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Posted by punwit (Member # 6388) on :
 
I was perusing the Perpetually immature thread and considered posting a story about a practical joke I pulled and then thought, "Hey, this topic deserves its own thread". Please feel free to relate any jokes you may have engineered or witnessed.

I admit I am a notorious practical joker. What I am about to relate to you is a true story. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Twelve or thirteen years ago I worked as a foreman for painting company. My boss had recieved a contract to repaint various telephone switching offices throughout central and eastern Kansas. Many of these locations were distant enough to require overnight lodging. On the particular road trip in question myself and two other employees were staying in a motel somewhere near Concordia.

Tony and Bo were my two workmates and one evening Bo and I elected to drive to the neighboring town for dinner while Tony stayed near the motel. I received several varieties of peppers with my dinner. While I enjoy peppers, my system does not, so I had the peppers bagged up and we proceeded home. The following morning Tony purchased his normal giant Mountain Dew with a straw. While he was away I used the straw to pierce the Jalopeno pepper. Needless to say his next sip of cola was a bit zippier than normal.

This is not the end of my mischief with the peppers. We returned to the room at the end of the day and Tony, being very fastidious, jumped quickly into the shower. While he was cleansing himself I retrieved a small reddish colored pepper from my little bag. I used a putty knife to make a paste and innoculated his toothbrush with it. I was certain that he would notice the pinkish cast to his brush but I was mistaken. He ambled out of the shower, over to the sink and grabbed his toothbrush and proceeded to vigorously brush his teeth. It was roughly 20 seconds before the heat made itself known. I laughed so hard I thought I was gonna barf.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
So, how long did Tony stay with the company?
 

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Posted by Farmgirl (Member # 5567) on :
 


I can never think of good practical jokes when the opportunity presents itself. I always think of them later... "I should have...."

Farmgirl
 

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Posted by celia60 (Member # 2039) on :
 
Nathan has decided that I am not a prankster. Therefore, I must have nothing to add to this thread.
 

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Posted by zgator (Member # 3833) on :
 
This is the same Nathan that goes around TP'ing early in the evening while people are watching. I'm not sure his opinion counts for much in this regard.

My stupidest joke was in college. Our apartment had a bathroom that a had a large gap under the door. We waited until one of our friends was over and went to the bathroom. I don't remember why, but he shared that he would be a while, so we took that opportunity to throw a smoke bomb under the door once he was situated. As funny as it was that he was stuck there while the bomb went off, it was even funnier that we had to deal with the smell for weeks to come.
 

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Posted by punwit (Member # 6388) on :
 
Tom, Tony stayed with my employer longer than I did even tho he liked the boss less than he liked me. Tony is a good natured individual that weathered the practical jokes and still considered me a friend.
 

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Posted by Lupus (Member # 6516) on :
 
When I was working on my bachelor’s degree in psychology I had a roommate that was not very good with computers. When I did was I did a print screen of his desktop and pasted it into a bitmap file. Essentially that makes a large picture file that looks exactly like his screen. I then hid his icons and set that image I took as his background screen.

What did this accomplish? Well, when you looked at the computer screen it looked normal, you could see all the icons and such. Unfortunately, the real icons were not there...it was just pictures of the icons, so when my roommate tried to click on them, nothing happened. Lol, it was really funny watching him try to figure out what was wrong.

The best was done to me was in my freshman year (at the previously described university). On April fools day I came home and my bed was gone. Amusingly I did not notice what was wrong when I first walked it...I just knew something was off. I blinked a few times and figured out my bed was gone. My roommate and some friends and disassembled my bed and reassembled it on to of a loft next door. That was quite a surprise.
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
Pranking is a big thing at the college I went to. One of the bigger traditional pranks is perpetrated by the sophomore class upon the freshmen, during their first exam. In my freshman year the sophomores in my dorm took all the drawers from our dressers and desks (without touching anything in the drawers, mind you) and built a tower in the dorm courtyard two stories high.

My sophomore year, my class (I unfortunately was in class at this time) made a "house of cards" out of the doors from the freshman rooms and also made a bridge from one balcony to the other out of their mattresses.

The Frosh Chem prank (so titled because of the exam during which it occurs) is typically followed by a freshman revenge prank, which usually sucks.
 

