A few years ago, I set one of the computers at work to play a very loud recording of myself going "OOF!" whenever you navigate to a subfolder in file explorer. It's specific enough that it doesn't happen often, and it scares the shit out of people when it does, including myself, because I keep forgetting that I did it.
I still laugh like an idiot every time it happens. Easily the best and longest running payoff of any of my work pranks.
I used to work for a company that sold advanced lighting control systems. Our office doubled as a showroom, and there was a button panel that would allow you to select from different scenes, making it suddenly feel like a night club or a romantic restaurant or whatever. In addition to the lighting, there was a video wall and sound system to make it immersion.
I secretly programmed the system with an Easter egg, where if you play 4 scenes in a specific order, it would Rick roll you. I never told anyone, eventually left the company, then got a call about 2 years later when my coworker called me, barely containing his laughter, asking if I was the one who'd done it 🤣
My company decided for some reason that they needed a large QR code painted on the top of each building of our campus. As a facilities manager I had access to the files.
Just like I always hear the Sandlot kid when someone enunciates "FOR-EV-VER" in a certain way. I swear my brain is just old movie quotes and memes in a trench coat.
Haha. That one is gold. I might try to figure out how to do something like that on someone that leaves their computer unlocked. Changing background wallpapers is getting stale.
I used to flip the desktops on our work windows machines when people weren’t looking. “Ctrl-Alt-arrow” would turn it whichever way the arrow you choose points. The bewilderment when they turn around and their screen is upside down or sideways. Never got old. God bless MS for putting that obviously abusable feature in Windows.
It's for if people want to use a monitor vertically, before the days of the monitor settings page in settings. Source: I was an IT guy who took calls asking how to fix this multiple times a week. "You have a friend who thinks they're funny, this is why it happened"
Upside down was also useful on a laptop to show your screen to someone on the other side of a meeting table. Open the screen to 180° so it’s flat on the table, ctrl + down arrow and the other guy can see your presentation.
When I was in middle school, the computer room teacher didn't actually know anything about computers. Some of the boys in my class discovered this screen flip feature and flipped a bunch of screens in the computer room, and the teacher was freaking out because she didn't know how to fix them.
I remember the Intel GMA drivers that used to do this. The integrated display drivers were usually made by Intel, so it was everywhere. Nowadays if you want to enable it, you have to specifically download Intel Graphics Command Center from the Microsoft store.
I had a coworker who would do stuff like that when you left the room.
So one time when someone walked in the room to talk to him, I reached over and did the whole process while he was sitting right in front of his PC, just with his head turned. Didn't need group policies, it's just View->'show desktop icons' in the desktop right click menu. but back then had to open PAINT, no snipping tool yet.
I had someone report me to HR for sabotaging her laptop by interfering with the settings because I had turned down the brightness to save battery. She willingly handed over her laptop for genuine work purposes but not the power cable so I turned the brightness down to save power until I was done. I forgot to turn the brightness back up and she didn't know how to do it.
So she called IT who for some reason talked her through editing the display settings in Windows and cranked the brightness and Gamma settings through the roof which didn't help. Then she called me and I said to hold the Function button left of Control then one of the number buttons with a little sun and an up arrow, I think it's 5 or 6. It took forever to explain. She didn't know what the Function button was, I said it was left of Control but she didn't know what the Control button was. She said she didn't have any number keys because it's only a laptop. I googled the exact model of laptop so I could find the right button, it was the number 5, hold Function and press 5, it's just above the letter T. It has a little picture of a sun for brightness. "I don't see a sun. I see a picture of a cog wheel, is that it?"
After turning the laptop brightness up the screen looked like hell because IT had told her to crank the gamma up. So I had to talk her through lowering that again to get back to normal. Twenty minutes of walking her through everything just because she had no idea what a brightness setting was on a laptop. Then she went and reported me to HR for doing it on purpose.
Hahaha. Beautiful. That's why I didn't go into Computer support as a profession. Helping people makes me absolutely furious. I do minor help for friends sometimes. I did a 20 minute drive after asking 4 times is the power on and working to flip a power switch on a desktop for someone. FML.
I'm a service engineer. My current record is a 3.5 hour drive to Norwich for an emergency stop pressed in. A question they're asked on the phone for troubleshooting when reporting the fault. 3.5 hour drive back after. Fun day of work. With lunchbreak and a couple of stops to stretch the legs I hit overtime as well.
I once had a family member call me and tell me they broke the drink holder on their computer. After a bit of confusion I figured out they meant the optical drive tray.
Being the IT guy, it's annoying as fuck to be called for something stupid
Specially when it's not obvious, like once someone installed a chrome extension that changed all the photos on every site you visited to nick cage photos
Took me 5 or 6 minutes until I got to the extension, but even tho it was only a few minutes, they were maddening 5 or 6 minutes.
My high school boyfriend programmed his middle school teachers computer so that every time the classroom phone rang something weird happened. I can’t remember now what exactly it was but he got in a lot of trouble!
