ask the readers: what are the best and worst pranks you’ve seen at work?

by Alison Green on April 2, 2019

I received this too late to run it yesterday but what the hell, we can still do it today. A reader writes:

Long time reader, first time question asker. This is more out of curiosity (I don’t currently have this problem where I work) but many of us have seen the episode of The Office where Jim seals Dwight’s stapler in Jello.

For April Fools’ Day, I’m curious about other readers’ experiences on this, the most treacherous of days for pranks. What are the worst or least appropriate pranks people have seen pulled in the workplace?

Over the years, pranks have proved far more controversial here than I ever would have expected, with some people arguing passionately that no prank is ever okay at work because they’re inherently mean-spirited. I disagree with that! Plenty of pranks aren’t mean-spirited, land the way they’re intended to, and are enjoyed by all. Other pranks fail that test, sometimes horrifyingly so.

For this post, I’m especially interested in hearing about pranks that went well — that no one felt humiliated, terrified, or angry from, and where genuine merriment ensured. But let’s also hear about pranks that went terribly wrong. Have at it in the comments.

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  1. Mary*

    I work in a lab, it used to be pretty common to send the student to the campus storeman for a “long wait” or a “glass hammer”

    1. Frea*

      When I worked at the golden arches, it was common to send new people to the (non-existent) basement for liquid dent remover or powdered mayonnaise.

              1. paxfelis*

                We used to send people looking for “staff private so-and-so” or “command private major so-and-so.”

          2. kiwidg1*

            Ah, the fun we had sending the young airmen out for some flightline! Thanks for the memories.

            1. wondHRland*

              My hubby used to be in the Air Force, and they’d send people looking for Jet Wash.

          3. SamIAm*

            Also military (Navy). New sailors were often sent to the boiler room on the ship to get a B-T Punch (punched by the Boiler Tech).

            1. Kathleen_A*

              My husband was a USMC tank mechanic stationed for most of his enlistment in 29 Palms, a town in the oh, so hot Mojave Desert (Unofficial motto: “Your Gateway to Death by Dehydration”). What some of the guys liked to do was put a wrench or something out in the Mojave Desert sun for a couple of hours and then tell the newbie to go get it. It would literally get hot enough to cause a painful burn, so personally, I don’t think this is very funny, but then again, I wasn’t a Marine, so…

          5. Free Meerkats*

            Our division office was conveniently located next to the first ladder down from the hangar bay level quarterdeck, so we’d get many of the new people reporting to the ship asking where Personnel was so they could check in. The old salts we’d give a straight answer to, but new recruit types? They’d get sent on a voyage around the ship to various offices that were in on it. Many of them had no idea how to find things on ships by number, so everyone would be “so busy” they’d just get the compartment number and then chased out of the office.

            Luckily, we were a nuke ship, so we never got the newbie BMs looking for a bucket of steam, most of the crew weren’t allowed int he engineering spaces.

          6. Wintermute*

            in the Submarine corps they send people to ask permission to “blow the DCA”– now, on a submarine there are many ballasts, tanks, receptacles and other apparatus that are vented, blown, dumped, transferred or cleared. The DCA is not one of them. The DCA is not, in fact a piece of equipment, it is a person, the Damage Control Assistant [officer].

          1. kab0b*

            I call into my shop and ask for a lift kit for a smart car. Then one of my new hires found one…

            1. Hills to Die on*

              coming close to having to explain to my coworkers why I am laughing out loud.

          2. Bowserkitty*

            I had never heard of the blinker fluid joke until a few years ago when my friends were talking about it. Thank god my mom never pulled that on me! I saw some hilarious videos where the humiliated teenagers storm back to the car where the parents are giggling in glee.

          3. TJ Morrison*

            Once I saw a car with one tail light half filled with water. I followed it for about a mile before our paths diverged. Watching it slosh around and cause the light to vary in brightness made my day and still brings a smile to my face whenever I think about it.

      2. Seeking Second Childhood*

        Summer camp…. a left-handed smoke-shifter.
        A friend’s restaurant… a left-handed whisk.

            3. Deejay*

              That reminds me of the uranium ore on sale at Amazon and the review ““I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.”

          1. CanadaTag*

            Actually, there is a type of bird called a snipe!

            From Wikipedia: A snipe is any of about 26 wading bird species in three genera in the family Scolopacidae. They are characterized by a very long, slender bill and crypsis, or camouflage, plumage. The Gallinago snipes have a nearly worldwide distribution, the Lymnocryptes snipe is restricted to Asia and Europe and the Coenocorypha snipes are found only in the outlying islands of New Zealand. The four species of painted snipe are not closely related to the typical snipes, and are placed in their own family, the Rostratulidae.

            1. Other Becky*

              Snipe are also extremely difficult to hunt – they’re mostly not that big and they fly in darting, irregular patterns rather than straight lines. The term “sniper” originally referred to someone who’s a good enough shot to be able to hunt snipe.

        4. future wolf*

          you joke but there is a bizarrely large number of items that are made “right-handed” that I can’t really use as a lefty.

          Dumbest example that comes to mind is a spatula. My wife got this great new spatula for our kitchen that is simply unusable to me because of the way it’s designed. A freakin’ SPATULA!

          1. Drama Llama's Mama*

            Yep, my husband didn’t believe me that there are some knives that are “handed” which contributes to my clumsiness with them. Until he went to get his fancy Japanese knives sharpened and the guy asked if he was right or left handed so he could hone the blade accordingly.

      4. irene adler*

        My bro used to tell the story of a foreign exchange student in Germany who was asked to go to the grocery store for fly lard. Made every clerk he asked bust out laughing.

      5. Qosanchia*

        I worked in a university dining hall, and one of the units got their newbie to tie himself and a passel of others up for 30-45 minutes dredging dry storage for “Plexan oven coolant.”
        The main dining hall manager was not pleased.

      2. Beth*

        From the costume shop at a major opera company: fabric stretcher or yardage extender. (I’ve heard that the circus world sends new hands for pole stretchers.)

        Also from the theatre world: a bucket of prop-wash (for dusting the props).

        1. DuPont Circle Travel*

          Tech theatre it’s a cable stretcher.

          And apparently in the old days, when lighting gel was made from actual gel (rather than the plastic it is now), you’d send the newbies to “wash the gel” – which resulted in the color washing away as well, triggering panic that you’ve now ruined it!

    4. Roci crewmate number 5*

      My son worked at a fishing lodge last summer and was sent by the chef to get a bucket of steam on one occasion. Poor kid looked for 30 minutes. Even asked the lodge owner if they were serious, he barked at him that if the chef needed a bucket of steam he better be hoofing it! They got the next new kid to search frantically for a left handed bacon stretcher. The re-telling of the tale was glorious.

      1. WrathOfJuno*

        Restaurant- sent to fetch the rice cutter or bacon stretcher from a near by competitor (they were all in on the standard prank and would proceed to send the hapless employee to another location that they said had the item). Also once had a new employee who wasn’t allowed to leave until he drained the Bunn Coffee Urn (which was tied directly to the water line)… I felt sorry for that guy and sent him home once it was clear that he would keep trying to drain that machine all night.

        1. DreddPirate*

          Ok, I’ve gotta say that the assignment to drain the coffee urn that’s connected to the water supply is genius!

    5. HR Stoolie*

      Way back I was working commercial fisheries we used to send newbies to the bow to with a gaff to spot and snag the “mail buoy”

      1. Foila*

        Ah, the mail buoy. We would remind everyone to get their letters ready, and then everyone had to keep a sharp lookout…

    6. Sienna*

      When I was in the army, a motor pool sgt sent a new private to the neighboring motor pool to ask for a box of fallopian tubes.

      2. Jules the 3rd*

        I would totally just come back with some (other) female members of the neighboring motor pool.

    7. Agile Phalanges*

      I once got asked to look online and find prices for an “air comb.” I thought it was one of these type of pranks, but apparently it’s a real thing–attaches to an air compressor hose and can be used to plow air into tight spaces in a comb-like set of streams. We used it to clean dust off tractor radiators. But yeah, I thought sure they were pulling my leg.

      1. Chinookwind*

        As someone who wroute up po’s for pipeline pigs, I didn’t know if soneone was pranking me when they wanted one for sniffer dogs. I have since learned that pigs are tools inside a pipe and dogs have tails and paws and noses that smell leaks.

      2. Anonny*

        I heard about someone who did the reverse of that – sent the newbie off for “skyhooks” or something, thinking it wasnt a real item, only to find that they were a thing, cost a fair amount of money, and when the newbie hadn’t been able to find any in the company stocks, they’d ordered them from a supplier.

        Oops.

    8. Surgery McScrubface*

      Working in the operating room – telling people they were paged to OR 13 (we don’t have one – goes from 12 to 14).

      1. Alli525*

        Is that pretty common, to skip OR #13, or just at your hospital? I always appreciate the old buildings that “don’t have” a thirteenth floor.

        1. TooTiredToThink*

          As far as I know its incredibly common (I’m not in the medical field, but have heard this many times), which makes this the most perfect prank. “I found 12. I found 14. Where is 13?”

      2. noahwynn*

        The airline I used to work for skips row 13 on all their aircraft. Apparently since they’re Las Vegas based and all the flights went to Vegas when they started years ago, they had trouble getting passengers to sit there because of bad luck.

      2. CMart*

        Also restaurant:
        – left handed wine keys/whisks/spatulas etc…
        – Strawberry de-seeder
        – sent to a neighbor restaurant for a bucket of steam

        And my favorite time (and resource…) waster: emptying the hot water from the direct-line coffee machine.

    10. SignalLost*

      When my mother was a new nurse, Eustachian tubes or Fallopian tubes from central supply was common.

    11. Common Welsh Green*

      New nurses on their surgical rotation routinely had surgeons crossly demanding neck tourniquets. My mother was halfway down a long hall to the supply cupboard before she realized what would happen if you put a tourniquet around someone’s neck.

    12. Trouble*

      When I worked at McDonald’s we:
      sent people ‘to the basement for more cups’ there was no basement but watching them look for it was fine.
      To the garage down the road for a bucket of steam to clean the grill
      to the coffee chain store across our parking lot for blueberries to make the muffins
      to the garage down the road for a long stand
      And not a common one but I told the new guy all the ice in the ice maker was waste and needed to be counted. I let him fill half a bag before telling him it was a prank.

    14. Construction Safety*

      Fallopian tubes
      Much hilarity ensued when he called on the radio asking if we wanted glass or plastic.

      1. JessaB*

        That would have gotten you a stack of packages of zipatone back in the day. You can actually get zipatone in a pattern of dots, I’d have gone to an art supply with the company card and bought you some if you asked me that.

    17. Glitsy Gus*

      A lot of newbies in the shop I worked in spent way too much time looking for a “calibrated measuring tape” or a “left handed c-wrench.”

    18. FallingSlowly*

      Proving I guess that everyone is different, personally I find nearly all of the “go ask for this (thing which doesn’t exist” to be unkind.
      To me, they are a setup to single out and humiliate a new or inexperienced person. Sure, dehydrated water should be a clue that it’s a joke, but things like “a 67 VW radiator hose” builds the “gotcha” around assuming that of course everyone knows they don’t have radiators, so now let’s all laugh at the idiot. When it’s not something that is in fact common knowledge or sense, I think that’s kind of a dick move by the pranker, and could very well make the prankee feel humiliated and picked on.

      There are also plenty of people who are anxious to please and do what’s asked of them, who might be afraid to voice their doubts about the command, who then also get laughed at.

      Just my thoughts.

      1. Bilateralrope*

        Plus there is the risk of the new guy finding it and costing the business a lot of money.

        I remember reading a story where someone was sent looking for “skyhooks”. He went looking. He found a place that had them, then placed an order.

        Luckily his boss was able to cancel the order, as it was expensive.

        1. Jack V*

          OK, *that*’s funny, at least in retrospect.

          Yeah, I don’t think these are always wrong, but they very often constitute the sort of prank “demonstrating dominance over someone who can’t fight back” more than “an elegant surprise that everyone is satisfied by”

          1. Vemasi*

            As with a lot of pranks, I think it depends on how you do it, and your attitude going into it. For the majority of “pranks,” two people could do the same thing and one could be good fun, and the other humiliating. This is how hazing gets out of hand. In a good natured group, it’s more “We’ve done some silly stuff together in good humor, and it sped up our path to friendship.” It can also cut the anxiety of being in a new workplace or group by showing there’s space for jokes and frivolity, and humanize your superiors when they say that the same thing happened to them when they were new.

            But it’s when, as you say, the prankster starts to think that they have power over the other person and can make them do whatever they want, or single someone out mean-spiritedly. And there’s no way to write guidelines about this, as the people who insist on no pranks ever understand–some people just don’t understand that pranks are supposed to be fun or funny for everyone involved, and think it’s all about tricking someone into looking like an idiot and then mocking them.

      2. NforKnowledge*

        Thank you, FallingSlowly, I feel the same way!
        I think for a prank not to fall into the territory of mean it has to be between equals, not picking on the new person just because you can.

        1. MayLou*

          I agree – as someone who has a tendency to take things literally, and not always recognise that someone is joking, I would be really hurt if this was exploited for others’ amusement. It’s also potentially opening up a company to accusations of discrimination, since pulling this kind of “prank” is a common way that people bully autistic people, people with learning disabilities etc. Unless the joke is extremely, very obviously a joke and the other person immediately recognises that (and you can’t usually predict that they will), it’s just mean.

            1. Anita Brayke*

              I was uneasy with it too! I’m a people pleaser and I also take things literally, and while I would have forced myself to realize that they were just kidding, it would have been upsetting too.

              I used to work in the scheduling office for a technical theatre, and apparently in rigging there is something called a “pickle” that is not a cucumber exposed to brine and spices for several months. A travelling supervisor asked a newbie to get him a pickle, so the guy went to catering and got him a pickle! Accidental prank, but the supervisor was nice and explained what he really meant. Now THAT was funny!

        1. FallingSlowly*

          Exactly. And it’s a vulnerable time, being new and trying to find your feet. It would be very easy for something like this to leave the target mortified.

      5. Longwing*

        I’m with you on this.
        “Hey newbie! Please waste an hour or two in your first week on a fruitless errand. This will teach you the importance of distrusting me when I make requests and impart a sense that I don’t value your time. It will also teach an important lesson about trying to please, namely that you shouldn’t do it. This prank gets better if you try VERY HARD to fulfil my request, so future requests will be answered with half-hearted efforts at best.”

      6. jcarnall*

        Agreed.

        Every single one of the pranks so far have been mean, intended to humiliate a new person for trying to be helpful.

    19. The Dig*

      At an archaeological dig I worked in, we sent the new guy fetch a neutron theodolite. The guy figured it out quick enough.
      Two other guys were sent to fetch a bubble bucket. I personally thought that was weird enough the guys would quickly figure it was a joke. They never did! They ran around the village, going from the dig to the café (the owner was in on the prank) to the base to our hotel, and back again, for about an hour, until another volunteer told them it was a prank.

    20. ProcrastinationGoals*

      I work at an IT Company and we have an electrical wholesalers next door who are a long term client and hilarious humans. We had a new help desk tech start for us recently and the older techs sent him next door to the wholesalers for a “long wait”. Now the staff next door took this and ran with it. When our new tech arrived and said he was there for a “long wait” the warehouse staff next door said, ” no worries, mate I’ll grab one from out the back for you”. He waited there for two hours. TWO HOURS.
      I had no words when he got back.

  2. NewHerePleaseBeNice*

    Probably not massively original, but several years ago I had a colleague who was Bridezilla-like in planning her wedding. We heard Every. Little. Detail. of her flowers, her cake, her dress, her vows, and we endured a massive tantrum-like meltdown one afternoon over the fact that she was struggling to find the right shade of pink for her bridesmaids dresses.

    She returned from her honeymoon to find her entire desk, chair, cabinet, noticeboard, folders, PC and screen etc. plastered with hundreds, thousands of bright pink post-it notes. Oh, and a single pink balloon tied to the back of her chair.

          1. AnnaBananna*

            + 1

            “It looks like two pigs fightin’ under a blanket.” I totally have the movie memorized, but that’s my fave Wheezer quote. :D

      1. NewHerePleaseBeNice*

        She was…….. lightly amused.

        (to be fair, these days I think I’d be annoyed by the waste of paper, but at that point in time it was hilarious)

    3. Engineer Girl*

      I had one set of friends leave their keys with the best man while they went off on honeymoon. They returned to find all their spare underwear in the freezer. The underwear had been soaked in water, balled up, an formed into little ice balls.
      You’ll have to wait for those clean clothes.

      1. Airy*

        Wow, that just feels mean. Also creepy that he went through their underwear drawers and handled each pair.

      2. Artemesia*

        Why would anyone leave their keys with the best man — this is asking for it. We all know to leave them with Mom and you will return to milk and bread and eggs and a bottle of Champagne in the refrigerator.

        1. k*

          Yes! I just went on vacation and my mom cleaned my entire house while I was gone (without me asking). <3

      3. Cassie*

        Ewww. That’s gross. Anyone who did that to me would be paying for new underwear. Which they would not EVER be touching! *shudders*

      4. wondHRland*

        When I was a kid, we were watching a neighbors house while they were on vacation (road trip). on the day they were to return, we filled their one (and only) bathroom with balloons.

          1. CmdrShepard4ever*

            I really hope this is a son living on their own also what kind of balloons, air/helium/water?

        2. Former Borders Refugee*

          I once went over to a friend’s house while they were out of town and hid about 100 tongue depressors all. over. their. house. Like, they have MOVED since, and they still will occasionally text me a picture of another one they found.

      5. Arts Akimbo*

        I’d think it was pretty funny, as long as it was cotton underwear and not expensive delicates.

        My Best Woman very, very kindly took it upon herself to clean up a friend’s post-wedding-reception-afterparty vomit from my guest bathroom while my spouse and I were on honeymoon. I’d have given her any number of free passes to freeze my underwear!

      6. CmdrShepard4ever*

        Spare underwear as in underwear that was in their drawers that were not currently being used?

        Or spare underwear as in brand new unopened unused underwear for emergencies?

        I actually keep spare (new unopened) underwear and socks that I try to stash away and save for emergencies when I forget to wash clothes.

        I wouldn’t want to touch anyone’s used underwear even if it is washed.

      7. That Girl From Quinn's House*

        I threatened to do this to one of my lifeguards years ago, he left his wet speedo “to dry” in a ball on the floor of the office. I was like, if you don’t at least hang it up next time it’s going in the freezer.

        1. Aro*

          My dad actually did this to his college roommate because he kept leaving his underwear in the microwave.

      8. JustaTech*

        A friend asked for suggestions of how to prank his brother returning from his honeymoon. The favorite was to turn off their water heater. Nothing is damaged, but ooh a cold shower. (The group collectively decided this was too mean and also that we would make sure to never get on the bad side of the person who suggested it.)

    4. entrylevelsomething*

      Post-it notes are classic. Don’t damage anything, just takes a little time to remove. And hey, if you remove them right, free stacks of slightly less sticky post-it notes.

  3. Arya Snark*

    I used to prank pretty regularly for 4/1 when I didn’t work remotely. Nothing controversial – just small cuts of post-its on the mouse reader, plastic bugs under keyboards/in candy bowls/in microwave and flipping the screen display on a particular friend’s monitor. Never got any bad feedback on them and I think they went over well.

    1. Engineer Girl*

      I’m a big fan of placing a post it containing “April Fools!” over the optical sensor on the mouse.

      2. Elemeno P.*

        I did this to my supervisor after I found some tiny sticky notes on my desk. Apparently they were on my desk because he’d used them to do the same thing to our boss and was trying to frame me for it, so he just figured it was payback!

      3. Detective Amy Santiago*

        At an old job, we coordinated that we were all going to “call off” to our supervisor. A few people did it the night before and a few people did it that morning. Supervisor came in and was confused that we were all there.

        She got her revenge by getting a colleague on another team to cover all of our mouse sensors with post-it notes while we were in a meeting.

        1. Engineer Girl*

          One day we all wore full suits to the office. Our supervisor got really nervous that there was a big meeting he had forgotten.

          1. Qosanchia*

            This is amazing, and my absolute favorite class of prank. It gets people weirded out without having to hurt anyone or cause any damage

            1. Margaret*

              When I was in university, we all dressed up lightly as our funny young philosophy prof (blazers and bowties.) He loved it and made us take a group photo.

        2. Spouter of Gibberish*

          That one is funny. Everyone probably thought their mouse was broken (until they flipped it over and saw the post it covering the light).

      5. Jules the 3rd*

        My kid likes that one.

        This year he submitted a paper to his teacher, 2 days early, and said he wasn’t sure about one of the sources. Could she check while he still had time to make changes?

        Rick Roll.

      6. Glitsy Gus*

        Someone did this one to every single desk in an office I worked in and, even as the victim, it was a fun one.

      7. Vicky Austin*

        Then there’s always the classic: yell “EEK! A mouse!” and then when people ask where, point to your computer mouse.

    2. Master Bean Counter*

      Somebody tried to prank me with a fake spider one day. The ex-marine salesman in who found it in my office gave a scream that would put a four year old to shame.

      1. An Elephant Never Baguettes*

        We have a plastic spider in our office restroom (a Halloween leftover which has by now acquired a name) and basically everyone who doesn’t know comes out of there complaining about the slight adrenaline kick of fear. At this point we’re weirdly fond of it though so Sybil is here to stay. (It helps that we never have external guests who could be startled.)

      2. Jules the 3rd*

        The guy in the cube across from me tries to get people with a fake rat. When I first came in, he thought I’d be an easy target. Unfortunately for him, I have a slightly flat affect and a biology professor / lifelong prankster for a father. I had a rat for a pet when I was 8 (Cream. My sister had Coffee). Animals that escaped their cages at our house included (but were not limited to) multiple non-poisonous snakes, hissing cockroaches, and my sister’s tarantula.

        When he left the fake dismembered hand on the floor under our divider, I realized my cube neighbor was a prankster and explained that I don’t actually like jokes, and he quit with me. I do make a point of hunting up his rat every Halloween and Apr 1, just to be nice.

        1. mdv*

          “I do make a point of hunting up his rat every Halloween and Apr 1, just to be nice.”
          … that IS awfully nice of you — acknowledging his effort to have some fun.

      3. Free Meerkats*

        At the state fair here, one of the 4H barns is known for the “plastic spider on a fishing line from the rafters” bit. They were pretty good with it. Maybe 3 years ago I stuck a pair of scissors in my back pocket and snipped the “web” when it landed on my shoulder.

    3. Zennish*

      It’s also fun to take a screenshot of someone’s computer desktop, set it as their wallpaper, then turn off “show desktop icons”… or so I’ve heard.

      1. Gumby*

        Or, if they are unwise enough to leave their computer both unlocked and unattended, the old ctrl-alt-down arrow. Faster, less chance of being caught.

      2. LadyFannyofOmaha*

        We change the background if people leave computers unlocked…. used to be pictures of Tom selleck from the 70s but we have now moved on to Kanye West. In fact, we now just call it “being Kanyed”.

        1. entrylevelsomething*

          Corgi butts were big in the box office where I used to work. Every few days, new corgi butts.

        2. Brightlights*

          We had a guy who just never learned to lock his computer. I flipped his screen many times. He would freak out and go to tech support, then I would flip it back before he came back.

          Another coworker set his background to a photo of Nicholas Cage.

          A coworker who shall remain nameless trained another “doesn’t lock his machine” colleague to lock it by logging into his account and sending an IM to several people (all his friends, whom she had warned in advance): “Anyone have any Beano? Lunch was rough.” The culprit was identified by her uncontrollable laughter. She was unrepentant. He still locks his machine every time, 5 years later.

          1. Spouter of Gibberish*

            Way back in the day, someone changed the ‘Exit Windows sound” on my boss’s computer to be Cartman from South Park saying “Stew you guys, I’m going home” — so when the next meeting ended, and he shut down powerpoint, it was uh, interesting.

            1. Aunt Vixen*

              Way WAY back in the day, when all was DOS and setting sound files to play on particular actions was apparently a tricky business, my dad had a co-worker named Dave – whose computer someone got to one lunchtime (not my dad; he never had this kind of skill) so that, when quitting time came and he shut down for the evening, it asked him what he thought he was doing. Poor guy almost fainted.

  4. socentury*

    Before I got to the firm, there was apparently an office-wide prank where everyone was informed the door was voice activated and their card would no longer work – a play on the voice activated copier. This one made everyone stand outside work saying their name until someone figured it out.

    1. That One Person*

      I think it helps when embarrassment can be shared and knowing you weren’t the only one, which is what makes things like that work out XD Or so I imagine, I’m sure there could still be one person who takes it personally even if 5+ other folks fall for it.

    2. JJ Bittenbinder*

      I once worked with a woman who did the voice-activated copier prank on her team. Surprisingly, no one had heard of it. What made it most effective is that she was the absolute last person you’d suspect of playing an office prank. She was a very kind woman and a great manager, but extremely business-like and no-nonsense. I think that’s why so many people fell for it.

    3. Not A Morning Person*

      A similar story! At one building I worked in, someone posted a note on the elevators that they were voice activated as a new development to help blind or otherwised disabled riders. It was embarrassing and hilarious at the same time when someone finally remembered it was April 1!

      1. Jack V*

        My first thought was, “yeah, right, how likely is it that they remodelled ANYTHING to make it more accessible without a big hoopla of people working on it for weeks” :(

      2. Zombeyonce*

        I live this one because blind people aren’t going to be able to read the sign, so it’s even better for people not really thinking about it!

    5. TardyTardis*

      We had someone who changed the global language on our copier to French (once we figured out how to change it again, no problem).

  5. Serin*

    In the early ’80s, I worked for a newspaper. No internet, no email, etc.; our computers had some kind of DOS shell, and all we could do was type articles in plain text and hit a command to send them to Composition to be printed in columns.

    I had a co-worker named Ben who was a really heavy typist, as if he was still accustomed to using a manual typewriter. When Ben was typing, you could hear it all over the newsroom: THUD THUD THUD.

    One day we came in and found a note on the bulletin board telling us that our machines had been upgraded, and one of the features added was this super-bare-bones kind of instant messaging from one workstation to another. Messages would appear at the bottom of the screen.

    The first message that was sent in that newsroom was one to Ben that said, “Ouch! Not so hard!”

    1. Michaela Westen*

      In the early 90’s I worked with an older woman who still used a manual typewriter. They had tried getting her and electric, and she kept breaking them.

    2. Atlantis*

      I had a similar situation using a raspberry pi (a small easily programmable computer about the size of a credit card).

      We were working on a project that included the pi having a separate email address so we could recieve data from it without having it connected to a monitor. One day, my teammate decided to prank us by sending an email from the pi even though it was deactivated in a cabinet.

      The email read: “it’s so cold and dark in here. let me out.”

      The confusion and mild panic that ensued was absolutely hilarious.

      1. whingedrinking*

        My partner does this thing that always makes me laugh where he does a voice for animals. I’m imagining your Raspberry Pi saying that in the same high-pitched, consternated way and trying to smother my giggles.

    3. SaraM*

      I once worked for a company where we (the non-IT employees) frequently had to restart the server for various reasons. This was Windows XP days. My buddy and I sent dozens of Net Send messages to our coworkers before someone finally heard us giggling in the server room.
      Our other coworkers were…let’s just say less than technologically inclined, and no one in the company had ever used this feature for good (most didn’t realize it existed) so it was great fun to send them stuff like “Get off Facebook and back to work, Susan! –BossName” We got a couple of the older ladies pretty good with ones like that.

  6. I'm A Little Teapot*

    We plastic wrapped the entire office of a senior VP. The guy was very cool, and everyone knew he liked pranks though he didn’t do much. So we grabbed a couple people, a huge roll of plastic wrap, and did his office. Monitor, phone, keyboard, mouse, desk, chair, trash can, white board, etc. If it was there, we wrapped it. He loved it and the whole area heard him laughing when he found it. (We were careful to time it so we wouldn’t mess up meetings or anything – the assistant helped).

    1. NPAF*

      Mine is similar! For our director’s birthday milestone we gift-wrapped everything in his office. And then filled it with balloons and streamers. Absolutely hilarious.

      1. Brightlights*

        We did this to a departing coworker on his last day (which was just before the holidays, so we were on a cube decorating spree anyway.) Monitor, mouse, keyboard, tower, and chair (we skipped his desk because we ran out of paper.) He just stared at it in silence.

        Coworker was an old high school friend of mine so I predicted this reaction. We helped him unwrap it. He was not mad.

    2. Alli525*

      My coworkers and I once gift-wrapped our quiet-but-collegial colleague’s entire cubicle (down to individual items like staplers) while he was away on vacation… but we think something must have happened on vacation, because he returned, saw everything, and went so quiet that all of us spent the rest of our time there – we knew our org was being shut down in a few months due to budget cuts – actually terrified that he might get violent. He wouldn’t even speak to us when we tried to apologize and explain it was all in good fun. It was the absolute strangest response I’ve ever seen to a joke.

      1. The Hamster's Revenge*

        One time a coworker was retiring and we filled his pickup full of Styrofoam peanuts. He was so upset, he started crying his eyes out. 20 people stayed after work to pick every single packing peanut out of the cab and box.

        I was nearly attacked by my work husband when I got the keys to his fancy new car and moved it 50 feet behind some trees in the parking lot. We’re still good friends 15 years later, but he has *not* forgiven me for futzing with his car.

        You never know about people sometimes.

        1. Jessen*

          I may have been the one who ended up crying after a grad school office prank once (someone filled my office with balloons). Honestly it was just really really bad timing – I actually thought it was funny, but my mental health was somewhere past in the toilet and down into the sewer system that day for entirely unrelated reasons. And it just ended up being the one more thing I couldn’t handle.

          I felt completely ridiculous because I had definitely provoked it and had absolutely no idea at all why I was crying and I just couldn’t stop. 8 years later and in a completely different field though I’m still very close friends with the perpetrator though.

        2. Schyuler Seestra*

          I would’ve been beyond pissed at anyone who moved my car. Especially my new car. Especially if they got the keys without me knowing to move my new car. Like blacklisted never talked to them again pissed.

          1. A bee*

            Same. It’d be illegal for them to drive it without correct insurance for starters. Maybe it’s a regional thing cos I hear of people moving each other’s cars pretty often in the US, but here in England it’s just not something anyone would do: you don’t operate someone else’s car unless you’re insured on it, and if you’re insured on it it’s for you drive it with everyone’s knowledge anyway. I wouldn’t take that as a prank at all!

            1. A bee*

              Plus accidents happen and if they got hit or scraped something there’d be no insurance and I’d be screwed (and you’re more likely to have an accident first time driving an unfamiliar car!

      2. Le Sigh*

        It was in good fun, but some people just don’t read it this way. Who knows? Maybe he was bullied as a kid and this reminded him of feeling picked on, and he shut down. Or maybe he just really hates pranks or felt a little isolated in the office, and he felt singled out. Or any other number of reasons.

        On the scale of pranks, this one is fairly harmless and in good fun (I wouldn’t have loved it but I would have chuckled); but I also think people who do pranks sometimes forget that regardless of intent and the fact that it was a joke, it doesn’t always read that way to the recipient.