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Posted by Kayla (Member # 2403) on :
 
I've never understood the allure of practical jokes. I've never seen one that is actually funny.
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
People at my college are still talking about the time when a previous class stole a cannon from Caltech. (I like how this site mentions how Caltech doesn't know about the rivalry.)

I think the best prank I ever heard about occurred shortly before I arrived. The students managed to cover the entire floor of the Dean of Students' office with a sod lawn. One of the pranksters subsequently had the gall to walk in with a lawnmower and ask her if she needed a trim.

[ June 17, 2004, 06:24 PM: Message edited by: saxon75 ]
 

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Posted by Wendybird (Member # 84) on :
 
My dh and his roommates played a prank on an apt of girls they were friends with. The front door opened inward so one snowy night they quietly snuck over, taped plastic wrap to the door frame and then filled the gap between the door and the plastic with popcorn. When the girls opened the door the next morning to go to class they had an avalance of popcorn
 

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Posted by punwit (Member # 6388) on :
 
Well if you know any cigarette smokers I have a good prank for you. Find a nail that has a head that is the same diameter as a cigarette. Push the point in all the way until the head covers the tobacco. This will make it very difficult for the cigarette to stay lit. I think it is highly amusing to watch a smoker continually relight their smoke and look at it in consternation when it won't stay lit.
 

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Posted by Wendybird (Member # 84) on :
 
LOL Saxon! I needed that laugh

***and punwit--thats great! I'll have to try that one on my brother

[ June 17, 2004, 06:20 PM: Message edited by: Wendybird ]
 

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Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
 
My problem with practical jokes is that they often escalate into dangerous and elaborate stunts. The competitive spirit is fine, sure, until someone gets hurt or people can't just let it go, so they spend piles of money and time doing something to try to get even.

The best response to a practical joke is to do nothing for a long, long time. Just make the person more and more certain that your retaliatory joke is going to happen at any moment. The anticipation will kill them!

Having said that, here is my favorite practical joke. It's from a Walter Matthau movie:

Find someone who is anal about recording their gas mileage and ADD gas to their tank every night for weeks on end. Then, a few weeks later, start siphoning gas out at night.

I also liked the one from Amelie where she steals her father's garden gnome and has a friend take pictures of it against various foreign backdrops like it was having a great vacation seeing the world. Then she mailed pictures of it to him so he'd get the idea that he should go on a trip and stop moping around the house.

LOL
 

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Posted by punwit (Member # 6388) on :
 
Bob, A good friend of mine found a cowboy hat I treasured in his trunk. I was sure I had left it there but he assured me I hadn't. He took it all over and had 20 or 30 people pose for pictures with it on. He then sent me a bill from a fictitious detective agency for tracking it down. The bill was in an envelope along with about 30 pictures and a detailed account of the exhaustive search.
 

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Posted by Taberah (Member # 4014) on :
 
A few favorites:

-Cover every flat surface of a room with Dixie cups filled with water. It takes a while to do, but it takes much longer to undo. The victim has to empty out each cup of water one at a time, and can't do anything in the room until most of the cups are removed.

Press a tack into the side of a can of shaving cream. Tie a string to the tack before it goes all the way in. Run past a room and throw the can into the room while holding on to the string. The tack is pulled out, and shaving cream spurts out everywhere.

-Put a can of shaving cream in dry ice. Once it's frozen, take a hammer and knock off the bottom of the can. A nice cylinder of frozen shaving cream will slide out. Chuck the cylinder into a window or hide it somewhere. As the shaving cream melts, it will expand and cover everything.

-Get a pizza or cookie tray and fill it with the liquid of your choice (water, soda, urine, etc.). Freeze it. Then remove the resulting disc or square of ice, and slide it under a locked door. This works best on non-carpeted flooring.

-A good revenge prank is to go into a person's room and simply hide sardines everywhere. Stick them in shoes, pockets, drawers, cabinets, and especially heating vents. If they have a dictionary, open it to "sardines" and put sardines between the pages there. This is a prank better suited to a more hostile rivalry.

-In the winter, go out to an appropriate grassy area and write the message of your choice with a herbicide. It won't show while the grass is dead during the winter, but in 3 or 4 months it's obvious for all to see.

-For people in college, you can have fun with statues by means of the creative application of Brasso. The administration can either leave what you've polished in or they can Brasso the entire statue.