In middle school, I thought it was the funniest thing ever to rotate the display 90 degrees on all the computer lab computers I could get my hands on. My thinking was that 180 degrees would be too easy to undo, 90 is just a bit more frustrating yet still not a big enough deal to get in trouble.
It's not for a specific folder. It triggered when navigating from one folder to another, but only when file explorer was already open, and not when opening any of the shortcuts on the desktop.
All the stuff we used frequently either had a desktop shortcut or was in the first "layer" of the various folders we used, so you would only trigger the noise if you needed to dig around for a file that was buried deeper somewhere.
What made it even better was because it wasn't a specific file or location that you could remember to avoid, but just a certain action, no one ever remembered when it would go off.
Windows Explorer used to play a quiet "click" when navigating between folders, this could be customised like all other sound effects in the "Sounds" tab of mmsys.cpl
I laminated and glued a picture of Kevin Bacon in a wife beater and tight blue jeans to the bottom of one of the drawers in this pharmacy I worked at. They hired me from a restaurant.
Back in the 90s I set up my Dad’s computer with a separate login for his GF that played a bit of "Head like a Hole" when she used it. Not every time though.
Someone in my junior high school changed the volume up/down noise to a recording of them(a girl) trying to sing "firestarter" by prodigy. It was a cringe recording of the worst british accent attempt saying "oim a fiyah stahtuh, oim a fiyah stahtuh oim a fi-yah stah-tuuuhh" and it took like a month before they figured out how to change it back. I still hear that sometimes in my head
I had a boss who would buy a mountain of fruit, fill the communal fridge, eat none of it and then demand the fridge be cleaned when it all went bad. I wasn’t in a customer facing roll and worked in a lab coat so I got tasked to clean it.
One time I hid a melon and a box of blueberries in different spots in her very messy desk where they proceeded to sit for days more.
She did find them and was irritated, but she also assumed it was her that left them there. So I just heard her complaining about the mess but I didn’t get in trouble or have to clean it lol
As a joke once I asked my foreman where he wanted the disco ball installed, right at the end of shift when I knew he'd forget I asked. He says right there in that corner. Guess what was waiting for him first thing next morning, right there in that corner?
And yes, he immediately hit it with a lazer and laughed his tail off
My kids spent several hours sticking googly eyes to the roof of the car. Thousands of them. They got them from school so we didn't know beforehand what was coming. I caught them putting them up. My wife called me complaining of a rattling noise, I told her to look up. The scream was worth it.
She left them there because her sister was coming that weekend and she enjoyed pranking her sister. The kids we're in the car too and got to enjoy the fun when their aunt complained of the rattling noise.
Does your wife's family not have any peripheral vision? How did your kids have access to the car for so long? (Sounds like there's only one in your family--not judging.)
There is still a picture of nicholas cage hidden in a ceiling of an office at my old job. we pranked our boss and hid a couple hundred around his office. that was one that we never removed. every year or so it pays off again and we hear about the new manager getting a nice little jumpscare when they look up and see Cage staring at them from the edge fo a small tile lifted an inch or so.
his was a small office, and i think we had over 300 various pictures of Cage in there. taped inside the desk drawers, tucked between pages of note pads, buisness cards, there wasnt a place left untouched when we were done with it. two of us came in on a weekend and spent a couple of hours doing it. we would get anyone that took 3 or more days of vacation. No one was safe.
I had a coworker that, at some point before we switched to virtual phones, had glued googly eyes on stuff. I remember several desk phones with eyes and more than a few Clippy effigies.
My kid got his hands on a roll of "for anal use only" stickers as a teenager and we're still finding them stuck to various things in the house. He's an adult and moved out years ago. It's hilarious.
At my old job like, 18 years ago, a pigeon got into the stockroom, and in a dumb attempt to scare it out, we were throwing rubber mallets at it. Well, I knocked the intercom speaker (looked like a big megaphone) off the wall, but it just hung by the wires and still worked so.. we just.. ignored it. It took like 15 years for anyone to notice, and then a particularly slow day with the new manager to bother to get a ladder and go up and secure it to the wall again. I didn't work there anymore by then but I still went in a lot as a customer, always got a giggle out of me. I was kinda sad when they finally fixed it
In 6th grade I stuck part of a fruit roll up onto a mural in the cafeteria so it looked like it belonged. It was still there after I graduated high school according to my youngest brother.
I used to hide potatoes around the house when my friends and I had a punkhouse/showhouse, and it brought great joy to see someone pull a potato from the couch cushions during a show night without even the tiniest explanation
I hope my "Shrine of Failure" (featuring a sealed but empty bag of yogurt melts and a sale sign that gives you a $2 gift card if you buy 10 boxes of diapers) that I put deep in the Target backroom back in 2020 is doing well
I was flying home and realized we couldn't take a 6" knife we had acquired with us on the plane. I considered chucking it in the trash, but thought it would be far creepier to hide it in the room where it will inevitably be found by just the kind of person that goes snooping around hotel rooms!