        1. Schyuler Seestra*

          I hate pranks, no matter innocent they may seem. I was bullied hard as a child, that type of trauma stayed with me well into adulthood. I do not like being the butt of the joke. At. All. Being laughed at is triggering, and I mean it in the fullest extent of the phrase. I’m not too sensitive, I’ve tried to get over it. if I came back to work to find my cubicle gift wrapped I would’ve flipped out. If you choose to prank you need to be prepared for a less than desirable reaction.

          1. Jules the 3rd*

            It is very important to really know your target. Anyone else flashing back to the person who locked their phobic coworker out on a balcony right before an important client meeting, making coworker late? So many levels of wrong.

            1. Schyuler Seestra*

              indeed. So many of the “pranks” described upthread are pretty mean spirited. Jokes should punch up not down. Sticking Googly eyes on surfaces is pretty funny. Pranks at the expense of the victim are not funny. Unless you know the victim well, and I mean well.

              1. e*

                In a previous workplace that deployed googly eyes regularly, we’d say you’d been vandal-eyes-ed. :)

            2. CmdrShepard4ever*

              Know your target and pranks. I have no problem with pranks and enjoy them. I would have no problem being locked on the balcony for a little bit, but if it made me late for a meeting, phone call or something similar I would be mad.

              1. boo bot*

                (Late reply, but one of the issues with the balcony prank, I think, was that it DID make the target late for a meeting.)

            3. Danger: GUMPTION AHEAD*

              We played one on a coworker that went over really well. We had an ongoing joke that if you ever couldn’t figure out something you went to $Coworker. Our boss took it to the extreme (e.g. “$Coworker, can you send me the e-mail about that thing I sent you? What thing? The thing?”). Coworker was on vacation and we covered her computer and desk with post it notes and joke questions, (e.g. “Hi $Co-worker, do you know what I’m doing today? I can’t figure it out”, “How do you do $SomethingObvious”,Do you know where $RandomFakeAcronym is?”). She laughed for days about it when she came back

              1. Phoenix Wright*

                I thought you were going to say you spammed his cell phone with messages, and I was about to scream in horror until you mentioned the post-its. That’s funny indeed!

        2. Adminx2*

          My caveat is always “I don’t have to do any work.” If they clean it all up themselves, that’s fine. I wonder if the people who do the wrapping/stuffing do te clean up of their mess.

          In HS I was pranked by being given a HUGE stack of name tags and told I had to number order them. This took nearly an hour and I was super proud of my organizing efficiencies. They were ceremoniously picked up, marched across the floor, and tossed into the bin. I had to work very hard not to cry. I was a bullied ostracized kid and just wanted to be liked. I understood it was a joke but still felt like a fool in a bad way.

          1. Schyuler Seestra*

            I’m so sorry you had to go through that Adminx2. The person who pranked you was way in the wrong. Thats the other thing I don’t like about pranks. There is an element of gaslighting. The victim is expected to go along with the joke or be deemed irrational/humorless. Even supposedly harmless pranks can be hurtful to the target.

            Agree on the cleanup, if you spent the time to disrupt your coworker’s space you have the time to set everything back to normal. Leave things nicer than you found them.

        3. Ellllle*

          I agree. I hate being singled out. I hate when people try to make me look like a fool, I don’t find it funny at all. And I do NOT like to be jumped out at/touched unexpectedly/made to feel like an emergency is happening. I’ve had my fill of that in the real world.

          I think the best way to do pranks is to do it to everyone in the area so no one feels like its about them and their reaction. At my old office I was one of just a few people who knew you could change the ringtone on our phones. There was a very odd one that was just a girl saying “Hello” and me and my office friend changed everyone’s (about 20 people) phone ring to “Hello” for April Fools

          Everyone thought it was funny and we did it to everyone so no one felt like it was targeting them for any reason. And then we also taught everyone how to change their ringtone and there were some great non-Hello ringtones people could choose!

          I think the only time I’ve found pranks funny is when I have comrades in arms and I don’t feel like its happening to me because people want to see me freak out.

      3. Kvothe*

        We did this to a coworker who was out on site for a few weeks right before Christmas, wrapped everything in Christmas paper and stuffed her extra pair of overalls and printed off a life size version of her face so she had a life size dummy of herself waiting in her cubicle. She found it hilarious that she only unwrapped the things she actually needed and left the rest for like a month.

      4. Snark*

        Way to read the room. Hot take: the “quiet but collegial” colleague is probably not the one with whom you have the relationship required to prank them.

        1. Alli525*

          Thanks ever so much for your snark, Snark. FWIW, we regularly came to lunch with us and joined in the conversations with gusto, joked around with us, etc. – he was a quiet worker, that’s all. And 7 people who regularly worked with him all discussed and genuinely believed that he was likely to enjoy a harmless prank. To this day we really do believe something happened over the trip (which was to his hometown to visit his parents, so maybe one of them became ill or had a falling-out), because he was a completely changed person after that.

      5. Kat in VA*

        I’m not terribly fond of pranks in general.

        This might be because my birthday is on April Fool’s Day. Yes, it really is.

        Firecrackers in birthday cakes are passé, at this point.

        1. FallingSlowly*

          Lol I used to date a guy born on April 1st. Apparently his mum had a very hard time convincing his dad that she was honestly in labour.

    3. Tink*

      I returned from a few days at corporate to find my cubicle completely filled with packing peanuts. To the top.

    4. Anonysand*

      We did this to a coworker at LastJob for his 50th birthday, but with aluminum foil. Everything was so reflective it was hard to look at… We even wrapped his individual binders, pens, and notepads he left out. He was a notorious prankster in the department and thought it was hilarious.

      1. Rebecca in Dallas*

        We did the same thing to a coworker for a birthday! He thought it was funny and left it that way for a few days (unwrapping things as he needed them). It was so shiny!

      2. Former Admin turned Project Manager*

        We did this to a colleague while he was on vacation, but also blocked off a bit of time on the day he came back to help him un-foil his cubicle.

    5. vampire physicist*

      At my old job my (great) manager went on a long vacation after she’d helmed a pretty major initiative, and on the day before she came back we filled her office with balloons.

    6. Not Australian*

      We had a variation on this; booked a fake meeting on my boss’s calendar so that we knew he’d have a bit of spare time, and then kidnapped his office furniture and locked it all in a store room. Put it all back within the hour, after everyone had finished laughing, and his only complaint was that he’d prefer it if we hadn’t returned his phone.

    7. Alexander Graham Yell*

      Oh man, we had this break room that nobody used and one coworker suggested we set it up like a tiki bar. Well, I had a Jimmy Buffett concert to go to and a lot of supplies, so I brought them all in one night and tiki bar-ed his office instead. Sent pics to our coworkers in the main office, who showed them to the CEO – apparently you could hear him laughing all over the office. It wasn’t a great job, but I *loved* the people I worked with.

    8. TardyTardis*

      One employee who was turning 60+ had her cubicle revamped (mainly by her daughter), which included Social Security pamphlets, a walker, and a few other Old People things which actually looked like practical. Much better in its way than the black balloons and the hearse for someone else down the hall…

  7. Mikasa*

    Yesterday, one of the managers used the blender and started screaming. She turned around and had fake blood on her hand. I got a little bit scared, but mostly tried to process how the heck she put her hand in the blender lol. Her actual direct reports didn’t fall for it, though. I should’ve seen it coming because she’s funny.

      1. Mikasa*

        I pass out at the sight of blood, but she’s a bad actor so she was laughing at the same time as she was trying to look scared. It helped make it less real.

      2. Susan*

        My dad lost the top of his left hand ring finger in high school – his stub just goes to the first knuckle. He worked at McDonalds in HS and says that he would put ketchup packets on the edge of the cash register drawer, slam it shut (spurting ketchup) and come up screaming, holding up the stub.

        1. Lighthearted Musical Numbers*

          Oh my goodness, that reminded me of a former high school friend of mine that had a deformed left hand (only the pinky and thumb had any joints, the rest was sort of a permanent fist). he was ALWAYS messing with teachers on the first day of class and subs during the year with variations on the “Oh god, my hand!” and door slams, and whatnot.

    2. TardyTardis*

      This was something that happened at a church seminar–the doors opened inward, and this is important to know. See, two ladies got up very, very early and wove a nice little net with fish line (it was attached so that the victim could get out when she wanted to) decorated with flowers and stuff. So the victim opened the door and ta Daaa!

  8. YRH*

    Yesterday a member of my team sent out an email saying there were brownies in the kitchen. There were actually trays of brown Es. However, when people went to her desk to say that was mean, she had lots of homemade brownies there.

      1. Falling Diphthong*

        One thing I’ve learned on this blog: Do not mess with employees’ expectations of free simple carbohydrates. They will cut you.

    3. Former Expat*

      A teacher at one of my schools did that. I thought it was cute. She had the real brownies too.

    4. A B*

      My mom used to make sponge cakes, ie a sheet cake made of kitchen sponges covered in icing. One coworker was apparently just sawing away at that thing with a little plastic knife, till Mom finally gave in and brought out the real cake. I’m laughing just thinking about it.

    5. a*

      My coworker’s birthday was yesterday, so someone in his section sent out a “Birthday treats at 10!” email…but there were no treats. The treats were today (we mostly do treats Tuesday-Thursday, because lots of people don’t work Mondays or Fridays) instead.

    6. Mrs. Fenris*

      My son did that to one of his teachers when he was in 8th grade. His teacher thought it was hilariously clever, and pulled it on multiple students after that. My son was very proud of this and we have had a steady stream of puns and sight gags from him ever since.

  9. TootsNYC*

    Two of us stole someone’s banana and held it for ransom once.
    We cut up letters to make ransom note that said we wanted her Lady Diana Spencer photo, and we cut off a little bit of the step and taped it to the paper.

    When she didn’t respond, we folded a paper napkin to make a blindfold and drew alarmed eyebrows above it, and took my revolver-shaped bookmark from a mystery bookstore and walked in to her office with the “gun” to the “victim’s” head.

    Our mutual boss said, “Give them the picture! They’re desperate!” so she did, and we gave her the banana. And returned the picture later.

    Once I left fake death threats for this guy I worked with–pictures of a blue-footed booby in a mousetrap (already sprung), and a tissue box made to look like a safe perched above his office door.

    1. Ask a Manager* Post author

      I love ransom notes! I once left my housemate a ransom note with letters cut from the newsletter for our kitchen’s spoons (which were always disappearing).

      I also once staged multiple murder scenes with Peeps for someone else, but that’s neither here nor there. (A Peep with its throat slit and blood made of ketchup seeping out. A Peep drowned in a water glass. A Peep on the stairs with a broken neck. Etc.)

      1. I'll say it*

        Ohhh yes, once I swiped a coworker’s cell phone he left on a conference room desk and made him search for it. I just emailed him various images of his cell phone around our office and told him I’d keep it there for him if he “cooperated”. On the copier. In the bathroom. In a trash can. Etc. I finally just left it somewhere really nondescript, but he finally caught on he could call it to find it.

        1. Ask a Manager* Post author

          Ha, newspaper. But in fact, another roommate and I did make a house newsletter (for just the two of us) and it was (intentionally) ridiculous.

      3. No Longer Working*

        Alison, have you seen the Peep diorama contests that show up on the internet every year around Easter? Your post reminded me of them. They are spectacular!

        1. btdubbs*

          For anyone interested, this year’s “Peeple’s Choice Awards” diorama contest is focused science. There are some amazing entries (and voting is still happening until April 14). My SIL has been involved in these contents for years and I’m bursting with pride that she and her friends took up the mantle when the Washington Post ended the tradition of hosting it after 10 years. https://www.theopennotebook.com/2019/03/13/vote-now-for-the-peeples-choice-award/

        2. TardyTardis*

          I saw a bunch of Peeps all sorted by color, and I had a wonderful idea for another LEGO movie–Revenge of the Peeps!

      4. NM*

        Speaking of murder scenes with food… At an old job in food retail, we had these UGLY lamb cakes at Easter. They were creepy looking, tasted bad, and didn’t sell at all. So it’s Easter and we have to spoil them out because they go bad the next day. So… we cut off the head of each lamb cake and stuck it on a little cardboard disk with some red icing. We named them and gave them to each department as a mascot. There was Lamb Boleyn, Marie Lamb-toinette, Lamb Greer, Ewe-n McGregor, etc. The rest of the cake was sampled out to avoid actually tossing food.

      5. Poster Child*

        I worked for an airline and my boss loved one of his model airplanes. So we stole it and left him just the wing with a ransom note. We also did some other fun stuff like taking a company ad of a man holding his child and photo shopping in pictures of an executive vp holding my boss. Best boss I’ve ever had.

    2. RetailRodent*

      My best mate is the king of ransom notes and letter from authorities. He made a ransom note for his sister’s cat, a license order from his brother’s local council for a multi-occupant hedgehog hotel and summons from his local council to a friend when they were caught short on a night out.

      He is also not know for pranks at work unlike all the others and when he taped a phone, a pencil pot and a stapler to the desk not one person accused him of it. He still gigles about that one to this day.

    3. AnonymousArts*

      I did this, but with a colleague’s red Swingline stapler (like in Office Space). I left a ransom note with cut-out magazine letters under his keyboard, asking for $1 million dollars in the fake currency named after our company (Company A Dollars, with the CEO’s face on them, they were made for an event), or I said it would be sold for spare parts. I then left a few additional notes with pictures threatening the stapler, like with it under the tire of a car, or being held over a fountain. Also sent one of the stapler with that day’s newspaper.

      Did it for about a week before I revealed myself at a dinner with him and colleagues outside of work. I was the first person he suspected and asked about it, but I guess I had a good poker face and he believed it wasn’t me.

    4. Luna Lovegood*

      So this isn’t work, but school instead. In Australia, the year 12s (HS seniors) do different themed dress ups instead of uniform during their last week of school. Monday for us was pyjama day, so I wore pj pants, my leaver’s jersey and brought in one of my beloved teddy bears to really get into the spirit. Of course, being my forgetful, unknowingly ADHD self at the time, teddy went missing sometime during the school day. The head of Senior School (this was a K-12 private school) found him, took him to his office, and ransomed him out in exchange for chocolate. I found this hilarious, and happily obliged!

    5. TardyTardis*

      This reminds me of the plastic flamingos which were kidnapped, and Polaroid pictures were left in the mailbox of the flamingos with blindfolds over their eyes. The ransom was about $10,000 in Monopoly money…

  10. Avocado Toast*

    This is a very lowkey prank, but I also got such a kick out of it for reasons I can’t explain.

    I have a part-time gig at a nonprofit and we have a Facebook group for the staff and volunteers to communicate, since we are very rarely in the same place at the same time. It works really well. In addition to more formal announcements, we often use the group to post things like “Has anyone seen the 3-hole punch that usually lives in the office” or “Can someone grab more water bottles? We’re getting low”.

    One guy went back through very old posts like this and commented “helpful” things to questions that never got answered, like “I think the 3-hole punch was out front last time I saw it”. Of course, then people got notifications for questions they had asked over a year ago and had forgotten about. It was harmless and caused good-natured confusion.

    (This might be one of those “you had to be there” things but I swear it made me giggle!)

    3. CMart*

      This is the kind of daffy “great aunt Kathy just got Facebook and is scrolling through the 5 family members’ she friended pages” antics that are just charmingly wholesome and make me smile.

  11. Prof. Kat*

    In grad school, my labmates printed off a photo of our advisor and stuck it in the picture frame I had on my desk, in front of the normal photo of me and my husband. Which was amusing, but tame. What really got me were the additional 100 wallet-sized photos they made and placed all through my belonging — my drawers, books, pencil cup, in the middle of my stack of post-it notes, etc. This happened like 8 years ago, and I went to look something up in a textbook *yesterday*, and a photo fell out. I still laugh every time, because it’s so bizarre.

    1. That One Person*

      Not a prank (well unintentionally on myself I guess), but over a decade ago I’d made the mistake of using a confetti stick in my room and thus caused confetti to fly everywhere. Stupid teenage antics and all that, and it became a hilarious event that any time I “super cleaned” my room I’d find more confetti.

      Well last summer we finally moved out of that apartment and after the movers finished packing everything up… I found more confetti. Always knew there’d be some waiting for when we moved.

      1. Kheldarson*

        That reminds me of something my brother did! He was an RA for his frat floor, and they decided to prank one of their members with the ultimate glitterbomb. Glitter on the bed, in the AC vent, on the blades of the dude’s fan.

        Needless to say, glitter was *everywhere*. They all pitched in to clean after they got their laugh.

        Cue the end of the year though: my bro is closing out the rooms and making sure they’re all clean and in good condition. And what does he find on one of the pipes in the room? A line of glitter.

        1. AnonEMoose*

          In some of my social circles, glitter is known as “craft herpes.” Because you will never, ever, completely get rid of it.

          1. Crocheted familiar*

            In my social circles, we call it ‘gay confetti’ (we’re all LGBTQ+ of some/many variety/-ies, so it does make sense).

            1. Caitlin Burrows*

              During Pride weekend last year, my friend was baptizing everybody with glitter. I went to my cousin’s baby shower the next day and had to explain that no, I was not wearing body glitter to a baby shower, that it was leftover from Pride and that I was going to continue the festivities later that night.

        1. Alli525*

          Ugh, same. I threw mine out even before the Epiphany this year because it was so dry, and I’m still finding needles in odd places around my apartment. Why there are needles in my bathroom, I will never know.

          1. Not Australian*

            We took a Christmas tree to the dump in our car and *ten years later* were still finding needles from it…

          2. That Girl From Quinn's House*

            I only buy paper Easter grass for this same reason. The plastic stuff winds up everywhere. I’d find a blade of plastic Easter grass stuck to two pine needles from last year’s Christmas tree in some random corner in September.

          3. TootsNYC*

            When she was young, my daughter and I ran around saying, “The Christmas tree must have had to go potty–there’s a Christmas tree needle stuck on the toilet.”

        2. Alli525*

          And once, when my roommate and I were too lazy/needle-averse to carry the tree down one flight of stairs, we screamed “WATCH OUT!!!” and literally shoved it out of our second-story apartment window, stand still attached. Then ran down to grab the stand and drag it the rest of the way to the curb. NYC, I tell ya.

        3. whingedrinking*

          One time I remarked to my in-laws that I kept finding their pug’s hair on my clothes even months later. At one point I hadn’t visited them since December and I still found dog fuzz on a shirt in February. My sister in law piped up, “You realize what this means. Winnie is the Hanukkah Pup! You think she only has enough fur to cover you for a week and then it lasts eight times as long.”
          (More realistically the hair was riding along with my partner when he visited them and then getting on my stuff. I still laughed.)

      3. Becky*

        Once upon a time we put some confetti (not a lot) in my supervisor’s office for his birthday. We kept finding it for a long time afterwards and even when we moved buildings some of it came too–it was stuck to the bottom of the chair mat on the pointy bits.

      4. Rena*

        We had confetti on the tables at our wedding, and a board game reception with many of our own games. Our friends took the time to sprinkle confetti into the board game boxes, so now we get a really sweet little reminder every time we pull out a game :)

      5. Rebecca in Dallas*

        Haha when I was a teenager, I had some body glitter (hey, it was the 90’s), it was the kind that was more like a shimmery loose powder than glitter. My sister got mad at me and dumped a bunch of it out in my room and I swear to god there was traces of glitter until the house was torn down two decades later!

        1. Luna Lovegood*

          We had a negligent babysitter when I was about eight, who spent the entire day watching Oprah. I won’t go into too much detail as to what my brother and I did, but we were still finding specks of glitter through the house when I was in high school.

      6. TardyTardis*

        I’m still finding pine needles from December’s Christmas tree whenever I vacuum. I think they breed.

    2. Elemeno P.*

      My coworkers did this to me with a cartoon character I hate! I’m still finding pictures.

      1. Elemeno P.*

        I should clarify that I think it’s funny and get fake-angry every time I find another one.

      2. Bazinga*

        I hate the “I want a hippopotamus for Christmas” song. I used to work in a cardiac cath lab. Someone put this song on every computer. So every monitor room, all over the holding area, anywhere I went they would start playing it.

    3. Ask a Manager* Post author

      Oh! I once cut out a photo of a man from a magazine, framed it, and put it among the many framed photos my mom has on a bookshelf, to see what would happen. After about a year, it was still there, so I finally asked, “Who is this man?” and she told me she thought it was some relative of my stepfather’s. So I asked him who it was, and he had assumed it was a relative of my mom’s. At that point the jig was up, but they have left the photo there. In later years, I convinced my nieces that it was an uncle they’d never met who lived in Vermont and was a cobbler. No such person exists. (In later years after that, my niece made a Gmail account for this uncle and started emailing me from it, insisting it was in fact my long lost brother/their uncle.)

      6. Hope*

        I did a version of this, only I stuck a framed picture of a dinosaur in with all the framed photos. Took months before my mom noticed it.

        1. Jules the 3rd*

          In my family, this would not be a joke. It would be someone’s fave dinosaur, that deserved his place.

          I may also have multiple pictures of my father with a chicken on his head. The picture with my mother holding a goose on her wrist like a raptor made into the paper.

        2. SaraM*

          My dad once did a similar thing to my mom. She sets up one of those Christmas Villages every year (you know the ones, with the ceramic light-up houses), and has all kinds of unrelated figurines and stuff she’ll scatter around the “town”.
          Dad stuck a plastic T-Rex in there one year to see how long it would take her to notice. Now my family’s holiday decorating isn’t complete until Christmas T-Rex is in the village.

          1. Former Admin turned Project Manager*

            My sister likes to add random plastic figures to my mom’s elaborate Nativity scene (she’s got the entire city of Bethlehem laid out, I swear). One year Yoda was among the travelling Kings and it took my mom almost a week to notice.

            1. Other Becky*

              When my dad was a kid the Nativity set and the Noah’ ark got mixed together during a move. So on that side of the family there are giraffes at the stable on Christmas Eve.

          2. Frankie*

            About 10 or so years ago, the rest of my family tried to prank my day by installing an Animal (the Muppet) puppet on top of the tree instead of the usual angel.

            He in turn got one over on us by not reacting st all, and ever since then Animal’s been our default tree topper.

          3. Common Welsh Green*

            Late to this, but my family makes a point of sneakily adding a new, unrelated animal to my creche every year. Some years it takes a few days until I find it. This year Grandson’s First Girlfriend got into the act and added an armadillo to the sheep and goats. I didn’t spot it until dinner on Christmas Eve.

      7. Chocoholic*

        My grandmother had these two paintings of children that were in the house she lived in when I grew up. I guess she had them when my mom and her brothers were growing up as well. The story was that those were Charlotte and Peter, and they were my mom’s older siblings who had been thrown into the Mississippi river when they would not stop fighting int he back seat of the car. :o

      8. DataGirl*

        My daughter’s best friend taped pictures of Lin Manuel Miranda’s face over every picture of herself in the house. Her mom was finding them for months, it was hilarious.

        1. Alli525*

          My previous employer had a really strange hodgepodge of art around the walls (everything from giant landscape paintings of the NYC skyline to framed Jerry Garcia posters), with one being a black-and-white photo of what appeared to be three gangsters, or possibly just old-timey businessmen. At one point, a sales guy printed B&W photos of his and two of his colleagues’ faces and very carefully taped them on – he must have had some Photoshop experience because the sizes were a perfect match. I don’t think anyone noticed for a MONTH, but then it spread like wildfire because it was hilarious.

      10. Annie*

        One April Fool’s Day I planted pictures of Astronaut Sloth all throughout my daughter’s bedroom and bathroom, The best was on the face of Tech N9ne on the poster behind the door.

      11. Wing Leader*

        This isn’t work-related, but my uncle used to flip picture frames upside down or sideways all over the house just to see how long it took my aunt to notice.

        Just for entertainment’s sake, here’s the freaky part of the story–My uncle tragically passed away several years ago. The upside down pictures thing was kind of his calling card. After he passed away, my aunt swears she would still occasionally find certain pictures flipped around. She would set them right, but then later they would be flipped again. She legit believes my uncle came back from the dead just to prank her lol (She lived alone, BTW, so no one else would be around doing it. She had two kids but they were grown and lived on their own).

      12. Mr. Shark*

        This is awesome! I love that the niece got back at you with the gmail account later!

      15. Liz*

        My best friend did something like this to me — snuck a framed photo of an emu onto my mantelpiece.

        As far as she knows, I haven’t noticed it yet — I’m actually waiting for the opportunity to sneak it onto HER shelves via a third party, and it’s challenging since she lives in another country. But now I’m wondering if maybe the emu wants a social media account.

    4. a*

      My husband and his siblings all resemble each other quite strongly. One of our coworkers borrowed his family photo, scanned it, and then Photoshopped his face onto everyone else’s, just to see how long it would take him to notice.

    5. Kate*

      My labmates went about 100 step further. I had set a coworkers belongings in Jello when he was out of town, run of the mill prank. So a few months later when I announced I was going out of town and asked a different coworker to watch my cats all my labmates immediately went to work. I got home from my trip and opened my fridge, grabbed a drink and paused. I opened the fridge again to see a giant picture of my research adviser stuck in the door. I laughed at them. Went to go take a shower, pulled the shower curtain back to find his picture plastered all through out my tub. Well, they put HUNDREDS of pictures of the guy throughout my entire apartment. They even found my passport and put his picture over mine. Every bottle on my bar had his picture inserted into the cap, every record I had had his picture pasted over the artists’s face. When I moved the next year and took down the frames on the wall his life size face was behind all the frames. I just found a picture a few months ago, three moves and a different country later! When I got to work after my trip they had a life size full body shot of him on my office door that had a speech bubble that said “Brrrr….it’s cold in Kate’s fridge”. He was on sabbatical and never knew.

      3. Miss Pantalones en Fuego*

        I’d be super angry if they’d permanently defaced all my records, though! When you say paste I’m imagining they actually glued the pictures onto the record sleeves and that would have really made me mad.

    6. entrylevelsomething*

      I worked for a college theater department and when we did our summer clean-outs we’d regularly find confetti from shows we’d done like 6 years before. Oh confetti.

      1. MayLou*

        I volunteer at our local theatre and they still have foil-confetti from a dance show several years ago. Every time anyone flies something in or out, a few pieces flutter down. At least it wasn’t fake snow, I guess.

  12. Big Al*

    I had a buddy who coordinated offsite training for people in our office. One April Fool’s, I created a fake class in his database. I had people in my office call from their cell phones to tell him they were at the training facility and there was no class. One girl put on a good show and yelled at him for a while. I even had the training site people in on it and they called him to ask why he had sent over all these people when there were no training classes set up.

    He only bought it for about 15 min, but we still laugh about it.

  13. sange*

    A few years ago, a colleague posted a detailed FB status on 4/1 about being stuck in her laundry room in her apartment building and how she was waiting for the super to come let her out. For anyone who lives in NYC, especially pre-war buildings with basement laundry rooms, this is a real and believable situation. We all commented on the status, started texting her, offered to reschedule meetings…and none of us realized our colleague was sitting in the same open office room that we were in. Literally right in front of us. Pretty funny.

    3. You remember this*

      OH! This one! My other coworker was on the phone with customer service for her Fitbit, back when they were causing rashes on people, so the hold time was endless. She had a real person who asked her to continue holding, but after awhile she hung up. I called back from deskphone, three feet to her right and asked if she’d just called.
      “Yes.”
      “So you did hang up on our representative.”
      “Yes, but…
      I have no idea what she said after that. I fell on the floor laughing, people came over from the next pod. I couldn’t talk. She’s still trying to explain why she hung up.
      And then the other coworker and I who hide giant toy rats and spiders in each others work space had this moment:
      I called her from my cell and asked her to cover for me for the day. She said sure. She didn’t notice me sitting across from her for an hour. It was work world hilarious.

    5. CmdrShepard4ever*

      This is similar to a prank I pulled on friends I texted a lot of them “I lost my phone can you call it to help me find it please.” Yes I texted them from said lost phone. This was pre-smartphone days so it would have been pretty hard if not impossible for me to have texted them from the lost phone. That prank would not really work now since there are ways to text from a computer, tablet etc to your phone contacts.

      Yes quite a few people actually called it or messaged me other helpful suggestions.

  14. OrganizedHRChaos*

    I just picked up an empty donut box and a veggie tray. People were pissed when they opened the box but it was funny all day since we have multiple shifts during the day.

    1. Seeking Second Childhood*

      One of these years I’m going to do that. Brilliant…. the only harm is to their expectations of free sweets.

    2. Guacamole Bob*

      I saw the idea on an old thread here of buying bags of Skittles, M&M’s, and Reeses Pieces and just mixing them all together in a big bowl, and I always thought that was the appropriate level for an office prank.

      1. Bad Hare Day*

        Please don’t! I have a peanut allergy and while I’m careful about the food I consume, other allergy sufferers might not be.

          1. Database Developer Dude*

            No. The plain ones are manufactured in the same place as the peanut ones, so there’s no guarantee there’d be no peanut residue in the plain ones….

          2. CMart*

            It would take work, but just orange/yellow skittles and Reese’s Pieces. That way peanut allergy sufferers would know to stay away, as it would appear to just be the Reese’s.

        2. Guacamole Bob*

          I think the original place I saw this, they put the wrappers for all three or some other sign so that people knew what it was. So you’re stuck sorting out the candy in some way or eating the flavors mixed together (shudder). Takes some of the surprise out of it, but I agree that mystery food is a bad idea in an office setting.

      2. EnfysNest*

        I did this one for April Fool’s Day a few years ago, and it was a big hit. We had a very small office with no visitors and I had confirmed everyone’s allergy status multiple times, since I often brought in snacks to share. If I ever do it again, though, I’ll still leave out the Reese’s, because they went completely unnoticed – my coworkers only identified the M&Ms and Skittles.

        I spent extra time ahead of time sorting out the colors (while wearing gloves) so that none of the purple Skittles made it in, for example, and so that it wasn’t obvious that some of the colors were overrepresented. Looking at the bowl, you couldn’t tell at first glance that they were anything other than regular M&Ms.

        One by one, my 3 coworkers who were in that day grabbed a handful, started eating, realized what had happened, and then laughed. And then grabbed another handful and kept coming back for more helpings throughout the day. :P So it was definitely well received!

      3. Alex the Alchemist*

        My aunt did something similar to a friend where she mixed up plain and salt and vinegar potato chips. Her friend hated salt and vinegar so it was kind of a Russian Roulette of potato chips.

    5. Zephy*

      At OldJob I sabotaged the donut box on 4/1 by putting a note on it. I think it said something like “WARNING: BEES” or something else obviously ridiculous but nobody touched the donuts.

    6. The Hamster's Revenge*

      Coworkers on the day shift were notorious for leaving out a donut box with one half-eaten donut in it by the time we (night shift) showed up. On National Donut Day, we ran out to the grocery store at 4am for fresh donuts and proceeded to tear apart 2 dozen donuts so each one looked like it had at least one bite taken out of it.

      Day shift was not amused.

    7. Sauron*

      The office assistant at my department in college would regularly put out donuts, and one year did the same thing – however, to avoid hungry college student riots, she had to keep real donuts under the desk.

    8. Kyrielle*

      I heard about this one and wanted to do it – but I heard about it after my last April Fool’s Day at $PreviousJob (where good-natured pranks were a Thing, and we once gift-wrapped someone’s entire office for their honeymoon). $CurrentJob doesn’t do pranks, even low-key, so I have never used it.