This is just stuff off the top of my head. It sounds like some of you had a rather boring time in college.
 

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Posted by ClaudiaTherese (Member # 923) on :
 
No, Kayla, neither have I. I find making myself to be the butt of jokes to be occasionally funny, but doing it to others always seems to have a flavor of mean-spiritedness.

I've never admired that part of me which might delight in others' discomfort. I'm not a prude -- I just don't like to have my pleasures feel tainted.

My friends always seemed to have imaginations that wouldn't be satisfied merely by sniggerage.

[ June 17, 2004, 09:12 PM: Message edited by: ClaudiaTherese ]
 

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Posted by Misha McBride (Member # 6578) on :
 
My friend used to work for an ambulance company, and pranks there were epidemic among the paramedics.

One the the favorites was to take a bag of saline or lactated ringers (I'm told the second option is better, as it is more sticky when it dries) and place it under the bottom sheet and pillow on one of the beds they had there for tired paramedics. Attach a tube and run it under the bottom sheet to about crotch level. When someone's head hits the pillow *whoosh* wet bed under your groin.

Baby powder in the air conditioning vents in the ambulances was also popular, just make sure you have the fan set to high.
 

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Posted by Jalapenoman (Member # 6575) on :
 
Some of my best:

1. In high school, we convinced a UFO nut that there had been a UFO sighting in Abilene, Texas. Over the course of a few weeks, we kept telling him about several strange occurences in and around that area. If he watched the evening news, we told him that we had seen it on the Today show. If he read the paper, we told him that it was in a different paper.
Eventually, our escalating storys had large crops of giant asparagus (yes, asparagus) growing all over town. Dogs and cats were disappearing, with only bone piles found beside the asparagus fields. It slowly took over the town and the governor declared martial law.
After a month, the victim was writting reports in his classes about this and telling anyone who would listen that he had proof of alien life.
He told us that he and a bunch of UFO buddys were driving to Abilene (about 400 miles away) on Easter Break to check it out. As they got close to the town, they heard a truck driver on their CB radio tell another trucker that it was "green through Abilene." They took this signal meaning that there were no cops on the interstate to mean that the town was green with asparagus.
The townspeople of Abilene experienced a carload of weird teenagers asking them about the giant asparagus, martial law, UFO sightings, and strange disappearances. The guys finally, after asking several people and getting laughed at, realized that they had been had.
He has never spoken to me again, though I have seen him in the interviening years in stores or movies.

2. Buy a package of disposable diapers and a bottle of Hersheys syrup (the kind you put on ice cream). Put some syrup in the obvious place on the diaper and stick them in fun and exciting places (ladies purses, people's windshields, school lockers, desks, chairs, park benches, shopping carts,......).

3. An oldie but a goodie: saran wrap toilet seats.

4. A variation to the sardine trick earlier is to pop someones hood and lay them, or anchovies, across their block. When the motor gets hot, they get to stinking pretty bad. You can also place them under door handles on cars.

5. Another car joke is to put rocks in someones hubcaps. THe faster they go, the more they clang. You never hear the noise when the car is standing still. Marbles just spin around and do not have the same effect as an uneven rock.

6. Oldie but goodie: crisco on the doorknob.

7. You can also put a fine layer of crisco on someones wiper blades. The first time they use them, they put a layer of grease on their windshield. THe blades then slide over the grease and do not remove it. The cheap window wash solution in wiper reservoirs will not touch it either.

8. Pour a fine layer of baby powder on a sheet of paper and slide it just under someone's door. Take a hair blower and blow on the paper. Everything in the room will be covered with a fine layer of powder. THe more you repeat the trick, the more powder. This also works with flour.

9. Oldie but goodie: ex-lax cake or brownies.

10. Oldie but goodie: methalyne blue. Amaze your friends by putting this ph tester in their dark drinks. When they exit the bathroom nervously a few hours later because their urine is blue, your joke is working.

Well, I think ten is enough. I am a master at the practical joke!
 

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Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
 
I tend to agree with CT. Most of these practical jokes are simply nasty.

But some of those were actually potentially dangerous. Or would the joke be considered a REAL success if the grease-clouded windshield caused an accident?
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
I think I should explain that pranking at my school is very good-natured. Anyone can be exempted from pranking at any time and there is never any hard feelings about it. (Although, it is considered in very poor taste to ask not to be pranked and then prank other people.) In fact, in my later years freshmen were even invited to put themselves on a "Do Not Prank" list when they first arrived.