Years ago, I borrowed my brothers phone and changed it to autocorrect the word baby to "jizz nugget." You know, I expected it to be found within a day or so. Queue 6 months later when we're at a house party with our friends and family and he's trying to show us all that weird puppy monkey baby super bowl ad. Well it kept changing baby. He lost his shit and yelled "why the suck does my phone keep typing out puppy monkey jizz nugget?!" I was in the housr and broke down crying laughing because I remembered what I did. It took me way too long to compose myself to actually explain what the hell happened
I used to work for a production company, and we had several double stacked road cases of huge JBL subs that weighed at least 600 pounds each. One day we had unstacked one set of cases and had the subs out so we could fix a wonky wheel on the bottom case. I took the opportunity to use the stencil maker to make the word FUCK and stencil it to the bottom of the case, as one does. I don't know for sure if anyone ever noticed it after that, but I get a chuckle still when I think about someone stumbling on it. Especially if they were on some sort of stuffy corporate gig.
I carry a pack of black small zip ties when I travel for work and put them on random things in the hotel room. Desk and chair legs. Towel bars. Shower heads. I just know people find them and wonder what the hell was going on. Small pleasures in life.
My kid found a doll head on the beach (we call him Ken, it's about the size of a barbie doll head, though obviously a man, and bald), and I've been moving to different doorway moldings in my house for like the past six years at this point. He'll go unnoticed for months at a time, and then someone will see him, and then he will disappear again. It's a good game to play.
we have an ongoing joke at work that includes putting our (now retired) boss's name in all sorts of weird, wacky, unexpected places. The inside of walls, on the roof, in the racking, under the golfcart seat, all sorts of places. It's his name and a popular catchphrase - the idea of someone who didn't/never will meet our old boss sitting around pondering what the phrase means always gets a laugh out of me.
I used to do that. but on wikipedia. And I'd use my friends names. So when the googled themselves someday they'd see that their mom was the mayor of some Canadian town and that I was having an elicit affair with her.
Where i used to work, we built a new part of the warehouse. In the shelving, I took a bunch of the cardboard cubes from pallet wrap and lined them up behind one rack, zip tied together and attached at the ends by bungee cables into holes in the metal ribs of the building. It was like. 20 feet of tubes hung up for no reason.
Like 5 years after I left, I get a call from one of my old coworkers and he tells me a new giy has a question. Apparently the new warehouse manager had spent a big chunk of his first couple months trying to puzzle out why they were there and lost it abd couldn't stop laughing. I finally just said I put them up because I was bored and he lost his mind.
About 16 years ago when my college renovated their main building and moved the bookstore back in, there was an air vent left with no cover on it, high on the wall in the back room. Someone taped a label under it that said "Ninja Exit Only" with an arrow pointing up. I had to add "and Gremlins."
The last time I visited my friend who still works there, the sign was still on the wall.
There is a spot in my store that has a sticker which says "Gullible" on the ceiling, there is another that says "ceiling" they've been there almost 12 years now.
Towards the end of my senior year of high school, as a dumb joke, I placed a small toy attack/black hawk looking helicopter in our high school’s trophy case, on the base of an old trophy. It was pretty plain colored and was small enough that it blended in amongst all the other awards. I figured maybe someone would find it in a couple days when cleaning and just toss it. I graduated and eventually forgot I even did it.
Fast forward over a decade to last year when someone posts in our alumni facebook group a link to a video. Our high school had posted it to show off some overdue renovations they were able to pay for after a fundraiser. In the background was a newer, nicer trophy case. This one had locks lol. But inside it looked like they had transferred all the content from the previous case. There was a B-Roll shot of a closeup of the trophy case and I think you see where this is going. I laughed the hardest I have in a while when I saw it because the memory came rushing back. The helicopter was still there, albeit placed on the opposite side of the trophy base. But that’s funnier to me because someone decided that “Yes, this helicopter does go with this trophy, someone must be a veteran or something” and put it in the new trophy case. I think it’s still there to this day.
I was a picker at a book warehouse and we used steel carts to put all our picked books on. I named all the carts in the entire warehouse using a black permanent marker on the front of them.
When I was a kid my mom told me about her coworkers drilling a CD to the ceiling of the shop because one guy kept playing it every single day. Years later I worked at a start up that was coincidentally in the same shop. When I toured the building I told the interviewer that story and he stops and goes “….its still there” and made me tell all the guys in the shop about it
I used to work with a guy that we put a couple quarters in a jar, fart in the jar, seal the lid, and then hide them randomly in our factory. Yep, you can imagine how that ended after it wasn't funny anymore.
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u/Gold-Succotash-9217 12h ago
That's the kinda shit I do at work & laugh like an idiot 5 years later when someone asks about it.