      I always thought it’d be neat to do it with donuts/fruit in the morning, and pizza/vegetables in the afternoon. (With actual donuts/pizza available, of course.) But spendy. A couple dozen donuts is easier. :)

  15. MayorDana*

    Ohhhh do I have one. This year some supervisor thought it would be hilarious to tell us all that as of May 1st any time we were sent to the workman’s comp doctor we’d be drug and alcohol tested. We work in an industry that has a high instance of repetitive motion injuries. Last we were told they accounted for 95% of all claims. So a friend and I who are both strongly anti drug testing when not necessary were on a mission getting ready to coordinate against this new policy.
    Today the supervisor is all wasn’t that a good one! Like duuuude no! Making people who might smoke a little weed in their off time fear for their job is not at all funny!

    2. Life is good*

      Reminds me of this “joke” played on me and my fellow employees. Years ago, at my old dysfunctional company, the owner/boss called the group from my office into the conference room and had all the other offices on speaker phone. He then announced that the company had been sold and the new company would be interviewing us to keep our jobs. There was an audible gasp and more than a few people were in tears. After about 5 minutes of this, he came clean and said “April Fools!” What an asshole he could be. The office mood was pretty tense the rest of the day…no one was amused.

      1. Kat in VA*

        One of my execs pulled this on me this year. He sent an email to his directors and me (I’m his EA) saying that he’d tendered his resignation and wanted us to know before it became public, and he’d be working on his transition plan with the GM, blah blah. I was in a staff meeting for a different exec, saw the email, and shot him a text asking OH NO – WHY – I LIKE YOU – PLEASE DONT LEAVE. He gave it a few minutes then shot back APRIL FOOLS, CAN’T BELIEVE YOU FELL FOR IT.

        However, this particular exec was planning on resigning this past December – it was all very hush-hush but as his EA he wanted to give me a heads up. So I moped around for a few days, and then discovered he was talked out of the resignation, so it’s not like there wasn’t precedent…

    3. TardyTardis*

      That wouldn’t be a joke where I worked. We had a company meeting shortly after pot was legalized here, where they said (among other things, including new options for our 401(k)s)–“Pot is legal. Don’t do it if you want to keep your job.”

  16. K8 M*

    The 3 male members of my team were VERY in to coffee- gourmet coffee- and spent a long time talking about their favorite/ new roasts, grinds, brewing techniques, etc. They would go on business trips and bring back beans from where ever they had been. One of them really liked coffee, but he wasn’t pretentious about it like the others. (Side note, I only drink coffee when I’m cold and then it’s just creamer with a splash of coffee in it, I was excluded because of this). So Non Pretentious Coffee Drinker (NPCD) decided to play an April Fools Day prank on the Most Pretentious Coffee Drinker (MPCD) because MPCD was convinced that he knew everything about coffee and could easily tell good from bad. NPCD made a “special blend” with traditional coffees (Maxwell House, Folgers, Great Value, etc) and brewed it, then went to MPCD and really just started extolling the virtues of his special blend. MPCD gave it a try and LOVED it. He said it was the best blend NPCD had ever made! NPCD let him wax rhapsodic about his special blend all day and then at the end of the day revealed the recipe to MPCD. MPCD was shocked and then laughed and said “well, it really does taste good!” It didn’t cure his pretentiousness though- he was back at it the next day.

    1. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      LOL this is wonderful. I saw where it was going and gleefully giggled away as it unfolded as expected.

    4. Roly Poly Little Bat-Faced Girl*

      This reminds me of the Saturday Night Live skit where Chris Farley is in one of those hidden camera, Taster’s Choice type commercial spoof. Still makes me laugh out loud.

    5. NOspresso*

      Haha, that reminds me of when my colleague and I spent ages on a deal with a new company that offered a machine with freshly ground coffee that seemed very promising. Of course, because people hate change, when we got the machine for a test period, every single colleague complained about the taste not being as good as the good ol’ Nespresso machine. We got so fed up with them not even giving it a chance we did a blind test on the biggest coffee drinkers and not ONE got it right. So much for it “smelling and tasting off”.

      …Unfortunately even after all that we sent it back after the test period because it just wasn’t worth all the complaining.

  17. momofpeanut*

    I had a coworker who turned everything in my office upside down. Every document on my bulletin board, every picture in every frame – even the screen of my monitor.

    In revenge, I came in the following weekend and put every scrap piece of furniture in his office and changed his door sign to read “Storage”

    2. MsMaryMary*

      When I was in college, some guys on the 4th floor decided to move all of the common room furniture from their floor to the 3rd floor common room one night. There was much confusion the next morning as one group of kids woke to an empty common room and another found their common room overflowing with couches and chairs.

      Housekeeping was very upset and called the campus police. The police came, but had to explain that no crime had been committeed. Nothing was stolen, nothing was damaged, it was just…moved.

      As an adult, I am much more sympathetic towards housekeeping – cleaning up after college kids has to be very trying. I think the 4th floor residents did end up helping to move all of the furnitre back where it belonged.

  18. I'll say it*

    We did the old “air horn attached to the bottom of an office chair” bit once, and got it on video. Definitely fabulous. But for long term prankability: google annoy-a-tron. I’ve had several. The magnetic part can be stuck to, say, the inside back of a filing cabinet. And can be set to sound like a single cricket chirp. Might make the office owner decide to call in an exterminator…after a few weeks.

    1. I'll say it*

      Oh and – googly eyes replacing all the regular eyes on coworkers’ family photos. Super easy and effective!

      1. I'll say it*

        Oh AND – I once took a cheesy photo of a coworker and made copies and put them in all sorts of places – the underside of a lid to a candy jar, under a monitor stand, randomly stuck in a file folder full of (internal) papers, behind doors….he was still finding them more than a year later.

        Then there was the guy who went home to the UK for a visit and came back to his desk decorated like Hogwarts. That one cost a bunch, I bought a whole lot of plain brown boxes around the size of shoeboxes, and those were the “stones”.

        I might be kind of awful, now that I think about it.

      2. Seeking Second Childhood*

        Googly eyes on photos in frames I hope. Otherwise sticker glue can damage pictures…and we don’t all have a way to reprint old pics.

      3. e*

        I strongly disagree with the annoy-a-tron as a fun prank.
        The guy in the office next to mine was pranked with two annoy-a-trons. He found the first pretty quickly. But a couple hours later, we were still trying to find the second. We moved *everything* out of his office, and it still chirped. We even opened the light switch and popped up a few ceiling tiles, trying to find the beastly thing. Several hours of patience and productivity lost.
        At the end of the day, our office manager sent an email to all 50 employees, strongly encouraging the prankster to remove it before work the next day.

        1. ScarlettInTheBallroom*

          I guess you have to know your audience for that one! I would have it hilarious

        2. JustaTech*

          As someone who is currently hunting down a low-battery chirp in my lab, I would find this less funny. (I got an annoy-a-tron Christmas ornament several years ago, which was sort of funny until I discovered that it had broken and there was no way to turn it off. I called ThinkGeek and they said they were very sorry but all I could do was wait for the battery to die, but if I filmed myself taking a hammer to it they’d put it up on the website.)

    2. Busy*

      We hung motion activated Christmas carol balls under my old bosses desk chair. Haha he couldn’t figure it out for hoooouuuuuurrrrrrsssssss.

    4. CDM*

      Similar to the annoy-a-tron

      Way back in the late 80’s my now-husband bought a book and computer disk of various pranks – one of which was a file that, when run, made the computer speaker make random chirping, screeching, squealing sounds intermittently. I ran that on a colleague’s PC when the team was in a meeting one day. Drove them absolutely batty for hours trying to track it down, and once the PC was powered down that night, it was gone forever without a trace.

    5. Flash Bristow*

      Alternatively, get servers or pcs that have a speakers, and get them to bleat or moo every random no of seconds. Just enough to make people in the room think “did that just happen?” and “was that over here?” but it goes quiet too quickly to be convincing.

    6. Ophelia Bumblesmoop*

      The cricket chirp happened to me. MONTHS of it. Only a few people were in on it and I could tell it was fake, but it was almost 2 years before I learned who actually set it up.

    7. TardyTardis*

      My husband used it on his students because his high pitch hearing was gone and it didn’t bother him in the least.

  19. The Man, Becky Lynch*

    My favorite “prank” is simply updating the phone registry to give everyone a super hero name. So if Accounting was calling it said “Wonder Woman” and if shipping was calling it showed “Superman” and the boss was “The Hulk”.

    Then waiting to see who even realized the change since so many don’t look at the caller ID. It made me chuckle at least.

    I don’t mind tomfoolery as long as it’s lighthearted.

    1. ggg*

      Foiled prank: I once used a php script to change the “Ready” message on the printer outside my office to “Insert Coin.”

      The first person who happened upon the printer saw the message, muttered something about “why is this damn thing never ready when I need it?” and re-booted it, erasing the message.

      1. Hey Karma, Over here.*

        At a sleep over in high school, one of my friends and I wanted to mess with the girls who fell asleep. We moved the clocks ahead two hours. The wall clocks, digital clocks in all the unoccupied rooms, the stove, the VCR. Friend up one girl at 8 because she had to leave by nine (we didn’t want to screw her over after all, just mess with her) “Hey, hey, wake up, we overslept!”
        Girl rolls over, pulls her arm out of her sleeping bag and checks her watch.
        “It’s 8:00.”
        DAMMIT!

      2. The Man, Becky Lynch*

        LOL drats, that sounds like something that would happen here if I tried such a thing.

    2. JanetM*

      Not an April Fool’s prank, but long ago when I was the default Novell Netware administrator at my office, I discovered the command “Fire Phasers” and inserted it into everyone’s start-up script.

  20. Audrey Puffins*

    Most people in our office print out the list of employee telephone extensions and tape it to our monitors. One year I had a co-worker with a glorious sense of humour, so I edited the extension list so that everyone’s names were spoonerised – Jane Smith became Smane Jith, Clementina Warbleworth became Wementina Clarbleworth, and so on – and stuck this new improved version to this co-workers monitor. It took him weeks to notice it, but he was genuinely tickled when he finally did.

  21. Amber T*

    I can’t imagine a prank ever flying in my office, but that doesn’t mean I’m not tempted every year to buy a bag of googly eyes and stick them on random items (the coffee maker, the printer, etc). Has anyone ever done this, and how did it go over?

    1. Shark Whisperer*

      I’ve done this! It went over super well at my office. The secret to making it really fun is to just do one object at a time. I started with a poster that was on the wall in a hallway. No one notices at first. The next day it was a coworkers stapler. Then the printer, etc. Once people caught on, it became a fun scavenger hunt to find all the googly eyes.

      Just make sure that you don’t stick them to anything paper that someone would be upset if you damaged. Googly eyes are easy to remove from slick surfaces, but they can damage paper.

    2. The Man, Becky Lynch*

      I’ve always worked with a mutually amused bunch. They have toy rats and fake bugs to put on the donut boxes etc. So I’m kind of bummed that you don’t get to put googly eyes on things…

      All my “reminder” notices and meeting notifications have movie or cartoon themes…so I don’t adult unless the IRS or OSHA walks in AKA it’s-required.

      1. Zephy*

        In the late 90s my mom worked for an insurance agency, and she and her coworkers had an assortment of fake plastic bugs/rats/poop/etc that they would prank each other with. Her signature move was to take the ball out of her victim’s mouse.

        1. Three Flowers*

          So the first thing I thought of when I read this combination of pranks was taking somebody’s mouse ball and replacing it with a plastic bug (like, a spider up in the mouse) as a nice surprise for the user. Now I must mourn the passing of mice with roller balls, for in the age of lasers, this prank shall never be realized. The shrieks would be spectacular.

        2. The Man, Becky Lynch*

          I had a trackmouse forever and my coworkers used to pop it out and hide it in my desk drawer when they were messing around on my computer.

    4. Seeking Second Childhood*

      LOL I’d totally forgotten about my smiley face. There’s a hallway that ends in a wall, with a door to the left and another to the right. Both open into the hallway. Both have stoppers for the door handles.
      And for a year or more there was a smile taped to the wall underneath them.
      (The painters noticed, alas.)

    5. Anon April Fools*

      This was my prank on my boss last year! You can buy a huge case of googly eyes on Amazon for just a few dollars. I stuck the eyes to my hands to make them less sticky before I attached them, and I didn’t stick them to anything that would be damaged (like paper). He thought it was funny enough that he left most of them up on his office, including the ones I would find annoying (like the small pair with eyelashes I stuck to his mouse).

    6. AvonLady Barksdale*

      That’s probably one of the few pranks I could handle. I’m not good with pranks. So have at it, I say!

      1. Flash Bristow*

        I’m glad I’m not the only one bad with pranks.

        In one place I worked, the two of us UNIX admin were unpopular – the rest were a clique of windows people.

        I decided not to take part in secret santa. Didn’t know who I’d get, didn’t think I’d get anything worth having. Knew them well enough that I’d be given a “joke” .

        My colleague, a very serious guy, spent a while sorting a decent pressie for his match. He received… a farting gnome. He was upset.

        I was right, don’t take part if it’s not your thing!

    7. Alex the Alchemist*

      I posted about my googly eye endeavor down below, but it was awesome! I got bonus points for sticking the tiny ones on all of the person’s K-cups :)

    8. Nea*

      I haven’t done googly eyes, but I saw a similar thing on Tumblr I’m dying to do next April Fool. Someone bent the outer edge of a bunch of paperclips and stuck googly eyes to it – ta da! Clippy!

      Clippy was then stuck to a bunch of post-it notes with sayings like “It looks like your javascript is working. Want me to fix that for you?” or “It looks like you’re trying to make coffee. Want me to help?” and then scattered throughout the office. (Including at least one whose message suggested it was posted in a restroom.)

      Silly, unoffensive, nondestructive.

      1. Indigo a la mode*

        “It looks like you’re writing a ransom note. …Need some help?”

        I miss that annoying little dude.

    9. Smol Book Wizard*

      I can’t speak for it specifically in a work setting, but I (usually not pro-pranks, being rather gullible and a bit anxious) was inutterably delighted by small paper eyes being left all over my dorm room by my roommate. I was still finding them on new things weeks later that I hadn’t noticed yet and so would burst out giggling when I opened the fridge and saw the milk carton, etc..
      It was the prank that kept on pranking, my roommate and I agreed. I left the eyes on my comb for a long time.

    10. Not Gary, Gareth*

      I did this for a well-beloved manager who was moving on to a new job. Before he cleaned out his desk, a few of us put googly eyes on everything we could reach – and because this was a place where people had lots of toys and stuff on their desks, there were tons of options. My personal favorites were the googly eyes that fit perfectly into a photo of him and his girlfriend, and the googly eyes on the toy otter. I think I still have a picture of the otter in my phone…

      And yes, he loved it.

  22. lurker*

    I’m a middle school teacher and we have a big bulletin board near the office with pictures of all the faculty and staff posted. This year our office staff planned ahead and solicited copies of everyone’s school photos from when WE were in middle school, and replaced all of our bulletin board pictures with our old school pics. The students LOVED it!

  23. Secretary*

    My deskmate and I at OldJob used to play pranks on each other and it was HILARIOUS!

    Really simple stuff, my office mate would often flip over my desk chair when I got up, and when I came back tell me I left it that way. Or he would turn my computer monitor around.

    I did the thing where you take a small piece of a post it note and put it on the lazer sensor of his mouse. He spent a minute trying to move his mouse, then right as he was about to restart his computer I was like, “Something wrong with your mouse, Fergus?” and he looked over his mouse and burst out laughing.

    We had to stop the pranks because a different coworker went to management after he flipped her chair over, but it was fun while it lasted.

  24. Ptarmigan*

    I worked for a small firm of contractors once, and at some point we were bought by a larger but very remote (we never saw them) company. One day our IT guy (in league with the President, a known prankster) put up fake surveillance cameras, and the President sent out an email letting us know that the new parent company had had these installed to monitor work at our job, and that we shouldn’t worry about it.

    Most of us thought it was weird but basically shrug-worthy, but one of my coworkers got really upset and emailed a bunch of people including the remote company about how unacceptable it was. Oops!

  25. TheRedCoat*

    We had a manager and a coworker out for a couple weeks at the same time (for the SCA folks, Pennsic) when I worked in the call center. Morale wasn’t great, and being understaffed led to a lot of rough days. So I led a charge to prank our missing coworkers. For our teammate we sealed his cube with streamers and filled it with balloons. For our manager (who hated puns), we all found pages upon pages of puns, cut them out and taped them in random spots all over her (slightly bigger) cube. A year later and my manager was still finding puns taped in places like under her keyboard, on the bottom side of desk, just… everywhere. She left a few up when she left the company, and even though I am in a different department I still hear the new manager stumble across on every once and awhile, and she’s just confused.

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        :: hides in shame realizing that it was your co-workers at the SCA event not you ::

        1. TheRedCoat*

          Oh, I wanted to be there. But 70% of the department was SCAdian, and the manager was summer queen that year. XD I’ll make it to Pennsic someday!

          (also EK :) )

          1. TheRedCoat*

            Oh, no, I’m mixing up my years. She was summer queen the next year. She was just a normal baroness at that point.

    2. Free Meerkats*

      Obviously, at least one of you was a herald.

      Former Solar Herald of Atenveldt.

  26. Indie*

    My entire department recently moved to a new floor, fully equipped with glass walls for writing on and adjustable height desks. On day 2 after the move, early in the morning, all the desks were set on either the highest or the lowest depending on how tall their “owner” was. As I am a rather short person, I had to stand on my toes in order to put mine down where it belonged.

    The only two people already in the office at that time were my manager and myself.

  27. jeannie*

    At my old job, my two-person team had a friendly prank rivalry with the two-person team in the office next to ours. This one was my favorite: April Fool’s was on Monday, so we came in Sunday and set up Dixie cups filled with water all across the floor of their office (starting closest to their desks and working towards the door so we didn’t wall ourselves in). You know, so that they couldn’t casually walk into their office without stomping on the cups and getting water everywhere. We even gridded out a little love note in food coloring (think “I [HEART] HR” for an HR dept). Our poor coworkers were running to the kitchenette and pouring out Dixie cups for like 20 minutes that morning! Maybe not the greatest way for them to start their week, but far from the worst, either.

    1. MsMaryMary*

      We did that once to a coworker’s desk when he was out of town. He came in to find a glass of water on every corner of his desk.

      We only let him spend 10 minutes or so walking to the break room to empty the cups two at a time before letting him know we used the office cart to carry all the cups when setting up the prank.

  28. nnn*

    If your target is a touch typist, move either the F or J key over one space on their keyboard. They’ll find they’re ttoubg kuje tgus and can’t figure out why.

    If they aren’t a touch typist, switch the M and N keys.

    Another one that I saw in real life: Jane and Sally both joined the team at the same time and in the same role and, even though they looked nothing alike, people kept getting them mixed up. So on April Fool’s Day, they quietly sat in each other’s cubes.

    Which reminds me of one from back in high school: on April Fool’s Day, all the goth kids dressed as hippies and all the hippy kids dressed goth.

    1. TootsNYC*

      At one job, I had the ability to create custom keyboards (in XyWrite). It was useful for inserting certain type coding.

      But I used it to prank the three or four people I thought would handle it well–I changed their keyboards so that every time they typed a capital-letter A, they got April Fool’s. So, they got their A, they just had to backspace the rest of them.

      (once i used this to prank a friend, but I did it badly; she’d said something about her ex-MIL being critical of her, and we joked about it, and I programmed her computer to say critical things–thinking she’d recognize our jokes. And she said she understood why, but it was still really harmful to have her computer “talking” negatively to her. I still feel bad)

      And they all knew it was me, so they called and said, “Fix it!”

      One time, someone gave notice to go to a hot new job, and I fixed their computer so that when they signed on, the program would open a file that said, “We will miss you,” and blink. She called me to find out how to get rid of it (she just needed to abort or store), and I offered to take it off; she said, “no, I kind of like it.”

      1. Qosanchia*

        My friend tried to do this to one of his teachers in high school, and she didn’t notice it for ages. Apparently she was a touch typist, and didn’t need the home row markers either. Quality prank backfire.

        1. Kelsi*

          Yeah, you’d actually need to reprogram my keyboard for this to work. My home keyboard is ancient and half the letters are worn down to unreadable anyway.

    3. Anonymeece*

      Ha! My coworker and I constantly get confused for each other (to the point that when someone we don’t know says, “Oh, thank you so much for that presentation to my class!”, we just accept it and pass it on to each other). She always wears vintage 50’s clothing, full make-up, and I used to wear flannel shirts, workboots, and jeans, so on April Fool’s one year we swapped styles. Our manager looked at us in confusion then started laughing when she realized.

    4. Blue*

      Ah, I just remembered that Halloween before last, one of our SVP-type people dressed up as the other one. Our office was on the casual side of business casual, but this dude wore a suit. Every. Single. Day. So when she rocked up in a suit, tie, and slicked back hair, everyone immediately knew who she was supposed to be. Fortunately, he had a good sense of humor about it – probably because he was already very used to people teasing him about the suits.

    5. Classic Rando*

      If your target is a touch typist, move either the F or J key over one space on their keyboard. They’ll find they’re ttoubg kuje tgus and can’t figure out why.

      That’s so brilliantly evil, it’s good that I work from home because I just did a weird cackle/belly laugh combo at that suggestion

    6. Meg Murry*

      Yes, my favorite office prank was when we swapped the M & N keys on a coworkers computer. He was a “hunt and peck with 2 fingers” typist, and had one of those letters in his login name for the computer. He kept trying to log in over and over and couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t work. We sat back and snickered at him until he reached the point of calling IT before we finally confessed.

      1. JessaB*

        What do you do if you get locked out after x number of tries, any log in system should have that feature.

    7. Bilateralrope*

      Keyboards typically aren’t designed for keys to be removable. Who do you think is going to pay to replace the keyboards you broke ?
      Including the courier fee to get the replacement into the office asap if they dont have spares.

      1. ScarlettInTheBallroom*

        Lots of keyboards are though.

        In my last job I rearranged the keys on my coworker’s keyboard to read “f*** you”. We had a really good relationship and it went over well. I promptly switched his keys back for him after he noticed :)

      2. MayLou*

        Old keyboards often are – although you have to be gentle in case you snap the little plastic bits that hold it together (ask me how my last laptop died… don’t eat toast and type, folks!).

  29. Elaine*

    Years ago I was on a team of 12 people. We worked the second shift and reported to a manager who worked the regular day shift. We decided we would all put in a request for leave of absence due to pregnancy. The back story is that a couple of years earlier, half the day shift got pregnant, all with due dates in a range of two months. So it was likely he might believe it for a while. We mixed them in with other items in his in box so he wouldn’t see them all at once, and we put ones from the younger women nearest the top. Some due dates were given as Labor Day, some as Halloween (triplets!), etc.

    He reported back to us at the start of our next shift that he wasn’t too worried at first. When he got to the third one, he became concerned. As more appeared he was suspicious, and he knew he’d been pranked when he got to requests from older women and the men. This was before parental leave was available for men, so they were all passing themselves off as pregnant.

    He thought it was so funny that he picked up all 12 requests in a big stack and took it up to HR. He handed them over and asked what they should do – this was a disaster! And she bit on it! He finally had to tell her it was an April Fools joke. Fortunately, she also thought it was funny. So we scored twice with our prank.

    1. Database Developer Dude*

      Now see, this is much better than the prank I observed. I’m a contractor (w-2 employee), and the contract gig I was on was for a government agency. Two government supervisors (female) played a horrible prank on a then-contractor (female) to convince her she was pregnant!!! And it wasn’t even April 1st!

      1. ContentWrangler*

        How did they convince someone else that she was pregnant? That would be terrible to prank about! Seems mean-spirited.

  30. Seifer*

    At my last company, when a group of us attended a conference, some of those that were not able to go wrapped our desks on Christmas-themed wrapping paper. One of my friends was a wrapper and he was very thorough–he wrapped scissors, pens and pencils, even the mouse and mouse pad. Then on the day that we got back from the conference, they all pretended that nothing was wrong. And also, no one had scissors to cut through the paper, so we literally had to tear through all the wrapping paper like it was Christmas morning.

  31. Ihmmy*

    At last job, I worked with a bunch of silly folk who loved pranking each other. We were pretty good natured about it, so some of these wouldn’t work for other people but for us it was all fun and games.

    It started with whenever we’d get a spam phone call (especially the one that starts with a cruise ship horn) we’d transfer it to someone else in our small office. One coworker was especially good at walking silently, so one day when I did my normal get into the office routine of putting my lunch away, he managed to duck past me without me seeing him and hide under my desk, and hollered boo at me when I came back to my desk. Scared the dickens out of me but I ended up laughing a bunch.

    One coworker kept trying to get us good and just, never quite good. He was also just on the edge of homophobic, so one time I ended up finding a very flamboyantly posed person and photoshopped coworkers head onto him. Then other coworker and I hid these photos alllll over EoH Coworkers office, in his folders, etc. He was finding them months later. We also filled his office with a bunch of balloons once time.

  32. MrsMurphy*

    The best prank we played on my boss was actually for his birthday. He‘s a very meticulous person who keeps his office in perfect order, and quietly requested that we do not put up decorations (we tend to get a little carried away otherwise). In the weeks leading up to it we kept teasing him that we would go all out – then on his birthday, he arrived to find his office door closed with a bit of confetti scattered in front of it. He opened the door fearing the worst…

    …to find everything exactly where it should be, but with a framed photo of his office decked out in a ridiculous amount of decorations. We‘d put them up one day when he was out, took pictures and immediately set everything to rights again. It took a few hours, but it was so worth it!

    Proper April pranks tend to be tame here and no one minds. Switching the monitor cables of two colleagues whose desks are back to back, or leaving a note for a colleague to „please call Mr. Baer about his account, you can reach him at [number]” and make that the number of the local zoo – things like that.

    1. TootsNYC*

      Our full-timers had to “share” their desks with people who came in to work the evening shift. One of the guys complained when people didn’t switch the mouse back, or if they left the stamps out on the desk instead of lining them up against the wall where he usually kept them.

      So one day we went to his desk and completely tidied everything. We re-hung the papers on his bulletin board, the stamps, the books, everything to be perfectly spaced and perfectly level.

      We thought we were SO clever, but he didn’t even notice.

    5. feministbookworm*

      Bravo. This reminds me of on Parks and Recreation when Leslie convinces Ron she’s going to throw him this enormous birthday party…. but actually has planned for a bottle of whiskey, a steak, a movie, and solitude.

    6. Silly*

      I work at the Zoo and receive calls like this quite often on April 1st. Some people get so embarrassed and some people just cannot comprehend that they were pranked. “No, I received a call from Mr. Bear! Please let me speak with him!”
      The best part was that at one point, we actually had two C. Lyons (sea lion) working for us. “Hi, I’m returning a call from Mr. C. Lyon” “Ok, great, let me transfer you…”.

  33. TootsNYC*

    We got a public-relations package that included a little gizmo that played a tune from a Verdi opera every time you opened the box (it was light-sensitive).

    I ripped the box open to get it out, and I put it in my direct-report’s desk drawer, so that when she opened the drawer, it would start “singing.”

    It took DAYS for her to actually need anything in her desk drawer, and then I wasn’t there to see her try to figure out what it was.

    1. Anon April Fools*

      I love this one! It’s so harmless but silly, and it would definitely make me laugh. I’m sorry you weren’t there to see the payoff, but I may steal this idea for a future year.

  34. irene adler*

    Swiped the mini-basketball from the office of the very annoying sales associate.

    We shrink-wrapped it then placed it in an ultra-cold freezer (-60 degrees C) where it shriveled up like a raisin.
    He searched everywhere for the thing-labs, other offices, lunchroom. Grilled everyone he came across. Asked for some hints.

    Kept telling him he was ‘cold’, really ‘cold’. He didn’t get it.

    Days later, we pulled the remains from the freezer and handed it to him (with gloves). Cautioned him not to bounce the thing or it would shatter. Let it warm up first.

    Poor mini-basketball was never quite the same. Neither was the sales associate.

    2. Amne*

      Was that meant to be an example of a bad, mean prank, or do you actually think breaking someone’s stuff is funny if you don’t like them?

  35. Lee*

    I once left a donut box filled with bananas on the break room table including a note inside that said “April Fools! Come to my room for a real donut.” That was a hit. Also the time I put googely eyes on all the lunchboxes in the refrigerator.

  36. ScienceLady*

    When I was a teacher, one of my co-workers once filled every drawer – every. drawer. – with broken crayons collected from the old art supply room. It was definitely a…colorful prank. (CSI “YEAAAAHHHH” sound.)

  37. AliceBD*

    There was a VP who would regularly come through and make our area clean up because he thought it looked trashy. Not when VIPs were coming (we already cleaned up then), and everything was totally normal amounts of office messiness. We just did things like have some papers on our desks or whatever and he hated it. On his last day before he retired, with the help of his assistant as to timing, we put “trash” everywhere around his office and our general cubicle area. It was all clean paper just scrunched up. Taped it to his glass wall in his office, strewn on the floor, etc. It made us feel good and he laughed and got the joke.

  38. JudyInDisguise*

    I was seated directly opposite an IT Tech amidst a corporate cubicle farm. He managed to sneak into my cubicle and connect a secondary mouse to my computer. Periodically, I lost control of my mouse and the curser would just go ballistic (seemingly) all on its own all over my monitor. Of course, I called him over to help. When he got there, I couldn’t duplicate the problem. Finally, his supervisor came over to ask if I was still having problems with my computer – (insert an uproar of tech- nerd giggles) My IT-dude neighbor confessed and disconnected his mouse from my computer. The funniest part was how funny they thought it was. At best, it was annoying – but their reaction was hilarious. I thought it was kinda cute, but they thought it was the funniest thing ever, which made watching their reaction funnier than the actual prank. Ah, those adorable nerds……….

    1. Admin of Sys*

      We had this happen but with an actual support call once. (though it then got duplicated over and over again by pranksters in the office) We’d acquired something like 5 wireless mice/keyboard sets and folks installed them, but they were all operating on the same frequency. Most of the time, in the cube pods where everyone faced out, the mice were far enough away the signal didn’t transfer. But if you were aligned so that you were facing another person (with a cube wall between you) the wireless mouse signal was strong enough to effect the other person’s machine. So, cue lots of calls about the cursor ‘moving on it’s own’ or ‘fighting me’, and one where the computer ‘opened up my word document and started typing!’ because someone managed to have a shortcut in the same place as the person across the wall.

  39. Drax*

    I have two at two different offices.

    The Shop Manager had his own office and a deep deep hatred for Justin Beiber (thanks to his daughter) so when he went on vacation for a week, we printed thousands of neon pink pieces of paper with Justin B’s face on them and plastered his entire office. Floor to ceiling on the walls, wrapped his desk in it, some of the shop guys even dangled them from the ceiling etc etc. He was so so mad when he got back, but as he was the king of pranking people when out of office it was pay back.

    The other was at another company, the boss had saran wrapped this guys chair and desk while he was on vacation so that was one part of it. It was a shared office (3+ of us in one room cramped) and he was very very meticulous about organization of his desk and papers. So naturally that’s the other part we had to mess with. We printed out a bunch of memes and various pictures of My Little Pony (the G rated stuff, not anything remotely sexual or gross) and we just filed them in his papers. For months after he was finding them. It was a thing of beauty. And he got very creative with swear words.

    1. Classic Rando*

      I *love* slow burn pranks. This reminded me of a story that a friend told me from his high school job delivering pizzas. They took an onion from the kitchen and put it in the glove box of one of the other delivery guy’s cars, figuring he’d find it in a few days. Fast forward several months (through the summer) and this delivery guy gets pulled over. The cop asks for his records, and he opens his glove box to find a rotten, slow cooked onion that had somehow gone undetected until that moment.