To be honest, I don't find many practical jokes funny. The ones in school were different because they were so large scale and took so much planning and effort to execute well. When someone pranked me really well I had to admire the work that went into it. And it helped that almost none of the pranking involved actually hurting or risking hurting other people, or causing them physical discomfort.
 

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Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
 
See, while I don't usually find pranks like the ones you described funny, saxy, I do admire the planning and ingenuity. And for the most part, there was no real harm done.

The one college prank that I did find truly amusing (mostly for shock value) was the morning I came outside and discovered that the HOLLYWOOD sign now read CALTECH.
 

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Posted by saxon75 (Member # 4589) on :
 
One of my favorite old Harvey Mudd pranks involved a sign. On the 210 freeway heading east there's a sign that reads:

code:

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California Institute of Technology
      Pasadena City College
            Next Exit

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quote:

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Is methalyne blue safe? Where could I buy it?

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It is always best to avoid putting chemicals into someone's drink. It can end poorly...what if they were alergic to it, and you killed them?

Besides...even if they just got sick, if they got pissed and pressed charges you could go to jail.

I always tended to stick with pranks where there were no safety implications.
 

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Posted by Troubadour (Member # 83) on :
 
One of my best pranks was to my new boss when I moved to Melbourne. I'm usually into seriously long-term jokes. This one took around 2-3 months to complete.

The first opportunity I had alone in his office I installed a piece of software on his computer that allowed me to send any message I liked to his computer from anywhere on the network - but the message would show up looking like an operating system warning dialog box, with my text in it.

I started off very very infrequently sending him reasonable-sounding error messages, just to get him used to his machine having possible difficulties. Occaisionally I was asked to come in and resolve the "issue" that was causing the errors.

After about a month I started making the messages slightly silly. Nothing major, just a jaunty lilt to the message.

After about two months I started in with some bizarre messages - "PORN SCAN (tm) Has detected unauthorised and illegal images on this drive. The relevent network managers have been informed."

That sort of thing.

As I lead up to the grand finale, I let others in on the joke and installed the sending software on their machines.

The last message I sent left him gobsmacked, his jaw hanging open - followed quickly by "Error - Jaw Malfunction, Please Close Mouth".

He figured it out then.... heh.

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I also spent an entire Christmas holidays during uni (six weeks or more here) broke, hanging out with another guy from the dorm I was living in. We spent the entire time sitting outside the room of a girl who'd gone home for the holidays, scrunching up the paper from the 44-gallon drum newspaper recylcing bins and passing them through the louvres above her door. When she came back we'd climbed up onto the awning outside her window and watched as she waded into a room hip-deep with wadded newspaper.
 

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Posted by Frisco (Member # 3765) on :
 
Recently, I've been sending friends a file (I've renamed it "A fun game to brighten your day" that opens a mock Confirm Folder Delete box:

"Are you sure you want to delete the folder 'Windows' and all its contents?"

It proceeds to complete the delete process, then opens to:

"Windows has detected that there's no system software on your computer:

Shut down computer?"

It's really funny. My roommate opened it, and he almost crapped himself trying to shut his computer down during the deleting process, because he downloaded the real thing once and lost almost everything.

It's obviously fake if you stop to think about it, but the panic interrupts clear thought patterns. Some people will cry. But they'll feel that much better when they realize it's a joke!
 

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Posted by punwit (Member # 6388) on :
 
While I enjoy a good practical joke I do practice some restraint. When contemplating any joke I always consider how I would feel if I were the intended victim. I won't do anything that would be intentionally dangerous or mean-spirited. I believe the golden rule is always appropriate. If I couldn't laugh if I were the victim I won't do it. I once stopped a couple of guys from trapping a fellow worker in a bathroom and leaving him for who knows how long.
 

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Posted by Frisco (Member # 3765) on :
 
I always go by the Golden Rule.

It's just that I can take a lot more than most people.
 

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Posted by punwit (Member # 6388) on :
 
My mother got me pretty good on April Fool's day years ago. I went to put on my jeans and she had sewed the leg opening closed.
 

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Posted by ArCHeR (Member # 6616) on :
 

quote:

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I always go by the Golden Rule.

It's just that I can take a lot more than most people.

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