a desk drawer for some reason. And then for a finishing touch, I made sure that annoying wire was hanging out so he'd want to open the cabinet immediately and fix it. With the inevitable result that he'd yank the door open, pulling the paper out with it, and once the pennies were past the edge of the cabinet, they'd fall and scatter everywhere, leaving the paper hanging there and reading "make it rain".

• Boss's desk had a deck of playing cards on it that were never used. I took those and hid every single one of them in various places around the office. Underneath keyboards, between the pages of technical manuals, taped to the bottom of desk chairs, amidst the clutter in desk drawers, inside a coworker's lunchbox, in the freezer of the office fridge, behind computer monitors, under the wiper of the boss's car outside, on top of high cabinets, etc, etc, etc. Oh, and of course one sitting with the pennies from the previous prank, to fall down with them. Some of them would be easy to find and be noticed almost immediately, like one tacked to the office bulletin board, some would be nearly impossible to find and would probably only be noticed years later, if ever, like one tucked up into the ceiling tiles. But every single card in that deck found a new and innovative hiding spot.

As I was on the way out, I never got to see these come to fruition. I was gone by the time anyone noticed. But I did get a text message a day later that only said "You beautiful bastard". That was satisfying.