      1. MsMaryMary*

        Oh no. At OldJob, we used to switch who sat where frequently – at least once a year. One time, a coworker knew the guy who was going to be sitting at his desk after the move, and left a sub sandwich in a drawer as a joke. Unfortunately, there was a last minute change of plans and no one ended up sitting there. By the time someone discovered the sandwich it was unpleasant.

  40. Seeking Second Childhood*

    Friends & I worked our way through college in libraries.
    One year one of the guys got his hands on the magnetic strips they use to protect books from theft. He had someone distract his roommate who was studying at the library….sliced a tiny line in his roommate’s banana peel … and inserted the already activated magnetic strip.
    Apparently they let the door guard in on it so there was no chance of roomie getting in real trouble with campus security. And apparently the look on his face as his banana set off the metal detector was priceless.
    Alas it was before digital photography.

  41. Jamie*

    The guy in HR had a creepy ID pic with glowing red eyes and inadvertently sinister smile. Didn’t show in printed version, but hilarious in jpg form.

    As a birthday gift to a co-worker with a sense of humor and no tech skills he made it the guys wallpaper.

    Poor guy found it funny but had to come to me to beg to remove it because he couldn’t look at it anymore.

  42. Edianter*

    My mom told me this one over the weekend and I loved it: She works in a high school, and before the holidays, her department decided to do a White Elephant exchange, with the rule being that your “gift” had to be something you’d found from somewhere in the school building. One of the people gave a box FULL of old Nora Jones paperbacks that the school library was getting rid of.

    Now, ALL the time (not just for April Fools) these books turn up in random places. Pull out your desk chair? There’s a Nora Jones book on it. Open the filing cabinet? There’s a Nora Jones book filed in with student records. Grabbing your lunch from the mini-fridge? There’s a Nora Jones book under your sandwich.

    It’s super funny, and the best kind of prank because it’s not inherently mean-spirited at all, and no one (and everyone) is the victim (and the perpetrator)!

    4. Amber Rose*

      We had this low-key with a Bratz doll a coworker confiscated from her kid for being inappropriate. For a while, it was prone to showing up in plants, on shelves, etc. Someone eventually attached it to a trophy base and I think it’s on display in the back somewhere.

    5. ContentWrangler*

      My mom and I have this kind of prank war with a creepy doll from her childhood. It’s a platypus babydoll (think demon child with a duckbill mouth). Once, I was housesitting for my parents and they got a box of pillows delivered. I opened the box from the bottom, placed the doll between the new pillows, and resealed the box. So, when she opened up the box, there was the doll looking up at her.

    6. Urdnot Bakara*

      This reminded me that the last time I was in our local used electronics store, they had like 20 copies of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I kinda want to buy them all and do something similar….

    7. MsMaryMary*

      Our company owner is very into decorating for the holidays. All (Christian) holidays. There was a three foot high Easter Bunny that had been displayed in our reception area for years each spring. It was very creepy, had weird eyes and buck teeth, and its fur was very odd, almost like cowhide. The receptionist hated it. Eventually it was decided that Bunny would be retired. He’d become worse for wear over the years. But for a week that last spring, Bunny appeared in various cubicles, in closets, in the supply room, and I think briefly in the mens room.

  43. Anon April Fools*

    Last year, I put googly eyes on every inanimate object in my boss’s office. I stuck them to the back of my hand first to make sure the adhesive was weak enough that they could be unstuck. He got enough of a kick out of them that there are multiple pairs still on the shredder, his monitor, etc.! No harm done, just good silliness.

    This year, I rigged a balloon drop to his office door. Unfortunately, it failed at the pulley, so the laugh was at my expense! But he got a good laugh out of it, which was the point, and it was funny to hear people wish him “Happy Birthday” (genuinely) all day long.

    Both pranks were easy to clean up, didn’t scare / upset / humiliate, and achieved their primary purpose of adding a little silliness into an otherwise bland workday.

  44. AnotherAlison*

    I’m not really one for pranks. I get more second-hand embarrassment for people than the person who should be embarrassed. But, kudos to companies who prank their customers. A friend of mine posted on FB yesterday about a flavored screen savor for babies who chew on their parents’ phones. She received a marketing email about this product, and then put a long rant on FB about how dumb that was. Another mutual friend replied, “Are you sure that’s not 4/1 prank?” and she responded indignantly, “Not unless the company is now sending prank marketing emails.” I’m just sitting back watching. Dude, you got pranked. Recognize it.

    2. RabbitRabbit*

      > “Not unless the company is now sending prank marketing emails.”

      IKEA sent one in 2017 advertising “Bigland” for adults, as a counterpart to Smalland where kids get babysat while parents shop – you could supposedly drink craft beer, get a massage, etc., while you waited for someone to finish shopping.

      I was quite sad when I finished reading the e-mail and remembered the date. :( I would have gone.

    3. Arjay*

      Not office pranks, but our local sheriff’s department posted on social media and had two press conferences about how they are adding a shark named Chomp to their marine unit. It is hilarious.

    4. Rainy*

      The AKC did one yesterday on FB that was amazing.

      There’s a new breed in the terrier group! (Go look for it, it’s AMAZING.)

    5. Lychee*

      In my country these kinds of pranks from companies are very big on April 1st. Some examples are a chocolate milk company that introduced their new chocolate milk bath bomb, or a cinema that said they were putting out popcorn scented air fresheners. There was also a big shampoo company that has a lot of special shampoos (for curly/grey/frizzy/etc hair) which advertised chest hair shampoo.
      I really like these kinds of pranks from companies, and in past years there have even been some ideas that were so popular they were actually created because people were so enthusiastic.

      1. Kelsi*

        That’s how a lot of products on ThinkGeek end up existing…when they started doing April Fools joke products, so many people asked for them that they now do a voting thing where you can vote for the ones you want to be real.

      2. Kelsi*

        Well, okay, just checked and apparently they don’t do the voting thing anymore. They certainly used to though!

    6. JustaTech*

      I love the “prank” emails from companies for April Fools because they’re always in good spirits. The one from REI (outdoors store) about outdoors trips for your pets is a great example. “White water kayaking for beta fish” “bike tour of New Zealand for mini donkeys”.
      Silly and fun and not mocking anyone.

  45. Washi*

    I pulled a prank at work once! I get in earlier than everyone else, so I sculpted some fake poop at home out of peanut butter and oatmeal and then put it on the floor in the corner of the office. When everyone noticed and started freaking out, I went over and picked it up with my bare hands. I was actually planning to eat it, but one of my coworkers started shrieking so much the minute I touched it that I was afraid she couldn’t take it if I went and popped it in my mouth.

    I feel pretty good about that one.

    1. Shark Whisperer*

      I’ve heard a story about this going terribly wrong. A friend of a friend’s brother (so this story is probably apocryphal) was a special forces instructor. He would have another instructor hide fake poop (really some sort of chocolate concoction) in the woods when they were doing training out there. He would then give the trainees a speech about having to be willing to do anything and then he would “see some bear poop” and pick it up and eat it. Except one day, it apparently wasn’t communicated well where the chocolate was and the instructor mistakenly picked up real bear poop. Supposedly he felt like he had no choice but to go through with it since he already gave his speech, so he actually took a bite out of the real poop.

  46. alh*

    This was in a university class, not the workplace, but it’s still my favourite. We had a prof who always, always drank a can of off-brand cola, purchased from the vending machine down the hall, in class. Every class. So the last class we all brought a can of the soda (I think someone bought a case at the grocery store, maybe?) and then we put an “out of order” sign on the vending machine. He came to class empty handed, and we almost blew it then and there by laughing. But we didn’t, and a few minutes into class at a pre-arranged signal, every single member of the class took out their can of cola and cracked it open and set it on the table in front of them. He just stared open-mouthed for several minutes, then he started to laugh, and laughed so hard he had to sit down and take several minutes to compose himself. Although he continued to laugh every time he looked up and saw the cans for the rest of class. It was brilliant.

    3. Alli525*

      This is maybe my favorite prank that I’ve seen yet! Reminds me of a time from my childhood, I think around age 12, when I had to “teach” my Sunday School class (it was part of the “curriculum,” we all took turns doing it) and the class clown had coordinated with the rest of the group to all uncross and cross their legs at the same time, or all drop books at the same time, that kind of thing. I remember being annoyed in the moment, because I was so nervous to be presenting, but now I think it’s hilarious.

    4. JKP*

      This is awesome. I hope they took pity on him and gave him a spare can at the end of class.

  47. Elemeno P.*

    My coworkers and I play little pranks on each other all the time. Our favorites are Photoshopping pictures of each other and hiding them in our boss’ office. He is very serious but likes our team dynamic, so he keeps them up. This leads to him having important meetings and people asking about the pictures of our team as giraffes on the wall, and him just quietly shaking his head at the team he’s stuck with.

  48. Former Librarian*

    We got the Brown E’s yesterday, and no real ones, either. :( No one confessed so we didn’t know who the culprit was, and we got chocolate chip cookies and Timbits today so all is well.

    And someone mixed up everyone’s name plates. About 40 people in our department and a bit of good-natured chaos while we were all returning the wrong one and trying to find the right ones.

    1. CupcakeCounter*

      In high school the departing senior class got the custodial team on board and they opened every locker (small school) and moved the contents all around and then put the locks on different lockers.
      I don’t think anyone made it to first period that day and a bunch of people were still trying to find some of their stuff in the afternoon because of kids who were out that day and weren’t around to unlock the 4 or 5 locks. The seniors were of course gone for the week but the chaos was well documented.

  49. Strawmeatloaf*

    Yesterday at my internship someone brought in cake. Or should I say “cake”.

    The icing was made of mayonnaise. Quite a few people fell for it, but if there’s a life lesson to be learned from it, don’t trust a cake if you can smell vinegar near it.

      1. ggg*

        My 5th grader brought a mayonnaise jar full of vanilla pudding to school yesterday, and ate it by large spoonfuls in front of her friends. Apparently it was quite successful in grossing them out.

        2. Amber Rose*

          Ah, that reminds me of the good ol’ days of filling Windex bottles full of Pepsi Blue and freaking people out by drinking it. xD

        3. KTB*

          At OldJob, my friend’s kid did that one! She got several of my coworkers, including one of the owners of the company. It was awesome.

      2. Strawmeatloaf*

        I don’t agree with food ones either, but I believe if there were allergies, others would be informed/the person with the allergy most likely wouldn’t eat random food that had been left out without asking. Of course, that’s not going to work 100% of the time, but I believe the prankster thought it was safe.

        I did think about putting a piece of paper on/next to it that said something like “it’s a lie” but couldn’t find paper to use.

    3. Alex the Alchemist*

      Something similar happened to my partner. They were working at a campus ministry that always had donuts for the Sunday services. The next day, all donuts were free for everyone on staff. A supposed “Boston creme” donut was left out, and my partner took a bite of it. They can’t eat mayo anymore.

      The worst part was, the prankster had completely intended that donut for their boss (who would’ve found it hilarious) to find!

  50. Utoh!*

    This was a prank that wasn’t. I had two coworkers who would always make jokes at each others’ expense. In this situation, they were working together (one at the computer, the other standing behind him looking over his shoulder). All of a sudden, a loud noise was heard and the coworker sitting at the computer yelled at the one behind him thinking he had just done something as a prank. It turns out, the other coworker actually fainted and hit the (metal) bookcase causing the loud noise. Of course this sent a panic through computer coworker who tried to dial 911, but was not able to figure out he had to first dial a 9, and then 911. The fainting coworker was okay, but I will never forget that entire scene as I was in the cubicle right across from where it happened.

  51. Caffeinated in New Jersey*

    My office has a small tradition of playing low-key pranks whenever someone is out on vacation so that they come back to a surprise on their desk; for example, putting stick-on googly eyes on all the objects on someone’s desk so that the stapler has a face now. I was out last week and came back to find my face from the staff photo PhotoShopped onto the Starbucks logo, then the logo taped to the mugs on my desk–I’ve got one for tea, one for coffee, and a bunch of company mugs sitting around to be distributed to guests, so it was more than a few! (I’m a big coffee person, including Starbucks in particular, and had been on vacation in Seattle.)

    I like that the pranks are all very, very easy to clean up and good-spirited, and we keep the remnants around as décor–all of the eyes are still up, and the faux-inspirational posters from InspiroBot that I used to cover a coworker’s desktop are now hanging above her monitor.

  52. Cake Wad*

    BEST: My coworker and I had lots of decorations on and around our desks. Before we got in to work that morning, someone carefully, meticulously swapped all of our things to the other’s desk. Her desk was completely set up like it was mine and vice versa. Super cute, and quick to clean up and get our lives back to normal.

    WORST: Our IT guy redirected our website — only on our internal network that staff use, not to the public — to our biggest competitor. Making us all think that our company had been bought (which would have meant we were all out of our jobs).

    1. Kathenus*

      From the outside looking in, your WORST seems pretty funny. Reminds me of a similar one years back, our IT guys had photoshopped the logo of one of the biggest businesses in our industry on our product, making it look like they had taken us over. We thought it was hilarious, I still have the photo. I guess if your company has an actual concern about something like this happening I can see it causing stress, but otherwise it seems pretty amusing as an April Fool’s day prank.

  53. MM55*

    When a new co-worker, fresh out of college went on her first work trip, I “reminded” her that all the bottles in the mini-fridge were free to take home. She had them all loaded in her suitcase, and thought it was not quite right. Made for a good story afterwards.

    1. Database Developer Dude*

      Okay, that’s just evil. Your coworker could have gotten in trouble when your workplace got the bill.

  54. Lindsay*

    I work in higher ed, and JUST YESTERDAY I had a coworker send me an extremely convincing prank news item about a topic relevant to my work that my Dean is deeply interested in. Knowing that the Dean was taking an important meeting the news was relevant to with senior University leadership, including the Provost, later that day, I immediately forwarded it to my Dean (crediting my coworker) who in turn forwarded it to a national organization also interested in the news. Thankfully, before the Dean met with the Provost, my coworker let me know it was an April Fool’s joke. I’m deeply grateful we avoided negative consequences in what was an important meeting scheduled on an unfortunate date, but I am also deeply traumatized by how close we came to embarrassing our organization with key leaders.

    In his effort to prank me, my coworker inadvertently pranked my Dean, a prestigious national membership organization, and almost pranked senior leadership at the University. It was a TERRIFYING experience ate the greater part of my working day and threatened my professional reputation!

    I am officially an April Fool’s hater now, ps.

  55. Anon Accountant*

    Our admin staff used to wash the coffee cups left in the sink. These were meant for clients but staff would use them and put them in the sink to be washed by someone else.

    A sign was posted announcing “dish duty” and names were assigned. Tantrums began. “I’ve never washed my cup and aren’t washing anyone else’s!” “I’ll throw the cups out before I’ll wash them!”

    They waited until the end of the day to reveal it was a prank.

    1. Gumby*

      The “I’ve never washed my cup” people… just – what? No. I would absolutely make that chore list real in the face of such tantrums (given the authority obviously). Talk about entitled and rude.

      Your admin staff deserve raises. And better co-workers. But raises at the very least for having to deal with said co-workers. Yikes.

      1. Anon Accountant*

        It’s my old job thankfully for sooooo many reasons. Several people there were so entitled, rude and obnoxious.

        Definitely the admins needed huge raises plus more for putting up with entitled coworkers.

  56. Pilcrow*

    Way back when, I wrote proposals for former job’s software projects.

    One day I copied all the proposal text into the Dialectizer (rinkworks(.)com/dialect), Swedish Chef version, and emailed it to the sales manager, saying here is what I sent to clients.

    Ell zee prupusel text luuked sumetheeng leeke-a thees. Um gesh dee bork, bork! (All the proposal text looked something like this.)

    I followed up with a “Psyche!” email shortly thereafter, so only minor heart palpitations.

  57. Amber Rose*

    Yesterday during the meeting it was announced that our GM was having so much fun that he’d decided to extend his vacation another two weeks (a lie). I think it gave some people a bit of a jolt given how busy we are and that there was no warning, but I wouldn’t say it was particularly mean.

    That same person once went on a fishing trip and while he was gone, we plastered his whole office in paper cutouts of fish. Hung them from the ceiling, taped to the windows and made a little gone fishing sign. He liked it so much he basically left it, just took down the hanging ones.

    Haven’t seen any mean pranks while I’ve been working, thankfully. And while some people are very vocal about hating all things prank and April 1, I enjoyed very much some of the ones that popped up online yesterday.

    1. Seeking Second Childhood*

      After ThinkGeek yesterday, my Avengers-crazy middle-schooler and I are seriously thinking about DIYing our mailbox to look like Mjolnir.

  58. bubba g*

    When I finished my student teaching 3 decades ago, on the last day of school, my mentor teacher and my students put my desk in a kiddie pool filled with water and goldfish. I loved the ingenuity, and no goldfish were harmed and all found homes.

  59. Calico*

    A coworker who was a friend at the time boxed up my cubicle while I was on vacation and taped over my name so I thought I was fired. She kept telling me to wait for my boss to come in but my boss was late so she finally told me it was a joke.

    2. ContentWrangler*

      Oh no, that’s not funny. I mean maybe, if she told you right after you saw it, but cryptically making you wait around…no way.

      1. Calico*

        Yeah I was almost in tears. And I didn’t want to make a scene so I just tried to laugh it off.

  60. irene adler*

    The lab was short on chairs. We informed that we could not order any more chairs for the lab.

    It was suggested by the CFO that we ‘share chairs’- let someone else use your chair when you are not in the lab. Never mind that the chairs were individually adjusted for height and what not.

    What were supposed to do when everyone was in the lab at once? That wasn’t made clear. All I know is that I had to work in the lab whilst resting on my knees. Not fun.

    At some point awhile back, I had noticed that the very tall CFO lady had the exact same executive chair (make and model) as the diminutive vice-president. No doubt they were adjusted to accommodate their respective sizes.

    So a few days after the ‘chair share’ announcement, I went to the front offices (where the C-suite folks work) while they were all out at lunch. Switched the V-P and CFO’s chairs.

    Should have heard the CFO screaming “Who touched my chair? Who changed it? “ as she kept getting up to re-adjust it-all afternoon long.
    Meanwhile, the V-P was completely oblivious as to why his feet no longer touched the ground as he sat at his desk.

    “chair-share” – I don’t think so.

  61. W.C. Green*

    It was crunch time for a major software project and the company canceled all vacations so we could make deadline. One of the team was from India and had a six-week leave planned–travel to her home city plus travel to various family members around the country–all of which had to be abandoned. The day she was to have left, she and I were at lunch, where I suggested we use this situation to prank the Project Manager.

    I returned from lunch alone and took my seat in the project room, where I sat looking as upset and fearful as I could. When the PM asked what was wrong, I told him that Team Member was so angry about the vacation ruling that she had gone to the airport and caught the noon flight to Mumbai.

    Everyone gaped at me in shock. The PM went pale and struggled to speak coherently. The upshot of his words were, “I don’t know what to do. We can’t hit deadline without her–good for her, I understand how she feels, but we’re really screwed.”

    Just as he was reaching for the phone to tell our boss the bad news, Team Member walked in, took her seat, and resumed her work. (She’d been in the hall listening.) The PM’s relief was a joy to behold. Best part was she got the blame for pranking him, not me.

  62. Guacamole Bob*

    I have a Rubik’s cube sitting on my bookshelf that has our logo on each of the nine squares on one side. My coworker knows how to solve the cubes and figured out how to turn the middle square by 90 degrees. He did a quarter-turn a day and waited to see how long it took me to notice – I felt pretty good that I caught on by day 2.

    It was a perfect office prank, in my view – it’s not funny enough to make anyone die laughing, but it’s very low risk and it provided a bit of lightheartedness within our team.

  63. Superdi*

    I once added a shortcut to my boss’s Word program so that when he typed “and” it would auto-correct to “and, like,” so every doc he worked on that morning made him sound like a CA Valley Girl until he finally called me in to fix it.

    There is a current ongoing prank in my department. We work in different locations and one of my coworkers was complaining that one of his offices was too bare and needed artwork. The rest of the department took a selfie and I had it made into a 16×20 print that we hung in that office. Now, when anyone is on vacation, they usually come back to find that print in their office.

  65. Friday Night*

    So, not the best or worst prank, but in my mind a good one.

    I came back from a meeting yesterday and had a hard time getting going, because I basically kept losing my cursor. I have three identical monitors on my work station hooked up to my computer, and I’ve really gotten used to it. The cursor is set up to traverse from one screen to the next naturally. Well, someone physically moved the monitors around so say, when I tried to move from the far right to the middle screen it jumped to the far left screen.

    It didn’t take long to sort out and no damage was, but for a few minutes I was really confused – and the momentary absurdity of trying to figure out what the heck was going on was great.

    1. MoopySwarpet*

      Reminds me of an unintentional prank with a mac “magic mouse.” I did something on my boss’s mac and left. He called about 20 minutes later because his mouse wasn’t working right. It was going the wrong direction. I went into the settings, nothing, googled “mouse moves opposite,” nothing. It took me at least 5 minutes to realize the mouse was physically rotated 180 degrees. Doh. It still happens once in a while, but now we all know how to fix it. ;)

    2. Lucille2*

      I have a PC laptop with docking station at work. When IT upgraded me to Windows 10, this happened every time I came back from a meeting and docked my laptop.

  66. Anon for this*

    I work at a university. Before I worked in my current office, my now-co-workers decided to glitter bomb the boss by putting a bucket full of glitter on top of his office door.

    Then the boss came into the office. With the German Ambassador. And was about to let the Ambassador walk into his office first.

    Co-workers had to quickly suggest to the boss that he might want to offer the Ambassador some coffee RIGHT NOW.

      1. Seeking Second Childhood*

        Glitter is an invasive species…once it gets out into the wild it’s there forever.

          1. An Elephant Never Baguettes*

            I work at a company which sells a lot of veeeery glittery products and I have by now resigned myself to finding glitter on my clothes/person/belongings and in my home until I am around 80, probably. Glitter is truly The Thing That Would Not Leave.

            1. Qosanchia*

              Once upon a time, back in college, I created a frame over my bed by lashing some old pvc pipes together (for hanging things like glasses, reading lights, etc). One of these, for some unknown reason, had glittery tape on it, so I would occasionally wake up a bit more faerie than I’d gone to bed. I moved to an apartment, and never rebuilt the frame. I eventually got rid of all of the bedding involved, as these things cycle out over time.
              More than 5 moves and 6 years later, including a move across the country, and completely new pillows, sheets, bed, and pillowcases, and my girlfriend was convinced I must be sneaking out in the night to meet my faerie lover, since I would still wake up sometimes with a few flakes on my face.

  67. Everdene*

    We currently have a giant teddy bear in our office in preperation for a fundraiser. We have all had fun moving and positioning this person sized bear around the room. The youngest member of the team got me good one morning when I pulled out my chair from under my desk and the bear popped out like a Jack in the Box! Before I left that night I areanged the bear like a lounge singer on a piano across his desk.

    1. Alex the Alchemist*

      At my old office, we had a cardboard cutout of our president that we had used for a marketing campaign once. After the campaign was over, we had fun hiding the cutout in offices, closets, the break room, and even once in the closet of our president’s office!

  68. MENA region*

    Our intern who is responsible for updating our gigantic wall calendar wrote “Jane’s birthday” on “March 32nd”. Someone fell for it and brought Jane gifts. Her real birthday is about two months later so the gift-giver was good-natured about it and said to consider it an early birthday present.

  69. Volunteer Enforcer*

    Kind of both? Our Business Manager at the time hid in a large cardboard box, jumped out and scared the life out of the CEO. We all still laugh about it to this day, the CEO included.

  70. Managercanuck*

    We built a mini-putt course in one of the senior officer’s offices. Got sod and placed it all over (on top of garbage bags), built a water trap and a sandtrap. Set up a pro-board and everything. And we got her a toy set of golf clubs from the dollar store so she could play. She loved it, but then we had to clean it up, which sucked. She did keep her clubs in the office, though.

  71. Seeking Second Childhood*

    This one’s for Roisin54 — a few days ago on the Friday work thread, you said you’d received something from the director about starting a “librarians on horseback” even though you’re in a very urban location with the library in the middle of renovations…
    Did that wind up a prank that went out too soon? Or are they really doing that to you?

  72. SheLooksFamiliar*

    A lady I worked with said she didn’t like her Windows 98 sound selections. One of my team liked 2001: A Space Odyssey, and helped me hatch a plan. We waited till she left for the day, and he recorded error messages in his best HAL voice. We reset her sounds so, at system start up, she heard: ‘Good morning, Trudy.’ An error or stop: ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Trudy,’ or ‘What do you think you’re doing, Trudy?’ or ‘I want to help you, Trudy.’ When she got email: ‘Daisy, daisy, give me your answer, do…’ And of course, when she shut down for the day: ‘I’m afraid, Trudy. Trudy, my mind is going…I can feel it…’

    Trudy didn’t think it was as funny as we did. We showed her how to change her sounds and all was well.

    1. PSB*

      Around the Windows 98 era, I changed all of the event sounds on one of my coworkers’ PCs to the AOL “you’ve got mail” sound.

      ALL of them. Even the ones that don’t usually have a sound.

  73. Artemesia*

    I taught school with a guy who was a world traveler. When he returned from Russia (this was in the 60s) one of the elementary schools in the district asked him to speak to a class. Unfortunately the kids misbehaved. Their teacher made them write notes of apology and they were delivered to our department office in a manila envelope when he was in class. The rest of us read them and then decided to prank him. We carefully composed 4 outrageous notes on lined paper in childish print about what they were doing when he was talking. We interleaved them with the real notes. It was hilarious watching his reaction, but then he shared them and it looked like they might get published in a local paper, so we had to stop the train before it went over the cliff.

  74. DenveriteDownUnder*

    One of the members of the admin team took a well-deserved vacation and was sorely missed the 3 weeks she was away. It was around Halloween and so her office mates bought fake spiderwebs and decorated her desk and chair with them. When she came back they said she was gone so long cobwebs had grown all over her workspace. It was pretty cute!

  75. Zona the Great*

    The only “prank” I played went over well but only because of the circumstances. I was the dishwasher in a very busy kitchen and had a particularly tough day where all the servers knew not to even look my direction. This was forgiven in such a dirty busy position so know one would hold it against me.

    One server bounced around the kitchen for a full five minutes announcing there was an extra Caprese salad that was made and who wants it?! If no one wants it I’m going to eat it! Anyone? No one? Okay I’m eating it!

    FOR FIVE FULL MINUTES!

    So as soon as she took the first bite, I came out of the dish pit and shouted quite loudly and intensely, “where is my caprese? Who the FUG ate my caprese?!” and watched while everyone in the kitchen went white and tried not to participate. The server’s face was classic as she struggled not to wrap her lips around that first bite. Chef continued chopping vegetables completely unwilling to even look over. Classic kitchen fun that helped relieve the tension.

    1. Seeking Second Childhood*

      Someone I know bought a crummy old vinyl chair at a tag sale because it sounded like a whoopie cushion if you sat in it. Sister’s introducing us to her new fiance? Give him the Whoopie chair!

  77. Jennifer*

    I love pranks. My old work bestie used to flip the display on my monitor when I made the mistake of leaving it unlocked. I used to steal the action figures from his desk and hide them all over the office.

    Pranks can be a lot of fun as long as the target finds them funny. You have to know their sense of humor. Even if I don’t think it’s funny, if it’s not mean-spirited I can laugh them off.

  78. Fibchopkin*

    The year I rickrolled my entire office-
    Our org is growing, and has since about doubled in size, but back when I pulled this prank, we had about 40 folks on staff. We are a membership organization, and have 2, large annual events every year, one that typically garners around 2500 attendees and occurs at the beginning of the year, and one that typically garners around 1000 and occurs in the summer. Immediately after the first, bigger events wraps up, a lot of manpower at the org shifts focus to ramping up for the second event. Back then, I was the staff lead on the smaller, second event, and we just happened to wrap up our larger annual event in the last week of March that year. So on the First of April, I sent out what appeared to be the typical “All hands on deck- here are the first round of staff assignments for X Event” email, with a link to the relevant documents for each person’s assignment. Every single one of the links was actually a disguised link to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0
    It was glorious. Even my CEO and COO clicked on their links, apparently mild intrigued by what I could have possibly ‘assigned’ them.
    Everyone chuckled, noone was hurt, and no more than 5 minutes of anyone’s time was wasted. Mission accomplished.

  79. Emmie*

    My old coworkers would leave their computers unlocked when they’d leave their desk. When my boss saw this, he’d send an email from their Outlook saying “I love puppies” to other coworkers. It was a funny way to reinforce the importance of locking computers when you have access to sensitive information. It rarely happened because computers auto locked after five minutes of inactivity, but it was a good ribbing nonetheless.

    1. Mimi Me*

      A few years ago a friend of mine was on vacation and left her computer open. One of her siblings updated her FB status to “I love corn”. Over the years they’ve all managed to forget to lock their computers and another post about the wonders of corn appears. Last year my friend went to a farm and bought some fresh off the stalk corn. She posted something to FB about how good it tasted and there were no less than 12 people asking “Have you been hacked again?? LOL!” before she had to explain that no, this time it really was her and it really was a post about corn.

    2. EvilQueenRegina*

      Someone who was leaving once went round the desks of anyone who had Facebook open on their phone or laptop and changed all their statuses to things like “I’m going to miss Wakeen loads, he’s hot!”

  80. DiscoTechie*

    Coworker put another coworker’s direct phone number on a Craigslist ad for a free used accordion. A surprising number of people will take a free accordion. The target did not find it funny after about 20 phone calls in an hour.

    1. socrescentfresh*

      This is my favorite one. Points for absurdity and lack of cleanup. (Except for deleting the post, I guess.)

  81. Ella Vader*

    A friend’s office pulled a good prank on their boss. Think Geek sold some kind of contraption that made weird noises and talked at random intervals. They hid it in the boss’s office, and he started talking to it. She said, after a while, he was muttering “Am I going crazy? I think I’m going crazy.” They kept it up all day, and the managed to remove the device without him ever knowing who planted the thing.

  82. Deeshyone*

    I was the office prankster and before I was outed, I performed the following:

    – Halloween’s Eve, I changed everybody’s name plates to something that was scary/campy/pop culture related to Halloween (this is the prank that eventually outed me cause I forgot to change my own – duh)
    – messed with a coworkers desktop by plugging in a wireless mouse and “taking control”
    – rearranged the letters on a coworkers keyboard. He was a “hunt and pecker” and had about 15 minutes of typing gibberish before he said out loud “I don’t remember the “E” being here…”

    There’s more but these were by far my favourite! :)

    1. Bilateralrope*

      If you’re wanting to keep your part in the “prank” hidden, then it’s a sign that the prank is a bad idea.

      The Halloween prank is the only one I’d find funny.

  83. animaniactoo*

    My office needs some good pranks. We’re pretty boring here lately.

    At home is another story (link posted below to one of the more spectacular back and forths that I submitted to another site).

    In the office, back when I was interim IT, I would regularly change the desktop background on the studio manager’s computer. She didn’t know how to change it back so she generally just put up with it until I found a new one “Brick wall installed to bang your head against”.

    The really evil one was one my dad had the program for. It was a variation on a screen saver in the days when Norton Anti-Virus was commonly used everywhere. When you walked away, a screen would appear that looked like the NAV alert screen and said something like:

    “Errors found in build tree, reformat hard drive now?”

    and the only option was an “okay” button. No cancel button.

      1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        I wife-taxed a hot dog once, only to discover that he’d laced it with sriracha ketchup. I am not one for spicy food, at ALL, like bbq potato chips are too much for me. Sigh. :)

  84. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

    Not April 1, but this is my all-time favorite.

    At an OldJob back in the 90s, the company hired two people around the same time who’d known each other before and were close friends. They were a pretty unlikely pair, “Kramer” was a guy in his 40s and “Elaine” a woman in her early 20s.

    One day, Elaine complained to several of us about having seen mice in the office. We’d just moved into a brand new building, and the company owner insisted on everyone keeping it spotless, so we were mildly surprised that there were mice. We all went home at the end of the day and forgot about it.

    The next morning, I came in to work to find my desk and keyboard covered in mouse droppings. I went over to Elaine’s desk to tell her that she’d been right about the mice. Kramer was there chatting with her when I delivered the news. He was skeptical, “mice? are you sure? Let me see” and walked back to my desk with me. He looked at the droppings and the desk, “hmm looks like mice, but let me check” and with a businesslike look on his face, he picked up one of the droppings, sniffed it, put it in his mouth, chewed on it thoughtfully… swallowed. “Yeah you’re right, these *are* mouse droppings” then he saw the look on my face and started cracking up. He and Elaine had planned it all a few days in advance. The morning after she’d spread the word around the office about the mice, Kramer had come in early and put chocolate sprinkles on people’s desks. Then went over to her desk, sat down, and they both waited for the first sucker to show up – I was the first sucker. I wasn’t really close with either of them, but I thought this prank was pretty genius!

  85. T*

    When I was a teenager I worked with my sister and we did not exactly get along. After she really irritated me one day I snuck onto her work computer and made a print screen of her desk top, which I then saved as the desktop background. I moved all her icons to the recycling bin (I think it was Windows XP), so she would see the icons but they wouldn’t work. She completely flipped out when her computer wouldn’t work, and retaliated when she saw my feet in the bathroom stall the next day. She yanked my feet and I ended up falling off the toilet and ripping the whole seat off.

  87. Free Meerkats*

    I filled my (now retired) boss’s office with black balloons to celebrate his 50th birthday. I don’t remember how many it was, but I bought out the party supply’s stock of them and barely had enough. It also took me almost 4 hours using a compressor. Right now thinking back, I’m wondering whether the joke was on him or me.

    When I left my job at a previous employer, I came out to find the maintenance staff had put my car’s rear axle on blocks just high enough that the tires were off the ground. Not high enough to casually notice.

    At that same job, it was a regular thing to find one’s locker filled with (new) plastic ball growth media. Like this, https://www.practicalgardenponds.com/files/2039883/uploaded/1.5BIOBALLS.JPG You’d open your locker and be knee deep in them.

    1. MoopySwarpet*

      In high school, a friend and I jacked up a teacher’s car like that. It was in retaliation for telling the gullible straight-A friend that they were going to be benched for the upcoming game and have to attend the mandatory study hall because they were on the low grade list.

  88. Hello!*

    I used to work for Congress and we would always have funny get well soon cards, birthday, anniversary, etc. that would tease legislators (i.e. when my boss had his appendix out, we printed out a picture of a legislator who is very opposed to pre-existing conditions coverage and said “Hey there big boy, don’t worry about your pre-existing condition, I’ve got you covered”). My coworker used to love to bring in flowers and my other coworker taped a rose to the ceiling and she had petals slowly dropping on her desk for a month. Someone had one of those electronic picture frames where you can add photos and the whole office added pictures of pets, random memes, etc. amongst pictures of her family… I could go on forever.

  89. Auntie Social*

    My boss’s birthday was also April 1, and one year he was pretty grumbly about turning 40. I knew where he was going at lunch–deli, cleaners, etc.–so I called each place and said “it’s his birthday, let’s give him the business”. One place said he didn’t look a day over 50, the next place said 55, the cleaners said 60, and so on. He was pretty frosted when he came back—and waiting for him was a cake that said “Happy 70th”. We finally got a smile out of him!

  90. Mel*

    My long time employer loved light hearted pranks. Once, while he was away on business, we set up a “new boss” at his desk, made of office supplies . And we rubberbanded his door shut, thinking he would have to curb through a window. The rubberband snapped really easily, so it didn’t come to that.

  91. jem*

    For weeks before April Fool’s Day, a colleague was looking more and more noticeably pregnant. We were a polite workplace, so no one asked her any questions, figuring she would announce her news when she was ready. On April Fool’s Day, she sends out a very aggressive-sounding email, accusing everyone of talking behind her back about her recent weight gain, and that she didn’t appreciate it, was feeling very sensitive about it, and what did we all expect when we worked in a place with constant free food?

    We worked in an open office. As more and more people started to see the email, it got quieter and quieter until you could hear a pin drop. I noticed a coworker’s hands flattened on her desk as she looked at her screen, horrified.

    Finally, the bravest among us offered a hesitant, “…April Fool’s…..?”

    Our colleague cracked up and said, “Yeah guys, I’m totally pregnant! You were terrified, though, weren’t you?”

    She got us GOOD.

    The baby was very cute.

      1. Database Developer Dude*

        No, it’s not. Imagine some poor coworker who’s male and wasn’t talking about her weight gain thinking he’s about to catch a sexual harassment charge for talking about a female coworkers body?????

        1. fposte*

          Why would he think he personally was up for a sexual harassment charge when it was addressed to everybody and he hadn’t talked about her?

        2. wittyrepartee*

          You mean *was* talking about her body? Because otherwise he’d probably be like “glad that mass email wasn’t directed at me!”.

  92. Namast'ay in Bed*

    At my last job, people were constantly mixing up two of my similar-looking coworkers, so for April fool’s day they dressed the same and switched desks! It was hilarious to see people walk over to one of them and start talking, only to do a double-take partway through!

  93. Dusty Bunny*

    The greatest prankster in our office was most thoroughly pranked by a newbie. Newbie drew Prankster’s name for the annual Secret Santa, and opted to give a small gift every day for a week. Each day’s gift was a scratch off lottery ticket. Day 5 brought the prank lottery ticket, which looked genuine. Newbie’s work team, which included the Prankster’s boss and me, were in a meeting in the glass walled conference room when Prankster arrived and opened his final gift. We surreptitiously watched as Prankster got very excited and began running around the office with a half-disbelieving look on his face, trying to find his Secret Santa.

    After about 5 minutes of this, Prankster’s boss opened the conference room door and called him over, and asked what was up. Prankster replied by telling Newbie, “You’re my Secret Santa? I won $10 earlier this week, but now this ticket says I won $500,000! Is this for real?”

    Newbie replied, “Oh, yeah, that does say $5000,000 is the top prize. Uh, read the back of the ticket. I think that says how to claim your prize.” The back of the ticket directed the “winner” to contact Santa at the North Pole to claim the prize. Prankster said, “Well, at least I still have $10,” and left the room, laughing.

    Prankster’s wife called later to let us know her legendary Prankster husband told the whole family how someone finally got him, and got him good.

    1. Live & Learn*

      A friend did this same prank to me when I was unemployed and desperately broke. She didn’t realize how cruel that was when I didn’t realize immediately that the “winning” ticket was fake!

  94. Cucumberzucchini*

    We one time photoshopped a truck crashing through the front window of the building owned by one of the business partners and emailed it to his terrible manager. It looked really real. We did this at the direction of the other business owner. It was actually pretty funny and nobody got in trouble. The fact that the person we sent it wasn’t a very nice person and had no real power and we were asked to do it by one of the business owners made it a lot less risky.

  95. Legal Rugby*

    When I was in the Army, I was stationed near Baltimore, and worked mostly with Baltimore Ravens fans. My big boss, a Sergeant Major, was a huge Steelers fan, and his main office was lined with steelers memorabilia and photos. We were working medevac one weekend and ended up coming back late at night, but were unable to leave until all the birds had come back – we landed just about the time the ravens beat the steelers for the first time in a number of years (or something, these werent my teams). One of my soldiers went hunt through their gear until they came up with a 250 pack of purple and black balloons left over from a morale day earlier in the year. My soldiers found a step ladder, removed the tile overhead, reached across and pulled up a tile in the SGM’s office, and proceeded to blow up everyone of those 250 ballons while they waited for the rest of our platoon to return. The next morning, I cancelled PT for an early duty call, so that we could all be in the office when he opened the door. Which was nice, because, boy, did we have to run when he figured out what he was staring at.

  96. Minerva McGonagall*

    We have a number of model skeletons in the university library where my office is for our health majors to study but there’s a few that get dressed up based on whatever holiday is closest. If you leave your office unlocked there’s a decent chance you’ll come back to find a skeleton “waiting for an appointment”.

  97. Sabrina*

    I was working offsite for three weeks around Halloween. My coworkers knew I was working in another part of the state but most didn’t know I was coming back on the weekends So between week two and three I went into work on Sunday morning, office was normally empty on the weekend, and covered my own cubical with fake spider webs, you could barely see my desk when I was done. I then left a giant bowl of Halloween candy on my chair.

    Come Monday I was bombarded with phone calls and emails from my coworkers wanting to tell me I got pranked. Trying to figure out who did was a popular topic of conversation and I was sent lists by my friends of who they suspected and who was denying it. I did eventually come clean, every single person laughed and said they should have known.

    That office was a lot of fun!

    1. fposte*

      Ooh, this one is really ingenious–it’s a way to prank when you know exactly how the recipient feels about it.

  98. LadyByTheLake*

    I worked for a company that had lots of ridiculous rules — only ten pushpins, desk must be kept clean at all times, only two pictures (family and pets) in specific frames allowed etc. The co-CEOs were an elderly couple. An entire department convinced a new employee that it was a company rule that everyone must keep a framed picture of the CEOs (think of a picture of your grandparents) on their desks. It took him MONTHS to figure out it wasn’t a rule. That was hilarious.

  99. Used to be a clever prankster*

    Radio station in early ‘00s, a few years after Butterfly Kisses topped the Christian and Country charts. Our all-request Friday evening DJ despised the song and would always look ahead on the playlist delete ahead. We were well past CDs, so I ripped the audio file for Butterfly Kisses into another audio file. As he announced what he thought was going to be Sixpence None the Richer, the laughing children on the intro of BK played underneath his voice and he knew he’d been had. Nearly 20 years ago and he still tells the story.

    1. Zephy*

      Aww, come on. You spend a significant chunk of your life at work – what’s the harm in having a little fun every now and again? There’s plenty of examples of pranks gone awry, but innocent jokes that are, at worst, an inconvenience for 15 minutes…what’s wrong with that?

      1. MonteCristo85*

        You are assuming they are fun. Some people don’t find any pranks fun, and if you can’t have fun without involving other people that’s kind of sad. I’ve been reading through this whole list and I don’t think I’d find any of these “fun.” They wouldn’t all upset me (although many of them would) but I for one don’t like being inconvenienced for someone else’s amusement. Plus you don’t know what someone else is dealing with…even the “innocent” pranks could cause real problems…like the random sounds could really upset someone with misophonia, turning over a chair could be a real issue for someone with back pain, etc.

        1. ScarlettInTheBallroom*

          It’s not really an issue though if you know your audience and have a good rapport/relationship with the people you are pranking. To each their own, but I do like a good bit of lighthearted fun at work now and then.

      2. Beth*

        What’s wrong with it is that, in many environments, there are no “innocent jokes”. And those of us who have been targeted by haters have heard an endless litany of “Just joking!” offered to excuse any and all levels of cruelty.

  101. The Guacamolier*

    OH MAN. I worked at a popular chain restaurant when I was twenty. This was a place FULL of pranksters, mostly the run-of-the-mill “send the new person next door to ask to borrow a squeegee sharpener/fan winder (like…to wind up the ceiling fans/random big, heavy things that you can’t move (like the host stand). Well, things escalated.

    They had a dispenser of those paper cone cups for employees to use to get a quick drink while on their shift. It started out humorously enough, people would sneakily tape a paper cone cup to someone else’s back and see how long it took for them to notice it. Those cups are really light, and sometimes it would take awhile for people to notice it.

    The worst of the pranksters got impatient, waiting for people to realize the prank, and started using the people with cones taped to their backs as mini basketball hoops, balling up receipts and corners of napkins and tossing them in when the person’s back was turned. This was the prank du jour for awhile.

    When they got tired of that, they started pouring water or tea from the pitchers-maybe half a teaspoon at a time-as they passed the people with cones on their backs.

    It all came to a head during dinner one night, when the Senior Executive Prankster and VP of Poor Decision Making LIT the bottom of a cone cup on FIRE, WHILE IT WAS TAPED TO SOMEONE’S BACK.

    I ended up having to whomp the new guy on the back to make sure the flames were properly extinguished. He wasn’t hurt. His white button up shirt was singed. He was pretty mad. And the restaurant removed the cone cups AND the dispenser before the following day’s lunch shift.

  102. Jay_B*

    I once had a boss with whom I had some kind of inside joke about David Hasselhoff – I don’t remember the actual joke anymore. One day I printed out semi-risque pictures of The Hoff and hid those pictures all around his office. For the next few weeks he came across them randomly while reaching for various office supplies or opening binders. He called me when he found the first one and he was laughing so hard I could hardly understand him. Word got around about the prank and different colleagues pranked each other that way for the next few years. For example, at one point a person in the Brooklyn office and a person in the Argentine office did a switch where they spent 6 months in the other office for cross training. They also traded apartments. When the Brooklyn guy left the Argentine’s apartment, he hid risque pictures of David Hasselhof all throughout the apartment. Our Argentine colleague was finding them for months and he would Skype a picture of each newly found picture company-wide. We all got a kick out of that!

  103. DCGirl*

    Years ago, there was a classic from academia in the Chronicle of Higher Education….

    A class waited and waited in a classroom one day for their professor to show up. After 30 minutes, he still hadn’t arrived, so they all finally left.

    At the next class, the professor read them all the riot act, saying that he had had to take an urgent phone call but they should have known he was coming (and waited) because he’d left his hat on the desk in the front of the room.

    At the next class, the professor arrived to find a hat on every student desk but no students.

    Classic.

  104. AnotherAlison*

    Thought of another one. . .This is a school prank, so I hope it’s close enough for work. My husband helped my son figure out how to rig up an old extra car horn to the brake lights in a truck. He did this to his friend while the friend’s truck was parked in the high school parking lot. When he left school at the end of the day, every time he stepped on the brakes the horn would continue to blast. Everyone around him was getting mad. . .you can imagine the 3:00 pm rush leaving a 3,000 person high school. My son let him drive home and then let him in on the joke. He said he had to keep putting the car in park at stop lights instead of holding down the brake. (IIRC, this was retaliation because that kid took another friend’s tailgate off his truck and hid it while he was at his work.)

  105. The Guacamolier*

    Legit funny prank: a helicopter was circling in view of a store where I worked. My boss took his phone outside and pretended he was controlling the helicopter with it, telling people it was this cool new drone that had just been released. Ha ha.

  106. yellowpolkadots*

    We changed out one of my coworker’s office door into a screen door that would slam shut. We added a welcome mat, wreath, an old patio chair, a fly swatter, and an ash tray. It was pretty awesome and everyone got a big kick out of it! He left it on for about a week then we helped him change it back to his regular office door.

    We also raided the framed picture section of a habitat for humanity and put up a big gallery wall on someone’s office. I think in total we spent $20. His wall was covered in Raggedy Ann, dogs playing poker, a dream catcher, someone’s framed needlepoint, and a 3D picture of ducks flying.

  107. Rock Prof*

    When I was in graduate school, some of my friends/colleagues would play some pretty good pranks. Some of them have been covered, like googly eyes on things, covering everything in plastic wrap (including individual paperclips), and filling someone else’s office with balloons.
    But my favorite one was when one of my office mates (we were often between 4-6 to a room) was out of town for fieldwork for a couple weeks, we (and a crew of other grad students) moved all of their stuff out of the office and put a couch and dorm fridge where his stuff had been. He was normally one of the prank-instigators, so he loved it. It does make me wonder how we, as grad students, came up with an extra fridge and couch.

  108. Antilles*

    At a company I interned at back in the mid-2000’s, one of the VP’s had a full-sized 150+ gallon aquarium in his office, located on the side of his office, adjacent to his desk. He took every opportunity to talk about how relaxing it was to have it, how it really brought out the decor of his office, and just how glad he was that that corporate allowed it. The guy was well-liked and genuinely enthusiastic, so it didn’t come off as showy or bragging, but he mentioned it often enough that it was well into the “yeah, we’ve all heard the story…” territory.
    One day, a field technician is in office and showing off his new cell phone. The tech was an outdoorsy type who loved fishing and boating, so he bought a high-end cell phone specifically designed to put up with all sorts of abuse. The VP was in a meeting, so the tech leads us all to the VP’s office, flips on the lights, and casually tosses his cell phone into the aquarium. Amid the shouts of surprise, he calmly picks up the desk phone, dials his cell and we all get to hear it ring, confirming that the water didn’t affect his cell phone at all. (FYI, this was *super* impressive in 2005).
    The tech hangs up the phone and immediately afterwards, the VP walks in and asks us why there are 10 people gathered in his office. We make a quick excuse about the aquarium, then leave, before remembering that we left the phone in the aquarium. Rather than go back in to pick it up, the tech decides to call the phone and see what happens.
    >First call, the cell phone rings and the VP looks at his desk phone, thinking it’s his, but then looking away, assuming it’s just from someone else’s office. Tech hangs up when the call goes to voice mail, waits a few seconds, then calls the cell again so it rings again.
    >Second call, the VP looks up again, then glances out the door up and down the hall, figuring it’s someone who’s away from their desk. Shuts the door, but of course he’s got glass windows, so we can still watch. Hang up, wait a few seconds, call back.
    >Third call, VP gets completely confused that he can still hear it and picks up his desk phone, then unplugs it. Noise doesn’t stop of course, which makes him even more confused. Hang up, wait, call back.
    >Fourth call, VP is completely baffled and walks outside asking if anybody is hearing that ringing noise. Everybody denies any knowledge of course. He’s clearly suspicious that something is going on, but accepts it and goes back to his office. Hang up, wait, call back.
    >Fifth call, VP finally does a whole circuit of his office, stopping when he sees the cell phone in his aquarium. He fishes it out and walks out to howls of laughter.
    Fortunately, he was a great sport about it. As a nice perk, every time he talked about the aquarium after that, he also included the story about how he got pranked, which made his aquarium-based stories much more entertaining.

  109. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

    It’s so minor and silly but a common prank a coworker of mine will do is hide post-its all around an absent person’s desk area (like under the keyboard, stuck to the bottom of a chair, in a notebook…) and number them with “1 of 7,” “2 of 7” etc. but then leave one of the series out so the person will “go crazy” looking for the missing one. But my group is a bunch of lazy cynics and we just don’t look for them. Sometimes we’ve found them years after the fact. It’s a prank that keeps on underwhelming.

  110. Alex the Alchemist*

    At an internship a couple years ago, I was tasked with pranking someone from our department who was coming back from a month-long leave (we were a pranky office). I went to Michael’s and got all the stick-on googly eyes I could find and proceeded to put them on EVERYTHING in her office including her computer, photos, desk, and all of her K-cups. Probably my proudest achievement while working there.

  111. It's Business Time*

    I switched the M & O keys around on a keyboard for a co-worker who typed by looking at each letter on the keyboard. He then came back to his desk, started typing and was alarmed that when he pressed M, O appeared. He turned to me and asked to help as he couldn’t understand why his computer was not working. I couldn’t help because I was too busy trying to stifle my laughter. I have also switched the left / right mouse clicks, much to the dismay of another co-worker. I also like to put weird calendar entries into people’s outlook if they leave their computer unlocked, mostly reminding them to buy me a present!

    1. Qosanchia*

      It’s related, but not strictly a prank. I worked with a left-hander who switched her buttons around, and she got endless satisfaction watching remote IT struggle when trying to work on her computer. I always got a little kick out of it when I had to work on it. I can mouse ambidextrously, but it takes a sec (or 9) to remember to switch my click fingers on her computer

  112. Sienna*

    At one OldJob I had, someone was notorious for leaving their security badge on their desk. So as a prank and lesson, two coworkers “kidnapped” his security badge. They had set up a scavenger hunt throughout the facility, enlisting multiple others to help. It started off with a post it note where he had left his security badge. The post it note instructed him to meet with Coworker 3 in the breakroom. Coworker 3 in the breakroom would give him a “side quest” in exchange for the next clue. Once they completed the side quest, Coworker 3 gave them another post it note advising them to meet yet another coworker but in a different breakroom for their next “side quest/challenge”.

    It took them the whole day to complete all the quests and challenges, but they got their security badge AND we all got a good laugh from it.

    But they still continued to leave their security badge on their desk. smh.

    1. CDM*

      I had a co-worker who constantly left his car keys lying around the workplace (a pool) and our boss would pick them up and hide them somewhere. Under the couch cushions in the lobby, on top of the roller holding the lane lines, in the container of kickboards, on one of the towel hooks, inside the sauna.

      Then one day she dropped them in the deep end of the pool. And found out that it was like $250 to replace the electronic fob on his 15 year old Mustang. She paid it, and he kept leaving his keys lying around where anyone could take them.

  113. Paloma Pigeon*

    After the monthly all-company meeting one department returned to find all of their chairs missing. Stupid, but funny and not mean-spirited.

  114. Jen RO*

    IT policy is that we must lock our computers when we leave them, but one coworker always left her unlocked. After we told her, repeatedly, to lock it or else… one day we replaced her wallpaper with a glam photo of a very bad local singer. (While we were looking for an appropriate wallpaper, we accidentally clicked a link to one of his videos, so we also messed up her YouTube suggestions for a few weeks!)

  115. Katty Kat*

    I worked in a restaurant in college and one of the managers made the mistake of leaving his truck in the parking lot when he wasn’t there. We used the industrial sized saran wrap and wrapped his doors shut. We also put all of that days garbage in the bed of his truck instead of the dumpster (all in tight bags, not loose trash). He thought it was funny only a little annoyed that we wasted saran wrap.
    We also used to stick each other’s straws in hot sauce and then put them back in the cups. Taking a swig of hot sauce isn’t always fun but we had a great group of people who were all pretty laid back so no one ever got too upset.

  116. Rachel A*

    My coworker and I are both short women (in a mostly male department) who sit across from each other. Sometimes people confuse us, despite the fact that we look nothing alike. For April Fool’s we switched desks for the day. A few people were confused momentarily, most were amused, no one got hurt, and we were able to do this with less than 5 minutes of setting up or tearing down.

  117. Other Meredith*

    My supervisor at the library once rescued a CPR dummy head from some kids who were using it to play soccer outside, and since then she’s built up a collection of mannequin heads. Recently she lined them all up on the windowsill in the breakroom behind the gauzy curtains. They scared the heck out of everyone who went to get a snack, including me, but it was hilarious.

  118. DCGirl*

    From my fund raising days…. I worked on the alumni phonathon program at a very large state university. Our office was in the basement of men’s dormitory, so we often had to put up with a lot of noise and drunken behavior from above. There was one day I arrived to work and had to climb over the Coke machine, which had been thrown out a window over night, in order to enter the building, for example.

    I worked the early shift, processing the previous night’s pledges, sending reminders, setting out the calling lists for the next night. My boss worked the late shift, which meant supervising the callers and staying till 11:00 when calls to the West Coast were finished. My boss would always call me when he got up to ask about the totals, etc.

    On April 1, he called and I said, “OMG, I’m so glad you called. I just got here and the guys upstairs must have stopped up all the toilets. The office is FLOODED, and all of last night’s pledge cards have been destroyed.”

    I totally got him for a few minutes, while he panicked, until I gave it away by giggling.

  119. DM Farmer*

    I had a fuzzy hat (fedora style) that I bought in London back in the 90’s and I loved it! My boss used to stab it with a pen saying it moved whenever it sat on my desk. One April Fool’s, taking some fishing line and a hook, I attached it to his suit jacket. He walked down the hall with this hat bouncing down behind him. Told him the hat was upset about being stabbed.

    Everyone had a laugh about my “possessed hat” :D

  120. Dust Bunny*

    This wasn’t April Fool specific, but when my boss started at Current Job, he came from a similar department at University, and everybody in our discipline knows everyone else, at least locally. They sent us a gag gift that had been languishing in their storeroom for years (nothing gross, just something that’s funny if you do this kind of work). So we sent back . . . I forget what it was, but something ridiculous. They sent us some old taxidermied fish from some campus building. We sent them a box of shrapnel when one of our air-conditioners self-destructed. They sent us (other weird thing, I forget what). We waited awhile and then sent them a semi-convincing “antiquity” with a note handwritten by me (they don’t know my handwriting) about how a distant relative worked for University and this ended up in his possession yada yada. We were so into this that I recruited a friend to mail it to them from out of state if the postmark was going to be a problem; she was disappointed when it didn’t need to go that far. Anyway, they thought the had gotten the last word and semi-believed this for about six months until Boss asked them about it at an event (they had not publicized it, pending authentication).

    They still haven’t topped it.

  121. SaffyTaffy*

    The only one I ever did was I printed out fake nameplates for all my coworkers with the names of actors or famous characters they resembled or idolized.

  122. Jennifer*

    My favorite prank on The Office is the one where they realized Stanley doesn’t really notice anything. They swapped out his coffee for orange juice, said they were opening a new branch on Jupiter, switched out his desk mates, brought in a miniature horse. He just kept on doing his crossword puzzles and left right on time.

  123. Mrs. Fenris*

    I’m not sure how appropriate this would be in most offices, but in my workplace it sort of fit. I worked in a 24 hour animal hospital. We had an all-hands rounds session at the morning and evening shift changes. One year we had a nurse who was pregnant and approaching the “due any day” stage. We had an easily flustered male doctor, and somebody got the idea to fake the nurse’s water breaking during rounds. Much discussion and research followed, because a. we didn’t really know what a human’s water breaking looked like, and b. we couldn’t figure out how to make it happen in a semi-controlled manner. We finally solved it with an IV fluid bag, a pair of scissors, and a couple of practice runs. It turned out that another, equally high-strung dude was working that night too, so we were expecting pandemonium.

    Well…it turns out that a medical emergency really doesn’t fluster a medical professional that much. They both jumped calmly into action, ready to call the nurse’s husband, take her to the hospital etc. Everyone had a chuckle, but most of all we were impressed and touched at how quickly they were ready to jump in and help.

  124. StarHunter*

    Harmless prank for April Fools’: I used to work at a place where the guys would play cards at lunch. Can’t remember the name of the game, but the idea was to get the kings because that got you the most points. So before lunch I took all the kings out of the deck…. They got a chuckle out of it later and had wondered why no one had seen a king.

  125. Arya Snark*

    My best prank coincidentally came to fruition on 4/1 – my friend and I were big fans of Office Space – we’d quote the movie constantly, I slyly named a report the Total Production Summary so we’d have a TPS report to laugh about, etc.
    We changed his name in Excel to Bill Lumbergh one day then forgot all about it. Then, one 4/1 our boss (who was head of compliance, had to make sure we met all sorts of SEC regulations and while he was a good boss, he was a bit of a stick in the mud) attempted to open a file my friend was in then started screaming, “Who is Bill Lumbergh and why is he accessing our system?!?!?!” We had to explain it because he had never seen the film (!!!) and probably only didn’t get in serious trouble because we convinced him it was an April Fools’ prank.

  126. Chocoholic*

    I used to tease my husband that I was going to tell him I was pregnant on April Fools Day and he always responded that I should not do that because it was not funny. Then one year, I was actually pregnant. It was funny because I got the confirmation from the doctor’s office on April Fools Day. So I got to tell him I was pregnant, but I wasn’t kidding!

    1. Mrs. Fenris*

      I grew up with a girl whose birthday was 4/1. She had six older brothers, and this was back when you didn’t find out the sex of the baby until delivery. So the story was that when the doctor said “it’s a girl!” her mom was absolutely sure it was an April Fool’s joke.

  127. Silicon Valley Girl*

    Yesterday, our director sent out a meeting request for a Very Important Workshop on Saturday April 13 from 6am-11am, assuring us that it was crucial to attend & she was sorry but she just couldn’t get the speaker to come in at any other time but it would be absolutely worth it. Usually, we are a very work-life balance, no weekend work type team, so this is not normal. There was *a lot* of back & forth about whether or not to believe her via email & slack, but she doubled-down, saying breakfast would be provided & it was important to make every effort to attend. Finally, a couple ppl called her out & she relented. While I admit to being fooled, I don’t mind! I’ve been part of some big pranks over the years, including some corporate fake product launches & such.

  128. N*

    Just yesterday, someone put googly eyes all over the technology at our ticket desk at our museum. Googly eyes on the scanners, printers, radios, and a bunch of other things as well. It was fantastic and absolutely hilarious without being offensive or disruptive.

  129. Lena Clare*

    Shudders.

    I utterly, utterly despise pranks in every single form imaginable. I don’t find even the genuinely mild ones funny when they’re done to other people. I am relieved if the recipient of the prank laughs and finds it funny but I would be cross to downright furious if someone tried to do it to me.

    An acquaintance I knew, not in my workplace, knew a colleague had a phobia of frogs so bought a fake one and put it in his coat pocket so he’d find it unexpectedly when he put his hand in. I find that horrifying.

  130. Former call centre worker*

    I have a colleague who’s a bit of a prankster, who also hates Christmas and was grumbling about it in the run up to it last year. When we were decorating our desks and he happened to be out of the office, his team gift wrapped everything on his desk – his books, his mail, tinsel everywhere, fairy lights wound round his mouse, miniature tree on the desk, they even wrapped the actual desk itself. They photoshopped him into a picture of Santa to show him, child-size, sitting on Santa’s knee, printed it, framed it and put it on his desk. They printed off signs pointing to “[Colleague]’s grotto” and stuck them around the office.

    When Colleague came in and saw it, he clearly realised he’d been had and slunk off to sit at another desk, defeated. He didn’t sit at his own desk again until January.

    1. Bulbasaur*

      I know someone who did something similar to a colleague similar to yours (prankster and outspoken Christmas Grinch). Mostly it involved extravagant decorations similar to yours, but they also changed the theme and various settings on his PC desktop to change the background, mouse pointer, system sounds etc. to Christmas-themed ones.

      I think he actually left most of it up, and decided to be faux-cheerful about Christmas that year.

      1. Former call centre worker*

        Hah! Sadly I don’t think that would work at my office as we use laptops and it’s open plan, so the chances of finding a laptop unattended, unlocked, and out of sight of its owner are quite low. I’ll keep it in mind for next year though just in case an opportunity presents itself!

  131. Astrid*

    Almost all of my friends and close family have done summers working as Staff at the same summer camp. 16 and 17 year-olds can be SITs- staff in training, before they graduate to full Staff.

    My sister did her summer as an SIT and came back as staff when my close friend was an SIT. He was washing dishes in the dining hall and she reminded him he needed to take apart the tray cart and run it through the dishwasher as well. The giant, heavy duty Rubbermaid cart they used to transport all the lunch trays.

    He went and asked the head kitchen worker if he really had to do that. She handed him pliers.

  132. Foolz*

    My current boss hired an engineer who had “fluffed” his resume and quit without notice within a few months due to being in over his head. It took a while to hire his replacement, a woman who ended up being great at her job and just a genuinely great person. A few months after she was hired, my boss went on a business trip and his first day back was April 1. The department conspired with the new engineer, and Boss came back to find her laptop, phone, and ID badge neatly stacked on the corner of his desk. They let him go to HR and panic for a few minutes before they revealed she hadn’t really quit.

  133. Nervous Accountant*

    My coworker was moving seats. he had left, so we boxed up his belongings and everyone wrote all over it saying “Good luck, see you soon, etc”. One intern had the same name as teh company’s owner and he signed his name. I only say its’ hilarious cz he was laughing and was a good sport

    another one, he went on vacation and his friends gift wrapped his entire desk and filled hsi drawer with those can tops.

  134. KT Library Lady*

    My former coworker was a delightful prankster and we worked in an environment that enjoyed a good prank, so these all were hilarious.
    – Giant bowl of M&M’s and Skittles mixed together without telling anyone they were mixed
    -Hiding another coworker’s belongings in various places
    -Gift wrapping our manager’s office while he was on vacation
    -Hiding a creepy bald pantsless female mannequin in various shadowy corners – this one was picked up by multiple coworkers and went on for about 3 weeks
    -An escalating prank war with a coworker: He put an overturned paper cup on her desk with the note saying “Caution – huge bug underneath!” When she lifted the cup, all she saw was a picture of that stupid troll meme. When she figured out who did it, she pranked him back (details escape me). He then put dozens of photos of Nic Cage around her office in fun hiding spots. She decided to Saran Wrap his car and put multiple photos of Mr. Bean in between the layers. We thought that was the end of it, but he then recruited another coworker to help him cover her car in hundreds of PostIt notes – every square inch was covered and he spelled out her name on the windshield AND they had rotated each post it so that the adhesive was on a different side, so she had to take them all off individually. She conceded her crown and has not won it back yet.

    Now, these pranks were ALL done in good faith and with the knowledge that the people involved would find it funny! Do not try if you’re not sure!!

    1. Snickerdoodle*

      A couple of years ago, I got put in charge of the office Halloween party, cube decorating contest, and my coworker’s baby shower all in the same week. I couldn’t handle it, snapped under the pressure, and dumped one bag each of Skittles, M&M’s, and Reese’s Pieces into a giant bowl and left it by the mailboxes with little serving cups and a sign reading “Help yourself!” Easily the most malicious thing I’ve ever done in my life.

        1. JKP*

          Everyone keeps bringing up the peanut allergy, but if someone is actually allergic, are they really going to eat mystery candy out of a bowl? It would be different if the candy was put back into the original packaging so the allergic person thought they knew what they were eating.

          1. Lena Clare*

            No of course not but the point of this particular prank is telling people “here’s a bowl of x!” when really the bowl is full of x,y,z isn’t it?
            So if I say to a colleague (or anyone) ‘what is in this edible thing’? I am determining whether I can eat it or not, so if they lie to play a prank on me I am not getting the correct information, and won’t act accordingly. And really, I tend to assume people wouldn’t lie about something like that.

            1. Rusty Shackelford*

              Actually, I’ve never seen a reference to labeling the bowl. No one is putting M&Ms in a bowl and saying “have some Skittles.”

              1. Lena Clare*

                Then that’s not a prank, that’s just a bowl of food people may help themselves to?

                1. Rusty Shackelford*

                  From what I’ve seen, the prank part is that people assume they’re M&Ms and are shocked to get a Skittle.

          2. vampire physicist*

            I have a severe peanut allergy and you are correct. I’m not saying everyone with a peanut allergy would do this, but I do not eat unlabeled loose candy, and I’m pretty cautious about free food not in its original packaging in general. I would feel differently if someone did this someplace where there might be children or if they’d put the mixed candy back in the bag, but most adults with food allergies know to be careful, and also most people with peanut allergies know what Reese’s Pieces and M&Ms look like.

  135. Mimi Me*

    I worked in a call center and had recently been moved to a specialized team. Another team member and I had just finished our in-depth training and were finally taking calls. As chance had it she and I were the last two team members to leave the office on March 31st, our first day with this new team. We were feeling silly so we decided to prank the team by putting a piece of tape on the bottom of everyone’s mouse (including our own) – so it wouldn’t work until it was removed. The next day I arrived about 30 minutes after she did and as I approached our work area she greeted me with panicked eyes and a fair amount of worry. Turns out the guy who left right before we did the night before was a known prankster on the team and everyone thought he had done the prank. In retaliation, they “dressed” his work station with all manner of confetti, post-its, and silly decorative things. We didn’t anticipate this and didn’t know how to proceed – should we let everyone know we did it? Would he be upset? Would the team hate us? He came in and, of course, denied the prank and being who he was nobody believed him. My co-worker and I were silent and said nothing. About an hour after he’d arrived our manager came in and she started teasing him. At this point I made a comment along the lines of how looks are deceiving and you shouldn’t overlook the quiet people on the team. Everyone immediately realized that he hadn’t done anything and we had and they all started laughing. The guy they had retaliated against took it in stride. He actually told us that the desk thing was long overdue since there was a lot he’d done that hadn’t even been discovered yet. Our manager even included the prank in the welcome to the team speech she made at the next team meeting.
    I don’t think I’d ever prank someone at work like that again because the stress of that morning was very intense. We didn’t know the dynamics of the team enough to know how our prank, however harmless, would be received. My co-worker and I really were scared that the guy who’d been singled out would be upset and that everyone would be mad at us. It didn’t occur to us the night before because we were young, new, and laughing at our own joke. I was happy that it was taken with the spirit in in which it was done, but seriously, it was a stressful morning.

  137. HG*

    One year my colleagues bought an 9 foot tall inflatable snowman- like what appears on your neighbors’ lawn at Christmas. We kept it inflated by the windows so that anyone who was on our floor could see “Lord Benedict”. On the last day before we broke for the holidays, we had a metrics review including people in various offices on different continents. We started the session by having “Lord Benedict” lead the meeting, sitting at the head of our conference table while we all provided updates.

  138. Snickerdoodle*

    When I worked as a stagehand, it was common to ask new people to go find some striped paint or locate a sky hook.

    1. PickyChicky*

      …and the stage electrician version – back in the day when color in front of stage lights was actually created with sheets of geletin (hence called gel). A staple was to have the newbies/interns go to “wash the gel”. Needless to say, it dissolved and they panicked.

  139. Combinatorialist*

    In my building in grad school, there was a bit of wall that looked like someone had punched or something. It had hole and the finish was kind of peeling away outwards. Some unsung hero (no idea who), printed out a picture of the Koolaid man and stuck it in there. For years the hole was unfixed and for years the Koolaid man was still there. Everyone I knew found it hilarious.

  140. (Former) HR Expat*

    I worked in a distribution center in a college town that was one of the rivals to my college. The DC leader was a huge sports fan, so each year when my team beat his, I snuck into his office in the evening and “decorated” it with my school’s mascot, and balloons/streamers/party decorations in my school’s colors. We also had a running bet that the loser would have to wear the winner’s school gear and sing their fight song in front of the entire team, so I knew he would take it well. He thought it was hilarious.

  141. Melissa*

    I worked in an office where one day we all walked in that morning to see that our Executive Director’s office was flooded with pink lawn flamingos. No one knew who did it.

  142. Pink Hair Don't Care*

    I took a photo of my coworker eating a hamburger mid bite, then used it as the background for the office clock. I had to take the clock apart and everything. It took him days to notice but when he did he laughed really hard! We eventually put the clock back to normal but whenever I look at it I always get the urge to laugh.

  143. Faulty Knees*

    One of the managers was a year before me in high school. I made copies of his senior year book picture (which was about 15 years old) and before anybody else arrived for the day, put them on the name plates on all the cubes and offices.
    He loved it! He was laughing and having a great time all day.
    I know him well enough to know he has a great sense of humor and loves attention, and was “punching up.”

  144. froodle*

    I stole a colleagues little Power Rangers man off his desk and at lunch time I took him out with me and took photos of him in little picturesque spots along with notes to his owner saying things like “goodbye (owner)” and “(froodle) treats me better” and “why do you never take me anywhere special?” Then when I came back to work I emailed him one photo every half hour, copying in the rest of the team every time. At one point he was away from his desk making a drink in the little kitchenette, heard the burst of laughter and slumped over his half made mug of tea in despair, KNOWING it was another missive from blue ranger billy telling him how much he preferred me. I gave it back at the end of the day, but Billy vacation photos were a.lot of people’s screensavers or desktops for a long, long time.

  145. YabaDabaDo*

    I worked with two younger guys that were friends (knew each other prior to working in our office). One of them, Tom, was in charge of maintaining our Access databases. Tom would add a command to the queries that would send the other coworker, Adam, an email any time a specific/routine query was run. It would just say goofy things like “You’re the best!” or “Live, Laugh, Love” or other random sayings we would get from my Dove chocolate squares. It was funny and even after Adam figured it out (and was amused), we kept it up and had fun making the email messages more ridiculous.
    Harmless and entertaining!

    1. Mrs. H. Kenway*

      I bought a bag of those Dove chocolates a few months ago. I gave my youngest (14-y-o) daughter one, and after she read the wrapper she looked up at me and said, “Are these grandma chocolates?” My husband and I thought that was a great descriptor.

      So until the bag was gone, we used to each have one piece a night after dinner and read the “inspirational” messages aloud, while we all nodded and talked about how deep and meaningful it was.

  146. SusanDC*

    Not me but my brother pulled a Jim from The Office move and hid a walkie talkie in his boss’s ceiling and kept the other one in his office. Where he played salsa music and occasionally pretended to sound like CB radio. He still laughs when he talks about this-he did it for a few days and took it out-everyone in the office knew and tried really hard not to laugh when the boss would walk around and ask other people if they heard music.

  147. StaceyIzMe*

    I think that the question of whether a prank goes over well or not is somewhat down to the tastes and the mood of the person being targeted. Reading through some of the pranks quoted, they didn’t feel very funny. Things not to waste- time (sending people on needless searches, it’s hazing when there’s a power imbalance), energy (they’re trying to clean up the post-its you left, figure out the tech puzzle you left or something similar), money (anonymously ordering food or other items they must either pay for or pass along a loss for to the business), trust (self-explanatory)… There are probably others. The thing is, most people who pull pranks don’t know whether someone has the margin to absorb their attempt at humor. How do you know they haven’t had some difficulty that has whittled their patience, energy or other personal margins? Generally, if your prank causes inconvenience, loss of time, money or status in social or professional settings, or otherwise objectifies them, you’re spending another person’s personal resources without their consent. It’s a form of bullying, even if it’s not often called that. There are a few exceptions. But many people who pull pranks flatter themselves that their creativity, intelligence and other traits manage to make up for the things they waste. Not really. Or at least, not usually. More usually, they rely on the object of their prank to absorb the negative aspects of the prank so that they and their ostensible audience can enjoy a snicker, a laugh, self-satisfaction or superiority. It’s not an emotionally generous impulse, but a selfish one, in my view.

    1. Lena Clare*

      Absolutely 100% agree with all of this. I’m even feeling situated teasing sooner of the pranks people have played!

      I think some part of it is having pranks played on me as a child and not finding them funny, and then being called a ‘party pooper’ or being told I had no sense of humour, which provokes extreme anxiety in me now.

      1. Lena Clare*

        Ugh predictive text.
        Sorry, that should say I’m even feeling agitated now reading of the pranks people have played

    2. MonteCristo85*

      Thank you. That is the best explanation of the problem with pranks I’ve ever read.

      I agree 1000%.

    4. Jane*

      Absolutely, hazing and inappropriately targeted pranks are not funny. Pranks can be done well- I’m something of a prankster myself – but often they are not. My favorite that I’ve done involved unwrapping several hundred cheep Easter chocolates and using the wrappers to individually wrap grapes. I left them out on the checkin table at a large community event and they were the hit of the evening. The kids loved them cause their parents would let them eat as many as they wanted. The adults loved them cause they were really funny (though most adults threw them away when they discovered it wasn’t chocolate, rather than eat the grape.).

  148. AZAmazonQueenT-Rex*

    While I was going through flight school, there was a radar instructor who was liked among a majority of the students and my class, myself included, all liked and respected him. April Fools fell during a time when he was our instructor, so the day before 01 April, I stayed late with the intent of playing a prank on him using his desk. I’d bought 5 rolls of aluminum foil and after all the instructors had left for the day, I started individually foiling everything on his desk. Most of my class was still there studying and saw what I was doing and joined in. Every little sticky notes, piece of paper, folder, chair, wheels, etc. was not left untouched by foil. The next day he took it very well and even left it up for the whole morning for everyone to see. One instructor commented that was the hardest he’d ever seen students work. I did have a flight with him that afternoon and he joking through a very large foil ball at me as he walked into the briefing room. From there on out, I would use the aluminum foil joke every couple of years. One year, we JO’s (junior officers) did it to our XO’s office (sooooooooo many plaques to cover) and a couple of JO’s even made an rug for him. Wish that was my idea, but it was not. They cut the slices sides into sides so it simulate the yarn strings that surrounds some rugs. XO loved it so much, that he kept the rug laid for almost 2 months until it was destroyed. Good times.

  149. Snickerdoodle*

    I have a coworker who used to sneak into people’s cubes when their backs were turned and wait to see how long it took them to notice he was there. Inevitably, I sneaked into his cube and sat down and waited for a full five minutes before giving up and just asking him whatever it was I needed to ask him. He jumped a mile and left me severely alone after that. :D

  150. Stuff*

    We had a piece of cake in a plastic container left over after a birthday party. It kept getting hidden in people’s offices. When they would find it they would hide it in another office – that piece of cake circulated for over 5 years. Luckily it didn’t mold or anything it just kind of dried out and petrified (no smell).

  151. Avocado Toast*

    OH I FORGOT ABOUT A GOOD ONE. This was part prank and part social experiment.
    Background: ‘Spiking the floor’ in theatre means putting down tape marks/outlines of where the set will be eventually so actors have a sense of their playing space.

    I was stage managing and had pulled out a measuring tape. These often got locked up at the end of the day by folks who worked in the shop, so I put a note on it that said “Please don’t move this – Avocado needs this to spike the floor”.

    They didn’t, but the note migrated to some other object by accident that would make NO sense to be used to spike a floor (I think it was a magazine that was in a waiting area). But no one moved it and I realized that I worked with people who inherently trusted and respected notes.

    So, I gathered a truly random collection of objects (a coat hanger and I want to say some snacks) and put the sign on them, and I got a lot of laughs out of the fact that it sat there for at least a month with no one moving it per my request even though IT MADE NO SENSE.

  152. Goya de la Mancha*

    Worked at a movie theater in high school. Pranks of the teen/young adult variety are rarely well thought out and included any of the following:

    * Taking the HUGE bin of ticket stubs and emptying them into co-worker sun roofs.
    * Buying crickets and emptying them into co-worker sun roofs.
    * Buying a large tub of mayo and spreading it on co-worker cars.
    * “Decorating” the outside of co-workers cars with trash.
    * Putting a denture cleaning tablet into co-worker drinks.
    * Locking co-worker out of the building on the opposite end from the next door entrance when emptying garbage.
    * Hiding in cabinets and scarring the bejeezus out of workers who came looking for supplies.
    * Switching name tags to confuse new employees (worked REALLY for Bobby S. and Bobby C.)
    * Sending newbies to clean Theater 9 by themselves (in an 8 screen complex).

  153. Aerin*

    At The Mouse, we had to clock in and out for our shift and breaks and the like on a computer. This was the mid-’00s, so a few locations had flat-panel monitors but most were still CRTs. Though I didn’t see it myself, I heard about one prank where someone opened up the monitor and flipped the innards upside down… then went to the display settings and rotated the screen 180 degrees. So everything looked normal, but the mouse wasn’t moving in the right direction. Took them ages to figure it out.

    That’s separate from the persistent game of Drop the Mic at any spieling attraction (the ones where the cast member has to give a speech of any length as part of the show). The idea was to make the person laugh so hard they couldn’t keep going. My favorite version of that was when someone pretended to trip in the Opera House lobby… then actually tripped and fell on their face. The girl on the mic started laughing so hard she cut her spiel short and choked out something about how long there was until showtime.

    An old dude came up to her and said, “Wow, someone’s got the giggles.” So the CM on the mic explained the story, and old dude turned stone-faced. “You find that funny?” he said.

    “No sir,” she replied, “I find that *hilarious.*”

  154. Funny In Other Ways*

    Disclaimer: these are my feelings only and I don’t expect that many people feel the way I do, I’m just putting this out there.

    I loathe pranks, even if they aren’t mean spirited and land well and aren’t directed towards me. They just make me feel incredibly uneasy and trigger my anxiety. Even out-of-the-blue, good surprises are hard for me to deal with.

    That’s why I dread the thought of being the subject of a prank, especially at work. I can’t really stop myself from reacting poorly, and I’m afraid I might come across as someone who’s not a team player, or just isn’t a fun person. I’ve declined helping other coworkers with pranks, saying it’s not my thing, and luckily didn’t get much pushback.

    I recognize this is my issue to deal with and I don’t expect others to stop pulling pranks. I just want to be left out of them completely.

    1. MayLou*

      I think the only prank I’ve heard of that I’d definitely be fine with is the googly eyes on things which won’t be damaged or hard to remove them from. Or perhaps the photo of what the office would have looked like if they’d not respected the person’s request not to decorate – that’s quite thoughtful (although the small amount of confetti probably prompted a sinking feeling at first).

  155. Anonymous for Today*

    I pulled a prank within a prank.

    I printed up silly pictures and hung them on our floor, along with a request to note all 10 locations then see me for a prize. I hung 9 pictures.

    People came to me all morning asking where the 10th one was. I didn’t want to lie about the 10th pic so I had to answer questions carefully. My friend Jane got curious and asked me, and I confessed that there were only 9 pics. She got a kick out of that and would stifle her giggles when someone would visit me for info.

    Mid-afternoon, I sent an email to my group that there was a winner – Jane! – and to ask her all about the 10th pic! She had no idea I was going to do that. People went to ask her about the 10th pic location, and she told them – there were only 9. People found the hunt to be funny, and Jane was a good sport with the second prank involving her.

  156. Bopper*

    Back when people had real phones on their desk, we unscrewed the bottom part of the handset and took out the transmitter element. So the phone looked normal but you couldn’t speak. After awhile we put it back.

    1. Frinkfrink*

      My first job our of school was at a university, assisting an admin assistant in the grounds maintenance department. We’d often get calls from various public campus phones (it was the 1980s–no cellphones!) reporting sprinkler heads broken or other things, and students would quite often vandalize those phones in that exact way. It was standard procedure, if we got a silent call, to wait a few seconds, then slowly and clearly say “If you are calling from a campus phone, someone has stolen the microphone and we cannot hear what you are saying. Please try another phone. Thank you.”

    2. Mrs. Fenris*

      We used to do that when I was a kid! I hadn’t thought about that in 40 years. You don’t even have to remove it-if you just unscrew the receiver a little, it will stop working, and you can screw it back tight whenever you feel like it.

  157. pamela voorhees*

    Time for my flamingo story!

    When I worked at a library on my undergrad campus, we had a “free room” — people would put things in there that they didn’t want, and anyone else could come and pick up whatever they wanted. My coworker went there regularly, and found two plastic flamingos. She promptly bought these back to her office, and put them in a potted plant. I then spotted the flamingos, and immediately moved them on break so that when she came back to her office, it looked like the flamingos were having a meeting — one was in her chair with a report in front of it, wearing her glasses, and the other was in the other chair in the room, with a pad of paper and a pencil, “wearing” my earrings taped to its head (so she would know it was me).

    Thus began the flamingo wars.

    One person would take the flamingos, set them up, and then leave them for the other person to find. Once you found them, it was your responsibility to set them up in a new scene, and leave it for the other person. At the height of it, we were moving flamingos probably four times a day. Scenes got increasingly elaborate, to the point where we even had the library cafe give us free scones and coffee so we could set up the flamingos in one of the seats pretending to have a little study break. We had permission to do this from the director since the students ADORED it (the director also loved it, which was why we set them up once in her office, with one of them “wearing” her hat) and we had several people who said they started coming to the library just to play spot the flamingos. Sometimes they were in the break room “eating lunch” (posed with the other one’s lunchbox, etc)., sometimes they were studying at the computer carrels (my coworker set them up there, and even left the computer on the Wiki page for flamingos, with handwritten “notes” on flamingos), and for my most elaborate one, I set them up playing video games in front of our rentable controllers to publicize our upcoming Smash tournament, compete with half eaten Doritos (I even sprinkled Doritos dust on the flamingos/the controllers) and some Mountain Dew Code Red. The only reason it stopped was because my coworker graduated — and our little flamingos celebrated by standing at the reference desk with graduation caps, gowns, and diplomas that we bought from Build-A-Bear. After that, they were peacefully retired to the director’s office where as far as I know, they still live.

  158. JanetM*

    Also not an April Fool’s prank: Many years ago, when my now-husband and I were dating long distance, we were talking about which of us should move. He told me that a mutual friend had recommended he move to me, since he knew more people in Phoenix than I did in Tennessee.

    Anyway, my friends and I talked about ways to convince him to move, and we came up with the Great Postcard Campaign. Many of my friends, and many of their friends in other states and even countries, sent him unsigned postcards reading, “Dear Dale, Margaret’s right.”

    I managed to remain sober and staid when he started telling me about them, to the point that he eventually blamed it on yet a third friend (who was not involved, but who had given her blessing when I checked with her because she’d known Dale longer than I had).

    I eventually moved to him, after he pointed out that he was 12 years into a union job that wouldn’t transfer, and I was a secretary who could work anywhere. When I called him to say I would move, he was very relieved. See, he’d just gotten a card that ended with, “PS — I saw this contest in the LA Times. Do I win the prize?”

    Also also not an April Fool’s prank: I mentioned this in an open thread a while back, and am finally acting on it. I have been placing a little glass disk (of the type often seen in vases and fish tanks) on my coworker’s desk when he’s not there. Eventually I will hand him a disk and repeat, “That was … odd,” which is what I said the day he bounced into my cube, flapped his arms, and announced, “HI! I’m the worst thing that’s going to happen to you all day!” and bounced back out. I will note again that I didn’t find the bouncing distressing or offensive, just confusing, and that’s what I’m aiming at.

  159. Dread Pirate Roberts*

    I worked at a Dairy Queen in High School, and one night I walked into the kitchen to find that one of my coworkers had spread out a sheet of wax paper and had poured a layer each of mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard on it. His hands were hovering over the condiments and he had a look of fascination on his face, so naturally I asked what he was doing. He told me that a chemical reaction between the condiments caused heat to rise from them. I rushed over to hold my hands over the mess too, but didn’t feel anything. He told me I had to hold my hands lower, lower… well, when my hands were about two inches from the condiments, he suddenly pushed my hands down into the condiments, smearing my hands through them. I still get a chuckle out of that.

  160. Told This Story*

    Our building had conference rooms where one in the sequential order was missing (think rooms 1-10 but there’s no room 7).

    Someone put out a message that there were donuts in room 7. The most notorious food vulture in the building spent a good twenty minutes looking for it and still another five after the joker revealed the prank.

  161. Earthwalker*

    At various times during the day, someone let it slip that one employee was leaving to start his own business. Then that he had asked another team member to join him. Then that the pregnant employee had changed her mind and decided to quit and not come back. Then that another employee had gotten a job offer. The entire team was on its way out the door before they took pity on their manager and told him it was all a prank.

  162. MsMaryMary*

    At OldJob, there was a long running white elephant gift exchange. Many of the gifts just stayed in the office and reappeared at the holidays. One of those items was a two foot tall Christmas tree, with eyes and a mouth, that lit up and sang Have a Holly Jolly Christmas. One year, someone figured out the tree had a motion censor. You could plug it in, but it wouldn’t light up and sing until someone walked by. We had a lot of fun setting it on bookcases and in corners and waiting until someone walked past and the tree lit up, opened its eyes, and bellowed “HAVE A HOLLY JOLLY CHRISTMAS, IT’S THE BEST TIME OF THE YEAR..”

    My favorite was when we set it under our division leader’s desk one night. When she came in in the morning and moved her chair, there was a sudden glow and something yelled “HAVE A HOLLY JOLLY CHRISTMAS”

  163. Hiring Mgr*

    I once told one of our interns that in my younger days, I was a well known rapper, King Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys, and that I had settled down into a corporate lifestyle because I was tired of the music biz and touring. I look just enough like him that she bought it reluctantly. But to carry the prank through to it’s conclusion, I wound up doing a freestyle rap of “Brass Monkey” in the breakroom. Unfortunately, I didn’t think this through beforehand, and there are some inappropraite lyrics in that song. I was terminated on the spot.

  165. Environmental Compliance*

    I used to work for my dad – his facility had a pseudo-internship program where you could work for up to 4 summers with them, as long as you did halfway decent at the interview & you were in some sort of tech school/college. Paid pretty well too! But my dad ended up being a joint ‘director of the interns’ along with the ops manager. We would answer to both equally.

    Well, there were times I couldn’t find my dad, and I would have completed all tasks on my list, so I’d attempt to find Ops Guy. Couldn’t find. Tried Dad again. Nope, nowhere. So I’d wait at his desk. Organize his pens, clean the keyboard. And then I figured out he never locked out his computer, so I’d change his desktop background to something silly (not inappropriate ever, just goofy animals – his favorite was a deer sticking its tongue out at a trail cam). Or I’d flip his monitor. I think at one point I shifted everything on his desk so it was a mirror image. Probably only got him a handful of times over the 2 summers I was there, but he found it pretty entertaining.

    1. The Hamster's Revenge*

      Way back in the day when people would leave their workstations unlocked, some of us would go around and take a screenshot of their desktop, move all the icons to the trash and then set the screenshot as the background. The more computer illiterate the coworker, the angrier they would get. Somehow, they still never learned to lock their computers. Other times we would get into their email and start a message to the CEO telling them something borderline wildly inappropriate (some pranksters would go full inappropriate) and leave the half written message up on the screen.

      And still people wouldn’t lock their computers!

      1. Zephy*

        I did this to my mom once, on the home computer. She restarted the darn thing probably 5 times and was starting to panic a little bit (she needed the computer for work), so I told her what I did and then undid it.

  166. PaulHollywoodsEyes*

    Not for April Fools, but for my boss’s birthday a few years ago I Nicholas Cage’d his office. Printed out various ridiculous faces of Nicholas Cage and taped them everywhere. Inside his work notebook, under his mouse, around his favorite pens, on his calendar a few months down the road, in his office jacket pocket. Took him months to find them all…

  167. Hummus*

    I used to work as a bank teller. There was a hair salon next door, and the owner had a business account with us. One day, he wrote checks to all his stylists and told them it was a bonus for them. Yay! Right?

    Well, it was actually a terribly conceived prank. The stylists came over all excited to cash their checks, and we had to tell them they couldn’t. For privacy reasons, we couldn’t explicitly say why, but people can usually read between the lines. That was not a fun day, for me included.

    I really hope no one deposited the checks in their own banks, because then they would have gotten charged check bounce fees.

    1. jcarnall*

      This is a perfect example of why pranks are only funny when done up the power hierarchy.

      Would have been absolutely hilarious if all of his stylists had just fake-quit on him after his malicious pretend-bonus.

      Even more so if they really quit.

  168. The Hamster's Revenge*

    It was around Halloween and the on-site mini-cafeteria had a giant fuzzy spider on a string above the cash register that could be lowered on unsuspecting customers.

    I am very arachnophobic.

    I was in there with two coworkers for our afternoon break and they convinced the kid manning the register to drop the spider on me when I went to pay. It’s a darn good thing that I had to set my coffee and donut down to get my wallet or someone would have gotten first-degree burns. I was told that the shriek could be heard in the next building and that I didn’t stop screaming for nearly 30 seconds. Poor kid thought he was going to be fired.

    Later I found a photo of a giant spider tucked into a large document I had printed out on my desk. I made those clowns help me recollate it after I threw it across the cubicle. Both these incidents were recounted at my going-away party over 5 years after they happened.

  169. Lulu*

    I bought a pack of tiny rubber hands and hid them around. Called it lending a hand around the office. :)

  170. Anony for This*

    This wasn’t for April fool’s but for Halloween. My boss has a very particular style of dress that he is well known for. Our entire team dressed up as different versions of him, complete with name tags.

    He loved it! We had visitors from different departments drop in all day to see it in person.

  171. Mary (in PA)*

    I’m late on this one, but someone at my husband’s office yesterday taped an empty donut box to a table in the break room. When the unsuspecting victim opened the lid, they were greeted with a “Happy April Fools” message.

  172. I'm that person*

    6 years ago, a remote user brought a box of name brand candies when she came to visit us at the main office. After it was empty, I took the box, filled it with rocks, and put it in my desk drawer. When April 1 rolled around, I put it out where we put snacks. One by one everyone came up, opened the box, and looked very sad. The people who had been tricked watched for the people who came next and everyone had a good laugh about it.
    Next year I put out the same box and everyone went to get candy and was sad once again.
    And the next year.
    And the next year.
    There were a couple of years where April 1st fell on a weekend but I did it again this year and everyone went to get candy and found a box of rocks and we all laughed about it.
    I’ll do it again next year. And the year after. And the year after.

    3. Snark Maiden*

      OK but now, one year, you have to fill it with candy. Intermittent rewards strengthens the response!

  173. Claire*

    On my last day at one job, I pranked my co-worker with a motion-activated frog. We worked flex hours and Fergus never arrived before 10am, so I arrived early with the evil device and announced my intentions. Fellow co-workers were utterly charmed by this project, and one of the managers supplied me with double-stick tape. Frog was soon attached to the underside of Fergus’s desk, then we placed the chair in front so it wouldn’t go off.

    On the dot of 10am, Fergus arrives and pulls out the chair. Ribbits commence. Fergus pauses, puzzled. Meanwhile, the rest of us are doggedly staring at our computer screen, pretending to be hard at work. At some point, the ribbits cease. Fergus sits down. More ribbits. Now he’s asking if anyone else can hear it. Nooooo, we say. What are you talking about?

    Eventually he figured out exactly where the noise was coming from, crawled under his desk, and ripped the frog from its tape. He was swearing at us, but at the same time, he was laughing. Success!

    (And I gave him the frog as a memento.)

  174. Destroyer of Worlds, Empress of Awesome*

    When I left my husband (05/1995), I moved to New Orleans. Ended up living with and dating a nice guy. He was in school for rehabilitation services and so was always getting these weird body things. One time, he saw a brain-shaped Jello mold and he just had to have it. It came with instructions on how to make Jello that was the same color as a brain.

    So, on 4/1/96, I made a Jello brain and took it into work. It was on a plate and I just set the plate right inside the office fridge. It was really freaky looking and it would jiggle around if the plate was moved.

    A couple of hours into the workday, one of the owners moseys up to the fridge and opens the door…..and ran, screaming at the top of her lungs about a brain in the refrigerator, from the kitchen area. Of course, all came running…except me. I was in the bathroom because I was laughing so hard I peed my pants.

    Once she “got it” she wasn’t upset and spent the rest of the day laughing at me….after I got back from changing my pants.

  175. I Wrote This in the Bathroom*

    Failed birthday prank: My boss at an OldJob turned 40 when I worked there. His closest work friend put an order in with one of those companies that does lawn ornaments, to come out and cover the lawn in front of the building with buzzards and signs saying “Happy 40th birthday, (name), you old fossil” and such (apparently returning the favor from when he’d decorated her cubicle for her 40th a few years earlier). We all came into work between 8:30 or 9, but my boss didn’t usually get there until 9:30 or later. My desk was facing the window at the front of the building, so that morning, I got to watch a truck come in, place the buzzards and the signs all over the front lawn, and leave; then come back a half-hour later, collect all the signs and the buzzards, put everything back in the truck, and leave again. Then we all got an email from the HR saying that age-related signs were not allowed (that was year 2000, so this kind of restrictions was still new and unfamiliar to us). THEN my boss finally strolled in. He was pretty mad when he found out he’d gotten birthday buzzards and then the HR had them taken away. Apparently he would’ve enjoyed seeing the buzzards. Well, maybe he should’ve gotten to work earlier then ;)

  176. Don't you be that kind of barn owl*

    One of our chemists was moving to a different laboratory within the same building. The lab tech wanted his desk chair (it was the best chair in the desk area), but he said he was taking it. So for the next two weeks before he moved we took turns hiding the chair (in a 3 story building) and replacing it with other things like a lab stool, a kick stool, a child’s rainbow painted chair.

    The best was when we left it in the desk area with some paper glasses, a mustache and a sign that said “this is not the chair you are looking for”. When he came in (before he had his coffee) looked at the chair, said “OK” and started looking around for his chair.

    To this day we tease him about having been “jedied” by a chair.

  177. JessaB*

    The very best prank I ever saw was not anywhere I worked it was on a TV show. The show was a reality show that featured a team of expert ice carvers, and the work they did. They did things like giant out door chess sets, and a company was celebrating their CEO and hired them to do his office. I mean the entire office. Everything, the desk, the chair, the card holder, the stapler, the calculator, every single bit of things in the office.

    The man came into work after lunch when they set it up and he was flabbergasted, it was down to the pen next to his keyboard, all of crystal clear ice. Freaking amazing.

  178. Earthwalker*

    Another: Someone sent around a notification that all passwords needed to be updated to the new security standards. Not a password you had ever used before, not your name, not family member or friend’s name, not a well known person’s name forward or backward, not a place name, not a date or containing the number of any year or any month, not a day of the week or name of a month spelled out or abbreviated in any way, not an English dictionary word, or containing an English word, or containing any word in another language, either forward, backward, or with the letters scrambled … I’ve forgotten all the rules but if you read all the way to the end it finally said, “So there is only one approved password. Ask your manager what it is.”

  179. SamIAm*

    I always loved a well thought out prank and pulled a few epic ones in my time. One year, while serving in the military, I got a colleague but good! I had a few people in on it so it went very smoothly. He (finally) laughed and then went on his way, or so I thought. He waited a whole year and paid me back in spades! I had to laugh… what else could I do!!??

  180. Frinkfrink*

    1. 25 years ago, I worked a long term temp assignment at a small branch of a slightly less small company where the general manager had no idea how to do basic things on his computer that weren’t directly related to managing the company. I’d done some poking around on the computers, figured out how to set the screensaver to any text you wanted, and on the advice of the permanent admin assistant, set the general manager’s screensaver to the sentence “Sir, we found your hair.”

    Luckily, he found it hilarious.

    2. At a state job a couple of years later, the head of the organization split her time between our office and the main office in a different part of the state. Since my coworker and I only had one computer in our office, the head had given us permission to go into her office and use hers when we needed to, if she wasn’t there. I set the colors on her word processor to the ugliest, most clashing browns, greens, oranges, and purples that I could summon up, then sat back and waited a couple of weeks for her to find it, laugh, and come get me to fix it. She never did.

    Eventually I asked her about it, and she said that she found the new color scheme much easier to read than the default one, and thanked me for it!

    1. Frinkfrink*

      Another one, from another job: shortly after I started at an academic library, I worked a late night (being there in case the students manning the desk needed help) for the first time on Oct 30 or so. My boss’ birthday was on Halloween and my coworkers bought a bunch of Halloween decorations and wrapped hard candies and I got to spend my solo shift decorating his cube and hiding candy everywhere.

      He enjoyed it and thought it was funny, but two years later when I inherited his position and his cube, I found that I’d so thoroughly saturated it with candy that I kept finding pieces of it tucked away in hidden corners for the two years I used that cube!

  181. Light37*

    I worked at a special library where, the day before he left for another job, the library manager stayed behind and salted the entire library with little green army men. This was shortly before I started working there, but we got a laugh out of it for a very long time. Every time we found one, we’d bring it up to the front desk and put it in the front cabinet as a display. We were still finding them six years later when we moved!

    1. animaniactoo*

      Was that library in the midwest and were the library manager’s initials KR or KN?

  182. CDM*

    My husband had a co-worker who bought a bag of peanut M&M’s at lunch every day, and was tracking the color distribution of the candy inside. I had, once or twice, steamed open an envelope and re-sealed it, and wondered if it would be possible to do the same with a candy bag, so we bought a couple and experimented with a hot iron. Long story short, my husband brought home a bag from the cafeteria (so the lot number was right, plus the convenience store bags were crimped differently than the cafeteria ones) and bought a bag of the pink breast cancer awareness M&Ms. I carefully opened the glued end of the bag, emptied it, and refilled with with M&M’s in two shades of pink, plus a couple random original M&Ms, and re-sealed it with my iron.

    Several co-workers conspired to distract him to enable the bag switch. Then he left the bag unattended on his desk and left the room before opening it, lol.

    He did think, momentarily, that he had won some sort of contest, but was highly amused by it anyway. (and yes, he got his bag of candy back) If we ever try that again on someone, we’ll probably fill the M&M bag with Skittles.

  183. Not Sayin' Who*

    Our AFLAC vendor gave me a very nice stuffed duck, with a bowl in its back to put candy in. I loved that duck! I left it on the cabinet outside my office and filled it frequently with candy.

    One day I came to work and… the duck was gone! I sent out a global email asking for the whereabouts of my duck. I received lots of sympathy emails, and suggestions as to how to get him back, with a few veiled threats about dinner menus.

    Soon, a note turned up, asking for ransom. Pay up, or the duck swims with the fishes. Global email: Please don’t hurt the duck! His family misses him! I’ll pay the ransom!

    Next day, global email: As requested, two unmarked bags of fun-sized Almond Joys have been left in last location duck was seen alive. Please bring back the duck!

    A few hours later, the ransom had been picked up and the duck was back on the cabinet, with a paper bag over his head. Global email: Thanks to all for your concern, the duck has been safely returned to the bosom of his family. Alas, he was blindfolded during the entire ordeal and cannot identify his captors.

    This was such a hit with staff that it is still talked about today, 5 years later.

  184. CL*

    This just happened at one of our schools, to a student, not a co-worker, but it’s easily the worst prank I’ve ever seen/heard. A parent called up asking that we pull their 7th grade student out of class to talk to them on the phone, saying it was a family emergency. The student gets on the phone and the parent tells the student that their grandmother has died. The student starts sobbing and then the parent tells them it was an April Fools joke and starts laughing. The parent didn’t understand why the student kept crying!

    1. fposte*

      And in ten years they’ll be like “Why does Taylor refuse to come home on breaks for college?”

      1. CL*

        Right?
        I mean, we were all just flabbergasted that they thought this was at all funny or even appropriate to pull a student out of class for. I wonder how Grandma feels about the joke too.

          1. Dusty Bunny*

            ….and this highlights the problem with pranks. Pranksters who have NO concept of things being cruel, awful, damaging, destructive and/or just plain not funny. And they tend to love pranks, escalate them, and can’t take the retaliation.

            Puberty is difficult enough, without being the 7th grader whose parents have such poor judgement and a cruel streak. Yikes.

    2. Mrs. H. Kenway*

      I once saw one on YouTube where a mother got her little girl–maybe five or six–all excited about the puppy they were going to get. The mother is asking about names and if the little girl wants the puppy to sleep with her in her bed, etc…and then says, “It’s a prank! There’s no puppy!” and seemed to think it was not only hilarious that her child was crying, but that it was hilarious enough to actually post online.

      That’s not a “prank,” that’s just cruel. I do not understand these parents–like the infamous DaddyoFive a year or two ago–who think deliberate cruelty to their children is the most amusing thing in the world.

      (The mother had turned off comments and posted an indignant little note in the video description that the kid got a puppy a few months later. Like that made it okay. It did not.)

      I mean, I once told a friend of my daughter (who I love like my own, who loves me, too) that she didn’t have to be nervous about getting her new school uniforms because when she did, she would be trying them on right there in front of everyone, with all the parents watching so we could comment on the fit. She said, “Really?” and I said, “Nooo, of course not!” That was funny–she thought so, my daughter thought so, her mom thought so. Because it lasted about three seconds and didn’t upset her. Telling a kid you’re going to give her a puppy and then revealing that it’s actually just you deliberately upsetting her for YouTube likes is awful. I do not understand those people at all.

  185. Megabeth*

    Best prank: A few of us took some plastic wrap and sealed off the inner and outer doorway of a low-level manager’s office. It made a see-through hollow space that we filled with packing peanuts. To look at it from outside the door, you would think that the entire office was full of the peanuts but in actuality it was more like a three-inch layer – maximum prank impact, minimal cleanup.

    Worst (maybe best?) prank: Someone put a rainbow sticker on the passenger side of a homophobic coworker’s pickup truck. He didn’t see it until he went to fill up his tank and he lost his ever-loving mind over it, I mean he was apoplectic with rage.

  186. PSB*

    Christmas light remotes are great for pranks. Once in a tech support job I had a non-technical manager. Connected one of his monitors to the remote before he came in for the day and randomly pushed the button throughout the day. When he came and asked for help with it, I told him he should really get a feel for our job by troubleshooting at least a little before calling IT.

  187. CastIrony*

    If someone pranked me, I wouldn’t take it well at all, so I don’t do pranks, either. Maybe it’s because there’s so much drama at my job already.

  188. SansaStark*

    I was buddies with a coworker at my last job. One time he went on a business trip and took his laptop but left the laptop dock sitting out on his desk. I unplugged the dock, wrapped about 50 heavy-duty rubber bands around it, and put it back where it was. I layered the rubber bands in a such a way that he would have to remove them one at a time. Underneath all the rubber bands I put a sticky note saying “April Fools!” He was actually pretty amused.

  189. Scoop*

    Best: Some folks covering a coworker’s desk in photos of his own face while he was out one day. And I do mean COVERING. The cubicle walls, the computer screens, the chair, the keyboard, the desk — everything was covered.

    Worst: A co-worker sent out an email saying a project I was leading was going to be delayed (for about the 10th time) due to a mistake she’d made. This was a really high-stakes, high-pressure situation, and I had to leave the building and take a walk to avoid having a panic attack. Then I came back and found out it was a joke. Hah.

  190. winecrawler*

    My employees did this to me. I had surgery to remove a tumor (I’m ok now) that was serious enough to require an overnight stay. I’m in bed, I have IVs and drain hoses coming out of me, I have a 4 inch slit in my throat. I mean, serious. And somehow I have a private room.

    I’m laying there, and I hear a female voice from behind the doorway curtain. “Ooooh Ferrrrr-guuuusss!” In walks in a pretty young lady wearing a full length coat. She removes the coat to reveal some rather nice lingerie on a very lovely figure, and proceeds to start dancing around and removing the rest of it. (No music, that would have alerted the nurses, who frankly were already alerted.)

    She’s obviously not even taking notice of me or my condition, because now I’m laughing at the sheer ludicrousness of the situation.

    Finally, when she was down to being topless and STRADDLING ME ON THE BED, she realized my condition and literally levitated off the bed – quietly shrieking “Oh my god you had SURGERY!”

    Once I stopped laughing and talked her down, we ended up having a very nice chat about her college schoolwork and stuff.

  191. Sorin*

    While I didn’t personally see it, a coworker (who was a recreational spelunker) used to fondly talk about the time he came back from vacation to find his cube had a cardboard ceiling with cardboard stalactites hung from it.

    I’m not sure if that actually counts as a prank tbf.

  192. Miss Muffet*

    office job – in the old(er) days…we used to unplug the handset from the base of the phone (but keep it tucked under) and then call – the person would answer but nothing was there. We’d also tape the mouse roller (You could probably do something to cover the optical eye on them now) so it wouldn’t work. They were innocuous and received well. No one was humiliated or hurt.

  193. Kateagory5*

    We have had a few awesome ones in my office!

    I left my computer unlocked, so a friend came over and posted in our “fun chat” that I was so in love with Taylor Swift. She then changed all my meetings to have Taylor Swift-related titles (think like “Weekly check in” was now “Weekly Shake it up!”). She also changed my desktop background.

    For revenge I bought a giant Justin Bieber cut-out & put it in her cubicle, then posted in the group chat she was quitting to follow the Biebs on tour. And as a final touch (I am super proud of this one!) I bought blue-tooth headphones and taped them to the back of her desk. I synced them to my phone and played Justin Bieber’s greatest hits at varying volumes while she was sitting at her desk. Watching her tear her cube apart trying to find the source of the music was so rewarding.

  194. bolistoli*

    The best prank ever played on me: when I was out on vacation, my coworkers glued everything down on my desk. EVERYTHING. They were thorough: notepad, pens, coffee mug, mouse pad – even gluing my phone receiver to the phone. I almost broke the phone trying to answer it. We were a telecom company, so replacing a phone would not have been a big deal.

    The funniest part was a few weeks later when I decided to eat the Cup-O-Noodles in my desk for lunch. Glued down. Fortunately it was right side up, so I didn’t end up with Cup-O-Noodles all over the place. That was a fun place to work. My coworker (and later boss), dubbed us a bunch of Type As gone bad. I miss that place.

  195. AlyxS*

    In my previous company the management played 2 on their staff 2 years in a row. The first year was an email cascade down from our HoD asking for our thoughts on wearing a uniform – this was an office job with no face to face contact with customers. The following year an article was posted to our intranet initiating a one-way system round the office

  196. Jenny D*

    I have two computer related ones:

    The first one is from when I was 19 and at my first office job. There was one PC in the office, in addition to the mainframe terminals on everyone’s desk. Of course someone had installed Tetris on it. You’d start the game by going to the DOS prompt, change to the Tetris directory and type “etetris”.

    One day I changed the name of the Tetris directory, and made a new empty directory. In it, I made a small command file so that when the next person tried to run Tetris, it wrote “This is a computer virus that is activated when you’ve played Tetris more than 1000 times without reaching a score of 10000. All the files on your hard drive are now being deleted. Have a nice day.”

    It took the guys approximately 0.5 seconds to start yelling at me.

    The second one was more recent. I worked at a place where we were supposed to be very security conscious, including locking our PCs whenever we left our desks. One of my coworkers was really bad at this and no amount of telling him, whether by me or coworkers or managers, seemed to have any effect for more than half a day. So one day when he had left his computer unlocked *again*, I took a screen dump of his entire screen, with all the currently open programs. Then I set that as his desktop background picture, and minimised all programs and hid the start menu.

    I swear he was clicking wildly at that picture for about five minutes and still didn’t figure it out until he’d rebooted and saw that it still looked the same even though he hadn’t opened any programs.

    That was the last time he left his PC unlocked, at least when I was around.

  197. T*

    I bought my husband a fart machine with a remote control as a stocking stuffer for Xmas one year, and he immediately brought it to work. I was a little surprised but apparently his work is much more laid back than mine. He taped it under the chair in front of his desk and the first person to come in and sit down was his boss. He sat there with a straight face as the fart noises kept coming from his boss’s direction. Luckily his boss thought it was hilarious and ended up helping him prank their people.

    1. winecrawler*

      I got one of those in an office xmas party white elephant. I hid it in the office of the one person who didn’t go to party….

  198. a non non*

    Our lab likes to do jigsaw puzzles in the lunch room in winter. Several of the grad students ordered a mysterious puzzle that appeared one day in our lunch room, with no picture. As we assembled it over the next few days, our PI realized that it was just a collage of pictures of him and our model organism.

    1. OtterB*

      This is the kind of joke I like – no scares, no wasted time, no humiliation, just amusement.

  199. Miss Petty and Vindictive*

    I actually have one!

    In high school I worked weekends and holidays in a local bookshop. They sold stationery and magazines as well, and some gift items.
    We were selling these globe puzzles – a 3D model of a globe, and it went together like a puzzle. With no ‘cheat points’ either – you just had to know what the world looked like. A coworker was the best at putting this back together, and he had been teaching me so if it broke while he wasn’t in store I could fix it.
    Well, a week before 4/1 we got a whole box of these square alarm clock things to give out with magazines. If you set it on one side it was an alarm, on another side it showed the temperature etc. And they weren’t especially loud when the alarm went off.
    So one day, when all the other staff were at lunch, my colleague very carefully makes a hole in the globe, just big enough to slide one of these clocks in. And then says “set that alarm for a really weird time, ok?” so I set it for like 14.39 or something. The clock went into the globe, and then we waited.
    14.39 rolls around, and the alarm goes off. Our boss (who was a fan of little pranks like this), and our other two colleagues spent about 10 minutes looking for the source of the noise. Of course, my co worker and I dutifully wandered around the store, trying to find the source of the mystery beeping. When our boss finally worked it out, he had a decision to make – break the globe, knowing we were the only two people who could fix it, or carefully rotate the globe so it would fall onto a different side, and silence the alarm for that day.

    Guess what he went with.
    His wife, our other boss, did not think his choice to just ‘leave it and see what happens’ was a good idea!

  200. winecrawler*

    We had an engineering VP who would always come back in the lab to frob knobs and generally want to poke at things we didn’t want to poke at because we had moved on. So for his birthday we got an extra lab bench and stool and whatever equipment we could scrounge and set up his own lab in his office.

  201. Feltwright*

    I used to work in a solo-practitioner law office. On April 1st we would PACK his schedule with appointments with fake clients, like 2pm phone consultation with Elizabeth Borden, family law questions…

  202. Trouble*

    Beyond the typical fast food ones like long stand, bucket of steam, get supplies from the non-existent basement level, count the ice cubes into a bin bag as they need to be counted for waste, when I worked in my first call center job we copied the ‘my computer’ icon into a small jpeg and set a colleague’s desktop wallpaper to the my computer icon in tile. True to size. And hid his my computer icon on a random one, and locked it there. In Windows 95 where the my computer icon was needed to access more or less anything. Watching him double click on them all and try to remember which ones he’d already tried, I don’t know how we didn’t laugh out loud and give ourselves away as the prank doers.

    In the days before everything you did being monitored by big brother we also set someone’s homepage to a sex toy shop. Another had their personal email account password guessed and some online dating emails replied to.

    Call centers are mean places looking back as an adult.

  203. Dwight S.*

    One time my annoying coworker put my stuff in jello. ALL OF MY STUFF. Ugh. Hate that guy

  204. Dizze*

    We used to have a division chef who would get really mad when the toilet was dirty. He would call every one in the bathroom and ask who left the toilet dirty.

    So one day a coworker cleaned the toilet, chewed on a bar of chocolate and spat it all over the bowl. It looked absolutely disgusting and very realistic.

    Then he went to our chef to complain about the toilet.

    He was absolutely furious, he started yelling and gathered everyone in the bathroom, 10 people where standing around looking at the bowl, our chef repeatedly demanding to know who did this.

    Then the coworker stepped forward scooped some of the chocolate up with his finger and taste it and said very calmly : “it’s not mine”.

    The place exploded, people where disgusted, 2 of them actually started puking and our chef was silent for the first time ever just watching it all happen in disbelief.

    Best prank I ever witnessed by far.

    2. Former poofreader*

      I get into the office very early. Good thing, because I was just laughing and clapping.

  205. bookends*

    It’s only work-tangential, but I saw one of my favorite facebook April Fool’s posts yesterday! One of my friends works at our city’s public museum. There’s a beloved “secret” feature of one of the displays – when you press a small button a rattlesnake in the display rattles its tail. He posted a picture of the button removed (probably from when it was being repaired at some point) and said it was being taken away because people had been abusing it. People freaked out in the comments! Someone even tagged a county board member and asked them to look into it (though they could have been joking).

    On a less fun note, my office used to have a birthday tradition of…scaring people? I got told to go to the president’s office because she was unhappy about my turnout numbers for an event, freaked out, and then everyone was waiting there with cupcakes and a card. On the president’s birthday, someone ran to get her and told her that her niece (who also worked there) was crying and she freaked out because she thought something happened to a family member…and then everyone had treats and a birthday card for her. I’m really glad that tradition left with some now-former employees.

  206. Krakatoa*

    One of my coworkers is a big fan of a college sports team. When he was out on vacation, I wrapped his desk with wrapping paper for their rival team, including wrapping up all the items on his desk individually. I also printed out a few photos of the rival school’s mascots and put them in the picture frames. He and I have a good rapport and crack jokes at each other, so it was taken in good stride.

    I bought another coworker a condolence card when his team lost a national title game and had co-workers sign it.

    My general rule is that it should never cause any real problems to doing their work and shouldn’t take too long to clean up, if at all (our desks are small and wrapping paper was cleaned up in about 5 minutes).

  207. Looloolo*

    Fun one from yesterday- got an email that there were donuts in the break room (which my office is right next to). Everyone goes running for them, and there’s a bakery box on the counter. Open it up and there are VEGGIES inside! Everyone laughs. I got to watch people’s reactions all day. It was great.

  208. It Wasn't Me*

    I worked in an office where we dealt with unsavoury characters. One of these clients had an absolute hate on for Co-worker B to the point that it was comical in a gallows humour kind of way.

    Co-worker A and I got a hold of a set of mugshots of said client (10 photos) and reproduced them in different sizes. We then proceeded to put the mugshots throughout his office: behind the door, inside drawers, under his keyboard, over the mouse sensor, inside books, over personal photos, etc. He also had vertical blinds so we covered each slat completely with mugshots and then opened the blinds so he couldn’t see the mugshots immediate.

    It was a great moment when he went to close his blinds and the eyes of the client all turned to look at him at once.

  209. Christopher Moreno*

    I’m going to preface this with a “We looked at their schedule and checked with their boss to make sure there were no emergency fires” first, buuuuuut…

    2006-ish

    For my manager’s birthday, we filled their cube up from floor to the tippy top with lots of black balloons.

    What they didn’t realize was we also took the ball out of her mouse and hid it in one of the many, many black balloons. When they sat back down, realized the mouse wasn’t working and flipped it over to see an empty void, the manager just sort of shrugged, handed them a pushpin, then cackled as she walked to her office.

    This falls into the “Yea that can’t happen nowadays” category but yea. Good times.

  210. Linyarri*

    Well it wasn’t 4/1 and there was a reason behind the “prank”, but…
    I was once a Teapot Training manager, I had a supervisor who would freak out if he had to deal with more than 2 Teapot estimates requests at a time. I put him on my shift to work with him directly. On a quiet day, I contacted a bunch of folks to give us some fake estimates requests. We had 5 from the night watch, 6 more called in by the off-duty watches, 2 priority requests from my admin folks and 2 more High priority requests from the front office.
    The whole day he was begging me to help him. I would ask him what he has on his plate then tell him he will be fine, he can handle it. Then I would sit back, put my feet up on the desk and read a book in our small open office. It was all I could do not to laugh at the look he gave me.
    About 6 hours of panic later he was finishing the last of the estimates when the 2 admin folks walked in to get their estimates. They had post it notes stuck to their shirts with the fake names they had given for their estimate requests: “Smith” and “Wesson”.
    My sup had a look of pure shock on his face and asked me how many of the estimate requests were real. I told him they were all fake, but I had checked them all over and they were all done correctly. I was also keeping a close eye on things so I could step in and handle any real customers. He ended up being my best sup in a crisis.

  211. Ella Vader*

    Back in the dark ages, our group at work acquired an Apple Macintosh computer. We put it in our shared workroom, and took turns playing with it and typing reports on it. We tried out all the features and programs, and there was this thing called ELIZA, that would answer questions in an artificial voice and answers like a psychotherapist. It was sort of open-source, so you could add in extra answers based on keywords. So colleague J and I read up on how to do it and input a few more keyw0rd-answer pairs, and then went back to our offices and listened. Sure enough, very soon colleague R went in to the workroom, ostensibly to type a report, and soon we heard that scratchy metallic voice, and then R went screaming down the hallway that the computer was spying on him!

    See, we had added the keyword “sex”, and the response “R, you should be working!”

  212. Kristobel*

    My boss (GP) and a colleague (MS) pulled off a good one yesterday! My boss, GP, and the colleague, MS, are doppelgangers – like it is creepy how much they look alike. Same haircut/color, same face, same height – everything! They dressed alike yesterday, and halfway through MS’s team meeting, she excused herself and then GP came in and sat down. No one noticed until MS came back in the meeting like 3 minutes later! Everyone was like, “what is happening??” and then burst into laughter. It was perfect.

  213. SusanIvanova*

    Everyone in our division got handed bumper stickers that proudly proclaimed we were the “D-Team” (D for development? Nobody was really sure) and told to put them to good use.

    So I did a riff on the A-Team intro – “If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them….maybe you can hire The A-Team. Or the B-Team. Or maybe even the C-Team. But hopefully not the” [insert D-Team sticker here].

    I put it up on a wall near my office where I had a good view. People stood around and tried to guess who’d posted it, naming all the office pranksters and punsters, but not one of them suspected me.

  214. AnonGoodNurse*

    My co-worker had a tendency to take the week of his birthday off. The year he turned 40, we got his office key from our admin and decorated his office. He was super into politics, so we decorated it with 40 pictures of his LEAST favorite politician (if you catch my drift…) with thought bubbles saying “Happy birthday!” We doctored the photos in his office too by taping pictures of other un-favorite politicians over the faces of the people. So his wedding photo became a photo of him and a congresswoman. Then, just because it was funny, I hide a bunch of pictures inside books and notepads in his office. (The picture in question was the one of President Obama coming out of the ocean a la Daniel Craig in James Bond…) This way, after he’d cleaned up everything we did, he’d still find an unexpected surprise months later. He thought the pictures were funny, but didn’t appreciate the rearranging of the furniture.

  215. Mrs. Fenris*

    Only in a Southern Baptist church…my mom’s pastor had changed into a robe for a baptism (Baptists, as the name implies, do a full-body immersion in a pool 3-4 feet deep). While his clothes were left unattended, the associate pastor swapped out his tie, replacing his [In State School] tie with a [Rival School] tie.

  216. E.C.*

    They best office prank I’ve seen is this one guy in my office whose 5-inch tall cactus was TPed by his teammates. I know he didn’t take it amiss, because six months later it is still festooned with painstakingly tiny shreds of TP.

  217. Gelliebean*

    I’m the office go-to person for random questions, so I put a big sign on my cube as follows (and saved the text for use again in a few years when everyone has forgotten) :

    “Effective immediately, all requests for information not having to do with 1980s rock bands must be submitted on a complete and notarized Form 10-346-QZ and accompanied by an appropriate number of jellybeans (to be determined by the difficulty of the request).

    “Any request found to be in non-compliance will be shredded twice, rinsed in mineral-heavy tap water, shredded again for good measure and then reviewed in the New York Times by a group of at least three, but no more than seven, Purple People eaters. One eyed, one horned, possibly flying.

    “We thank you for your cooperation.”

    The best part is that someone then created a Form 10-346-QA and several people filled it out with random requests (lyrics from a Weird Al song, etc.) :-D

    1. Alexander Graham Yell*

      Hahaha I love this! I had one coworker who always used to ask me for the same phone number – honestly, almost daily, and it was a really really easy number to remember (think like 866-866-8668 in terms of ease). So one day I wrote down the number of the local Papa Johns and taped it to my cube on the side that faced him. The next time he asked, I just gave him that number and tried to keep a straight face. He got halfway through his question before he realized the person was asking him about pizza and started laughing.

  218. Mully*

    Our IT head redirected Facebook.com, in our office, to a page that he made that said Facebook was now charging a fee and they needed to provide a credit card to continue to use Facebook. Once they clicked the link, they got an April Fools message. The first person to complain she couldn’t get on Facebook was his wife, the HR manager.

  219. Kimbop*

    My husband (at home) unwound some TP and drew spiders on it, replaced it in the bathroom for me to experience! That was pretty funny.

  220. cactus lady*

    Once my former coworker forgot to lock/turn off her computer before she left on vacation, and since I was covering for her, I changed her desktop background to a tiled image of Goose from Top Gun posing seductively.

    When she got back we were making small talk with our boss while she started up her computer and then all of a sudden she BUSTED OUT LAUGHING and couldn’t stop for like 5 minutes. It was fantastic. She ended up keeping Goose as her desktop background until she left that job.

  221. MissDisplaced*

    The best one was replacing someone’s desk chair with a full (non-working, clean) toilet, complete with a fancy seat and toilet paper holder. It just looked so funny and out of place.

  222. SRRPNW*

    This happened in college, which was located in frigid Minnesota.

    One of the dorms was very old and very poorly insulated. During one of the cold snaps one of the students created an ice rink in his dorm room. He lined it with plastic and opened the window. Then put water on the floor and waited for it to freeze. And then ice-skated in his dorm room. There is a photo of him doing this which pops up every now and then for alumni to enjoy.

  223. NotThis*

    Terrible prank — when I worked at a law office, a partner pranked one of the senior associates. The associate–who was notoriously well-organized–missed an extremely minor deadline for sending something into the court. The partner faked an order from the judge stating the entire case was dismissed because of the missed deadline. The associate absolutely freaked out before being told it was a joke. It did not help that he was being considered for partner that year (which he did get).

  224. Killer Queen*

    We have a corporate office and then branches throughout the state. Since we are a small company we have one (religious) IT guy who works at the corporate office but sometimes travels to the branches for IT purposes. He noticed one of the branch managers had a picture of a girl in a bikini as his desktop picture. He now periodically changes the managers’ desktop to pictures of church buildings. This wouldn’t be good for some people but they are good friends so the manager thinks its funny and its all in good fun. Made me laugh when he told me!

  225. Ellochka*

    When I worked at a historic house museum there was one room that had been locked and the key lost. Since we had to check the room, we were not all that patient at how long it took to get the room opened. There was also a portrait in the house of an old woman. One coworker was very creeped out by it and showed to everyone as the exemplar of a scary painting. Think grey skin, glaring dark eyes that seemed to follow you, and weird shadows in the background.

    When we finally got word that we had gained access to the room we all trundled upstairs with the new key and wrestled with the old door, keeping coworker in front. She opened the door only to find that we had gotten there early and put the portrait in the room, placed eye level under the old light bulb, glowering away at anyone who opened the door.

  226. Wine Lady*

    My first wine job was a tasting room host at a big winery, where my boss was an older man who could be very strict.

    One day, I came in before opening to see my boss and one of my coworkers counting a GINORMOUS pile of change that was sitting on the counter. They were just finishing up and explained to me that a gentleman had just stopped in on his way out of town and bought a case of wine in all change. He didn’t want to wait for them to count it all out, so my boss had let him take the case of wine and agreed to count it all once he’d left. This wasn’t such a huge surprise, as it’s a very large winery, with big margins on the wine (so we could be very liberal with discounts, etc) and wouldn’t have been the end of the world if it was off by a few dollars. Anyways, my boss tells me that the total is under by maybe $20, and he had a lot to do, so would I mind giving the customer a call to let him know? Young and eager please as I was, I took the phone number they held out to me and hopped off to the back to make the call.

    Which didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. The phone was answered by a grumpy-sounding man with a Texas drawl, who told me that there was exactly enough change, what was I accusing him of, and I ought to go count it again. I (young, eager, and now pretty flustered) quickly agreed, got off the phone, and quickly dashed out to the front of house – only to find my boss with a cell phone in his hand, laughing so hard he was nearly crying.

    It was his change that he’d brought from home to change out for larger bills.

    I should note that I’m still good friends with this former boss today, seven years later – I live in a different country now, and he came to visit me last month! He was strict and sometimes temperamental, but he was a mentor in a lot of ways and always tried to boost my career. He likes to say that I’m the only one of his employees who would have been nice enough to count all of the change, and that I was the best at handling tough customers.

  227. Rey*

    I was an early morning student custodian during college (so I know better than to do this in my current office). There were several items (Chucky doll, taxidermied animals, mannequin heads) that we snuck around the building to scare each other when we opened a custodial closet or pulled out a trash can. The best part is that my coworkers each thought I was helping them, so I got to help both of them mess with each other. I don’t think the timing matched up with April Fools, just whenever somebody found something sufficiently scary at the thrift store to bring to work.

  228. Alexander Graham Yell*

    Did anybody here read The Toast? I vaguely remember a story about Danny, his sister, and their mom going to visit their brother at his office to take him to lunch and duct taping a robotic dog to the underside of his desk. It was motion activated, so any time Danny’s brother would sit down or move his legs it would bark.

    I may have mentally filed that away under “Things I wish I’d come up with but definitely plan on doing one day”.

  229. Anne (with an “e”)*

    When I was in high school I remember some upper class men somehow got into the school the and switched things around in certain locations. For example, when I walked into my geometry class it was like walking into a mirror version of what the classroom usually looked like. They had done this to three or four classrooms. Also, at our school no one ever locked their locker. And certain students had their lockers switched. However, the switches were meticulously executed. When a student finally located their items, it looked exactly the way it had been left the afternoon before, except now your things were in someone else’s locker. I thought the prank was funny. It was obvious that a lot of people had spent a lot of time pulling it off. It felt like being in Alice In Wonderland all day long.

  230. CaperMaker*

    When the director of my kid’s playgroup bought a house, the night before closing we all went and flamingo-bombed her new back yard. Fifty pink flamingos arranged in roving herds. Also got one in the freezer, one in the closet, and one in the attic–that one has yet to be discovered.

  232. nnn*

    Oh, just remembered another one from high school. The school had the same style of chairs in a variety of colours used in many different parts of the school. One teacher was particular about only having blue chairs in her classroom, another teacher was particular about only having green chairs in his classroom. So students came in early and replaced all the blue chairs with orange chairs, and all the green chairs with yellow chairs.

    1. ggg*

      Once at my university, the undergraduates replaced a good number of the outdoor dining hall chairs with toilets left over from a dorm remodeling project.

  233. The Other Katie*

    At a previous job that shall remain nameless, a co-worker’s daughter found a roadkill skunk. She took it home and stretched the hide over a remote control car, creating an RC skunk. (It still smelled a little skunky, which just added a whiff of veracity.) He brought it in one summer cook-out day when no one was going to get any work done anyway and spent the morning driving it around the office, into meeting rooms and the least. It harmed no one, but it did make a bunch of engineers scream like startled children. This is as close to a harmless yet hilarious prank as I’ve ever seen.

  235. LadyFannyofOmaha*

    A woman on my team, who is absolutely lovely- albeit scattered, continuously loses her door fob/keys. One day, I actually found and returned them at least 3 times myself. So the 4th time I found them, I hung them from a string in the ceiling tile above her desk. Haha! I was amused! She sat under those things for about 2 hours before she realized they were gone again. I didn’t let her search long, but she has kept those keys on her for the last year. Haha!!

  236. JLB*

    I had a coworker who looked a lot like Toby from The Office so I took all the pictures on his desk and verrry carefully put a pic of Toby over his face in each picture (making sure not to damage the originals). About halfway through the day he realized one looked off and started going through all of his photos and burst out laughing, trying to figure out who had done it.

  237. Ruthie*

    So I actually pulled this prank on my husband, but it was related to his workplace. His boss Marsha is a public figure and can be a handful. April Fool’s Day came around during one project where she was being particularly demanding and my husband often would say things like “Marsha! Marsha! Marsha! Everything is about Marsha!” So while he was showering on April 1, I added autocorrect settings to his text messages to replace common words like “the, and, a” with “Marsha.” I was very pleased with myself and it went over well.

  238. huskypunx*

    At my last IT job the help desk manager had a full size whiteboard near his desk where he’s track projects and tasks. The rest of the IT managers would add obnoxious things into various columns occasionally as a joke. He went on vacation for a week and I drew a giant game of pac man around all the existing text. He was actually pretty impressed I took the time to make stencils for the ghosts and such.

  239. qdizzle*

    Back in the day when I was a Legal Assistant, I came into work to work on a day that happened to be my birthday and my desk was covered in colorful paper shreddings. It was so much. my coworkers must have spend the better part of an hour making this happen. I suppose it was suppose it was budget confetti. We all got a good laugh out of it and then had to spend an hour cleaning it up, which I did not mind as I was on the clock. Better than a glitter bomb I guess.

  240. phira*

    At my first job, we took birthdays somewhat seriously. We had a list in the breakroom so everyone would know when everyone else’s birthday was, and we celebrated every birthday with a cake. We had a lot of birthdays close together, so we’d usually celebrate those birthdays together, which was fine. We also would try to surprise people. You know, “Oh hey, Sansa and Arya, we’re having a quick meeting in the conference room about X, Y, and Z–oh SURPRISE!”

    One of my coworkers’ birthdays was two days before mine, so my first year, we celebrated on the day in the middle, and it was really great. The next year was her 30th birthday and she was at a conference during that time. We celebrated my birthday while she was gone and figured we’d celebrate hers when she got back. She found out about it and assumed that we weren’t going to celebrate hers. We of course *were* but were waiting to surprise her as usual, so we kind of just … all ran with it. For like, two hours. She was moping in the breakroom and we all piled in to surprise her with her cake and a few presents, she was shocked and delighted.

  241. Cacwgrl*

    I once stole my best friends dog out of his truck while he was in a meeting with my boss. She was his best gal and always rode shotgun with him while he went all over town. He showed up unexpectedly on April Fools, left her in there with the music and AC going like always and walked in to his meeting. I happened to be at the front desk as he came in, he saw me, said hi and went back. I walked right out, unlocked the door, got the dog, relocked the door and we walked back inside to my office. She knew me well enough she just settled right in behind my chair happy as could be. Meeting ends, he stops by to say hi, completely misses his dog at my feet (she wasn’t small by any means) and walked out. It took twenty minutes for him to notice she wasn’t riding with him and to call me to chew my butt. I died laughing. My boss loved every second of it and the dog got a cheeseburger for lunch that day after dad realized he took so long to notice her gone.

  242. nnn*

    Not work-related (unless you have a fully-stocked kitchen), but a good, simple prank to play in a house is to switch the forks and spoons in the utensil drawer.

    Many people have muscle memory about which utensils are where, so they’ll mindlessly reach into the drawer for a fork and come up with a spoon.

  243. SafetyFirst*

    Just yesterday a few of my colleagues pulled a great one. I am known in our office for my punny sense of humor, and a few weeks ago I got invited to a stakeholder meeting for product development. I jokingly complained that I was expecting steak at the meeting. So yesterday they staged another stakeholder meeting for the purpose of presenting me with a fake steak. I keep it on my desk now so I can bring it to future meetings.

  244. Tech Nerd*

    My office loves April Fools, and I like to pull elaborate pranks. Last year, every single desk got a paperclip with googly eyes and a little slip of paper with joking advice from Clippy. This year, I set up one of those laser pointer projectors you see at college parties, the ones that make whole clusters of moving laser dots, in a stairwell that happens to be lit with blacklights (our building’s interior decorators are fun people) and put up signs about the new laser-based security system.

  245. Anon with no name*

    My supervisor is a fan of Stranger Things – they recently returned from a long vacation to several items in their office turned upside-down – pictures, desk items, and someone even took the time to rewrite everything on their whiteboard upside down… that was a pretty cool prank.

  246. Anonforthis*

    I was surprised there wasn’t an April Fool’s post yesterday! Both our HR director and dept head went all out and decided to induce Monday morning panic attacks by:

    1. Announcing that they were planning to reduce timelines by 2 weeks and increase output by 20%
    2. Accouncing that we had to move offices by the end of the month

    A coworker on my team pulled a cuter prank by taping up the yellow “police only” ribbon around our cubicles.

  247. Accessibility, or no access*

    When a colleague’s computer is locked or just booted up, turn on the Mouse Keys feature which controls the cursor using the keyboard. This interferes with typing! When they try to enter their password, chances are it will include a key which is a mouse control key now, and the password will be rejected. A good chuckle as they scratch their head, retry, retry typing super slowly and carefully, and it still won’t work. Bonus points if you can time it for just after their password has needed changing, for extra self-doubt!

    To encourage mischief I’ll share that all you need to do is press “Option” five times in a row on Mac. On Windows it’s Left Alt + Left Shit + Num Lock. Sadly not very effective on Windows if the keyboard has a numeric keypad – but works well on laptops where the mouse keys are on the main lettered keyboard.

  248. Alaska*

    At a former job in a very small town, the interns in a particular department stole their manager’s large, cut-out moose lawn decoration (he was named Maynard) from her front yard, disassembled it, gave it a new paint job, and reassembled Maynard inside of her office (he was too big to fit through the door fully assembled). I heard later the interns were a little worried because she legitimately thought Maynard had been stolen during the two days he was getting his makeover, but she ended up taking it well.

  249. Commenter*

    Someone printed out a bunch of letter ‘E’s in brown. They then put them on a plate in the break room and told people there were brown-es for everyones enjoyment

  250. Soupspoon McGee*

    When I was starting out in health care, a senior CNA started yelling that someone had left a full urine container at the nurse’s station. He and the other CNAs gathered all the newbies for an irate talk on safety and protocol. He yelled, “Whose is this? Where did this come from?” then sniffed it. “Smells like the guy’s from room 303B.”

    Newbies: “You can tell that from the smell?”

    Then he dipped a finger in and tasted it. “Yup, that’s his.”

    Newbies cringed. CNAs howled with laughter.

    It was apple juice.

  251. EvilQueenRegina*

    Someone replicated the exact same stapler prank at my last job. This was right before my 30th birthday, and I was away at the Edinburgh festival that week but had seen the picture on Facebook, I was half expecting to come back and find something similar like a team mascot-flavour jelly containing Fred and Ginger the team mascot stuffed cats. The prank I actually got for my 30th was someone dressing in a tiger suit and pouncing on me during my birthday dinner. (Except I kind of got spoiled for it, since he’d tried it on beforehand and someone put a photo on Facebook and since I was friends with him I saw the photo in advance.)

    One time someone sent round a mass email at Mum’s old job claiming that a new work uniform was being implemented. It caused a lot of grumbling before someone actually clicked the link and it was a photo of some dude dressed as Bananaman.

    The one I always wished I had done was the time when we had a big box of chocolates for Christmas and this particularly unpleasant lady got it into her head that the cleaners were stealing the chocolates and wouldn’t stop banging on about it. There was no noticeable decrease in the chocolates, and quite honestly it didn’t matter to me if the cleaners did have a few, but Cruella wouldn’t shut up about it and kept saying she was going to start counting the chocolates to see how many they were stealing. To this day I wish I had removed a few before she did her count, then put them back when she wasn’t looking and then watched her wonder why there were more chocolates than there were before she counted.

  252. philosophical_conversation*

    Oh gosh, there’s so many pranks at my office. Once, we filled a co-worker’s office with glitter-filled balloons. Another time, we moved someone’s desk to the middle of the hall while they were out. A group of co-workers drunk-dialed our boss while they were at a conference and told him that they all got arrested. We’ve moved Christmas decorations to random places around the office, taped about 300 inflatable beach balls all over our boss’s office, and made plenty of prank calls.

    Recently, we bought a few really small Bluetooth speakers and started to hide them in people’s offices. Generally we’ll make them play things like crickets chirping or random beeps or other mildly irritating noises, but this past week we decided to recreate the “Salt and Pepper Diner” scene (we’re all huge John Mulaney fans) by setting it up to play “What’s New Pussycat” on repeat. It took our co-worker a solid half hour to find where we hid all of speakers and was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time.

    Luckily, all these pranks have gone over well, but it’s really a matter of knowing your audience. It’s part of the culture where I work and pretty much everyone is involved in one way or another.

  253. julie b ohio*

    Well I wish I could add a picture, I do have one!! A few years ago at work I taped an official looking sign on the copier, with a logo that matched the one on the machine. It said that the copy machine had been upgraded to voice enabled and gave the directions and commands to use it. It warned it was in learning mode while it learned everyone’s voices so you might have to try a couple times. At the bottom it said if you had problems the reverse side had contact info. The reverse side said April Fools. I wish we had video in the copy room. People were talking to the copy machine all day! “Command – COPY. 3”

  254. ladycrim*

    My co-worker is a huge Pittsburgh Steelers fan and his cubicle is decorated to reflect that. For his birthday one year, we replaced all the Steelers paraphernalia with Green Bay Packers decor. We even stuck the GB logo on his Steelers coffee mug. He claimed to be horrified, but he was laughing very hard! (I made him a cake with the Steelers logo on it, too, so all was forgiven. :-) )

  255. entrylevelsomething*

    I work in theater. The old school prank was the send interns/newbies to “wash the gels” (what you put in front of a light to color it)– and watch as they dissolved in the water and the kid panicked. Nowadays, the gels are polycarbonate or similar plastic so you can’t do that one. :(

  256. Chelsea*

    The CFO sent around a very well-crafted email telling us that the company was going vegan and was getting rid of all of our favorite free snacks (all those that weren’t vegan were going to be phased out). Additionally, they removed all the snacks that weren’t vegan from the communal areas so people would further think it was real. I knew right away from the email title “Going Vegan” that it was an April Fool’s joke, but the CFO still got 50+ responses from people in the company criticizing this decision, saying it would affect market share, etc. etc. So funny. lol

  257. ladycrim*

    I work for a union. In 2007, most of the Locals in my state merged into four large Locals. The merge was a long and complicated process that involved completely revamping the power structure, renegotiating staff union contracts, dealing with the logistics of going from two offices to eight, etc. April 1 of that year, I sent an e-mail to my fellow Administrative Support Staff members telling them that we were now going to be merging the four new Locals into one enormous one, and we’d be starting the process all over again. I thought I’d given enough hints that it was a joke – giving the new Local a ridiculously long ID number, announcing that we’d start negotiating again “as soon as the ink dries on the current contracts” – but I did still get one or two panicked phone calls. Perhaps I should have announced that our new President was April. F. Ool.

    1. EvilQueenRegina*

      Dad’s old work place got sent a letter about some training or other signed A F Day. Someone was still half way to the phone to book a place before she caught on to the name.

  258. PrankingPixie*

    I’ve had some very fun coworkers who have loved to prank each other. We did have a code of conduct, and the prankster always had to help the prankee out with cleanup or fixes in the end, no harm could come from the prank, no long term mess and nothing that would ultimately interrupt “real” work. These are some of our exploits:

    We have a strong policy of all computers must be locked. My office mate was working on a document and forgot to lock his computer. He came back to his Word document being lime green with red font. He never forgot to lock the computer after that.

    That same office worker’s white board was colored completely red over the course of a week. Because it was behind our door, it took him a while to notice it.

    I removed the space bar off of a different coworker’s keyboard (carefully, as damaging office supplies is against our CoC for pranks). I left it in the arms of his stuffed T-rex. He in turn removed all the letters of the my office mate’s first name from his keyboard. This is the same guy that was victim of the Word and Whiteboard pranks.

    My office mate left on a three week vacation and said I could “use” his cereal. So I bought a box of it and strung the whole thing up on fishline. By the time I was done, he had close to a quarter mile of cereal with the message Welcome Back written in cursive on the wall (because of the fishline). I came in 1/2 an hour after him, and he had it all cleaned up and wanted to know if it was me or the other gent that had done it. We claimed to have no idea what he was talking about as he’d thrown out all the evidence by the time we got in. He still talks about that prank and it’s been over 10 years now.

    I changed departments to a crew that liked to prank each other nearly as much as my first department. Someone went out on a two week vacation and found her entire cube covered in safety warning flags and faux warning signs, her phone taped with surveyor’s tape, and several of her office supplies wrapped by my cube mate. I may have supplied the warning flags and the surveyor’s tape….

    That lead to her and her best friend in my department taping my phone receiver down and my mouse. I undid the mouse tape but didn’t fix the phone for the rest of the day so they had to answer all the phone calls to the department hotline, LOL.

    Not to rest on that, I then bought signs that said Please Use Other Door. I put them at the two doors to our office area to annoy the one that had taped my mouse. It backfired as we had three people just going back between the doors and being very confused as each exit told them to use the other exit… whoops! They took it in good spirits when it was explained why it had been put up.

    My cube mate also had most of her friends in another department wish another one of our coworkers happy birthday. She got phone calls all day that day from random people on site.

    When our boss retired, we pulled out a lot of stops – she’d been immune to the pranks because well, she was the boss. However on her last day, we filled up her office windows with balloons to make it look like her entire office was filled. I only had water balloons so we must have had easily 1 hundred to fill up her windows that we had to blow up and hide from her while we were doing it at lunch (the windows are 7 feet tall, and maybe 18 inches wide, we set up paper boxes and then filled them with the balloons to make it look “real” and the balloons only blew up to fist size). We hid the radio tuned to a classical station. We put ace and horse bandages around the door knob so she couldn’t get her key in, and blockaded the door with more so she couldn’t get in (thus couldn’t get to her computer and leave). She thought it was grand, and laughed all day. She left everything up and wouldn’t let us take it down until she left. She was 6 feet tall and worming her way through the ace bandages that were taped over her door.

    However my best prank was somewhat intentional and somewhat unintentional. I had bought small speaker devices that played sounds at random intervals. In one person’s cube, I placed on in her light and it was randomly giving computer beeps and chirping noises. In the other person’s cube, I placed the “horror” themed one that had a child laughing, creaking doors, and a voice whispering “Do you hear me now?” I hadn’t realized that I’d placed it directly above her cell phone when I hid it in her light. At this time, Verizon had a commercial where the spokes person asked “Can You Hear Me Now?” The coworker had a Verizon cell phone. For all the morning I’m listening to one coworker tell me to stop making her computer beep at her. Meanwhile, directly across the office area, the other one is getting completely freaked out. She starts saying “My phone is talking to me!” and “Yes, I can hear you!” I’m dying in my cube laughing silently at this point, because of the acoustics in our office no one else can hear these things but we can hear the coworkers. We have our daily meeting and finally it’s quiet enough someone can hear the chirping but the rest of the group denies all knowledge. Meanwhile the person who is convinced her phone is talking to her (she never heard the other sounds) is calling her boyfriend and asking if he can hear her phone and if his phone has started talking to him and asking if it can hear him. Eventually she is freaked out enough that she starts talking about buying a new cell phone, so I fess up, and can barely speak because I’m laughing so hard. They still laugh to this day when we talk about it. The only down side is that now I’m the one blamed for all the office pranks automatically, LOL.

  259. Krabby*

    A guy at work sent out a photo of an ultrasound on April 1st with the message, “I guess we’re expecting again.” He had 5 young kids so it was a pretty funny joke until one of our supervisors saw it and flipped out about how the business couldn’t take him going on leave anymore. To be fair, due to very generous paternal leave within the country I was in, he hadn’t worked for more then 6 months at a time for the last 6 years. Still, it was not a good look for the company.

  260. B*

    My co-worker has some little plastic dinosaurs on his desk so yesterday I added 3 more I had randomly lying around the house. Unfortunately I timed it wrong and he caught me at it, but that’s probably for the best. That way it wasn’t creepy because he didn’t know who did it. He’s new. Too many glass walls in our workspace… he gets to keep the toys and he poses them all on his desk.

  261. Jane*

    Music festival kitchen, runs yearly with a volunteer/worktrade staff. One of the recipes calls for hand massaging the strawberries for 1/2 hour. People actually do it, though when pressed for time it is permissible to use a quisenart. It was written in to the recipe so many years ago that somehow people don’t realize it must have been a joke.

    Also, same festival, different kitchen: one egg in every 20 hard boiled and put back; footprints in paint leading to the center island where the left foot goes one way and the right foot goes the other…

  262. Brightlights*

    Shrek was a Merino sheep from New Zealand who ran off one day and hid in the wilderness for several years. He grew quite a fleece. I showed my coworker a picture (I recommend you google “Shrek the Sheep”) and she laughed so hard that she cried.

    I waited until she went on her lunch break, then printed out 20 pictures of Shrek in different sizes and taped them all over her workstation.

    When she came back, she was consumed by giggles. She laughed until she cried again, she laughed until her abs hurt, and at one point she couldn’t draw breath because she was laughing so hard.

    After 20 minutes she was under control again, and another coworker- who was not in on the great Shrekking of her desk- chimed in from over the cube wall with a deep-voiced “BAAAAAAAAAAAA.”

    To this day I send her pictures of sheep. She trades me pictures of cats. She is still my best work friend. And sometimes I BAAAAA at her.

  263. PranksAreGreat*

    My office has a long tradition of pranking people when they’re gone on vacation. So when two coworkers married each other, we decided to build them their first “house” together. We started by cramming both of their belongings into one cubicle, then constructed an entire house around it out of cardboard. This being an engineering firm, it was probably the most well constructed cardboard house ever built, complete with an A-frame roof, windows with saran wrap for “glass”, a door with a latch, a mailbox, and a “love seat” which was two office chairs duct taped together. Everyone loved it so much, it stayed up for over a month before our boss finally made us take it down.

  264. TheMagicFoolBus*

    One of my coworkers went on vacation and whilst he was away, Slack underwent a routine update. My coworkers and I then proceeded to only Slack the returning team member in quotations – even down to emojis and the like. We managed to keep it up until lunch on his first day back, then the beans were spilled and a hearty chuckle was had by all.

  265. Phil*

    I went into the office one Monday morning to find someone over the weekend had cut out tiny little Nicholas Cage heads and planted them EVERYWHERE. I loved it, I kept the one they stuck to the top of my monitor as a memento.

    1. Another Manic Monday*

      Hehe. I did the same thing to one of my coworkers. Put photos of Nicholas Cage all over her cubicle.

  266. Vancouver*

    I work at a public aquarium and this year my desk neighbour (who’s worked with us for over 40 years) got a good portion the building to run two minutes down to the ocean. How? All he had to do was announce over our staff radios that there were killer whales in the harbour! We were down there for a couple of minutes until one of my other colleagues remembered what day it was.
    Our head vet also sent out mildly amusing emails from the accounts of his staff who forgot to log out when they left the office.. But the killer whale thing was the best anyone has come up with for a few years.

  267. Another Manic Monday*

    Far from a good prank or a bad one; but I did fill up my coworker’s cubicle with photos of Nicolas Cage.

  268. MindoverMoneyChick*

    I was teaching a week long corporate train the trainer course. Basically teaching subject matter experts how to do training properly. We talk ad nauseum about the importance of learning objective. We also talk a lot about treating people with respect, not making them feel bad about not knowing an answer or asking questions. We did lots of fun exercises and over the course of the week I usually developed a great rapport with the classes. On the last day we gave them a multiple choice test and then I would go over the answers with them as a group.

    One time it had been a smart group but people were making a lot of mistakes. I was frantically backtracking trying to remind them of things I’d been saying all week. Then a bunch of people got wrong a very easy question on learning objectives. I think I was starting to really look flustered and one student said to me “Did we cover learning objectives”. I lost it, pointed at her and said to the rest of the class in an loud and incredulous tone “did she really just say that!?!?”

    And then immediately tried to back track, because holy crap was that terrible of me to say. The whole class burst out laughing because they had planted all those mistakes and stupid questions as a prank on me. It was kind of hilarious because I was just so gullible about it. My co-instructor figured out about 5 minutes early what was going on and tried to subtly give me a heads up and it didn’t get the hint at all.

  269. MindoverMoneyChick*

    I was teaching a week long corporate train the trainer course. Basically teaching subject matter experts how to do training properly. We talk ad nauseum about the importance of learning objective. We also talk a lot about treating people with respect, not making them feel bad about not knowing an answer or asking questions. We did lots of fun exercises and over the course of the week I usually developed a great rapport with the classes. On the last day we gave them a multiple choice test and then I would go over the answers with them as a group.

    One time it had been a smart group but people were making a lot of mistakes. I was frantically backtracking trying to remind them of things I’d been saying all week. Then a bunch of people got wrong a very easy question on learning objectives. I think I was starting to really look flustered and one student said to me “Did we cover learning objectives”. I lost it, pointed at her and said to the rest of the class in an loud and incredulous tone “did she really just say that!?!?”

    And then immediately tried to back track, because holy crap was that terrible of me to say. The whole class burst out laughing because they had planted all those mistakes and stupid questions as a prank on me. It was kind of hilarious because I was just so gullible about it. My co-instructor figured out about 5 minutes early what was going on and tried to subtly give me a heads up and it didn’t get the hint at all.

  270. Phil*

    One of my coworkers once took a Hawaiian vacation, and when she got back, found an entire tiki hut constructed around her desk.

  271. Book Badger, Attorney-at-Claw*

    So I’ve only been at my job three months, but in that time I’ve gotten a reputation as an office baker (I’m not the only one who bakes or brings in snacks, so I feel no pressure). My go-to is banana bread muffins, because I can never eat a whole bunch of bananas before they go to waste, so they end up being baked instead.

    For April Fools Day, my “prank” was that I made them gluten-free, since there are two people in the office who are gluten intolerant (not Celiac, as far as I know) and have thus far been unable to eat any of my baked goods. They were a little gritty, since gluten-free flour doesn’t absorb liquid as well as normal flour, but they went really fast. (I did notify everyone in the office that they were gluten free so that no one was surprised, but I also know that no one in the office is allergic to rice)

  272. gg*

    Made cookies with like 10 times the amount of salt they should have in them. Most people figured it out during the first bite and were grateful to find the real cookies (appropriate proportions) in the cupboard after that.

    But ONE GUY ate 2 whole cookies. I couldn’t trust his opinion on basically anything and certainly not my baking thereafter.

  273. Lauren*

    I’ve done two in my office – first one was the day before I had to go on medical leave for surgery. I wasn’t working that day so no one suspected me. I snuck in at night after everyone had left and hid about a hundred giant paperclips everywhere INCLUDING the bathrooms. Paperclips had a bent end, giant googly eyes…you see where this is going! And they all had notes attached saying things like “Hi, I’m Clippy, your helpful office assistant. It looks like you’re trying to be productive, would you like some help with that?”, getting more and more ridiculous as it went on and outright mocking their inability to find all the Clippy’s. Closing people blamed the next day opening shift and vice versa, and to this day we still have paperclips hidden in drawers everywhere.

    And then the last day we were in our old office, I snuck in before opening with a bunch of 3d paper penguins and created March of the Penguins through the office. Which resulted in lots of videos of my colleagues using them for bowling pins, hrmph!

  274. Akcipitrokulo*

    In the days when microsoft office products allowed you to customise the order and appearance of the buttons…

    Swap the print and print preview buttons’ image and location.

    Then ask more technically-minded colleague for help because your print button stopped working!

  275. Jo*

    I had a small prank war with a co-worker once. The best ones I can remember are:

    1. I had a small 3D printed pokemon on my desk. I came in one day to find it totally graffitied. I was pretty mad and really thought he’d gone too far this time. I took it to his desk and told him that he better know how to get all this marker off. He let me stew on it for a while before he revealed that he had actually gone and BOUGHT AN IDENTICAL FIGURE and drawn all over it with pen. My original one was safe and sound in his desk!!

    2. I took an action figure from his desk. I then made an Instagram account and posted pictures of it in random places, usually around my house – looking in the fridge, hanging out with my cats etc… Eventually I posted a picture of it in the office with a note saying ‘Come and get me’.

  276. On a pale mouse*

    A coworker had, I guess, been reminding his team about the importance of labeling things correctly in the computer room. While he was on vacation, they labeled everything in his office, and I mean everything. “Door,” “air vent,” “windowsill,” “whiteboard,” “stapler.” He thought it was funny.

  277. incompetemp's colleague*

    I’m late to the party, but I still feel like it’s worth sharing this.

    My colleague Stan got himself a smart desk at work to test out. It lifts and drops automatically to keep him standing throughout the day. It has a little terminal with a sensor to know when he’s around, and it even says hello to him in the morning. My colleague Melvin came up with the diabolical idea to make an email account called Stan’s Desk and start emailing him as the desk. He roped me into it after the first email, and for the past month we’ve been ramping up the creepiness of Stan’s Desk’s emails.

    It’s all been very harmless stuff, like, “I’m very proud of you for all the shaping you’re doing!” and “Send us your private email address to sign up for our helpful notifications on weekends and vacations!”

    But on April Fools, I took a photo of his cubicle from the perspective of the smart desk terminal, doctored it to look like a shitty security-cam-style photo, and sent it in an email saying the desk missed him. He showed me the email that morning and was like, “This-THIS is where I draw the line!! It’s taking PHOTOS of me now?! Where even is the camera on this thing?!??!” And he laid the terminal flat on his desk so it couldn’t take photos anymore.

    Melvin and I sent him one final email with a dark screen (presumably a photo taken from the terminal laying flat on the desk) with creepiness levels turned to 100, and then we walked over and confessed.

    “I got catfished by my desk—AND FELL FOR IT!”

    He took it very well, don’t worry.

  278. MM55*

    In college, I had a telemarketing job from 6-10 pm. We took a break every hour to rest our voices and get drinks. One winter, a co-worker put water in the tea kettle and turned on the burner. But it was unplugged. A few minutes later I made a tea whistling sound, including the sound tapering off when he lifted the kettle. He poured cold water (that he thought was boiling) into his mug and took a sip and his brain was fried, as he really thought the water boiled but it was cold. It wasn’t until I did the tea whistle sound again that he realized what happened.

  279. Molly*

    In high school, I worked as a lifeguard at a lake. My older siblings had all worked there, as well, and my brother was the head guard during my first summer. There was a pipe with a wheel about 8 feet deep into the lake, and they would tell new guards to swim down and turn the wheel to “drain the lake” when it seemed too high. I watched many new guards try to drain the lake with no success! I thought I was pretty cool since I already knew the prank and I think my brother got a little sick of my fifteen year-old bravado.We also had these giant inner tubes, made of really thick rubber, that people could take into the lake. One day, the owner told me that we needed to deflate all of the inner tubes because the air inside was stale, and then re-inflate them with fresh air. I didn’t think twice, and then spent a full day trying to deflate the stupid tubes! I had to stand on them, jump on them, lay down on them – they were huge and it took forever to get all of the air out of each one – and it smelled awful!! Since I already knew about the new guard prank, it never crossed my mind that they were pranking me until well after the fact! My entire family was in hysterics every time it came up for the rest of the summer. I find it hilarious now, too…and it was also a great lesson in humility!

  280. NYStyle*

    My mom was a doctor in a hospital where her colleague was a big prankster who convinced everyone that the new carbon monoxide detectors were security cameras and then set up a website with still photos from all the operating rooms and said “look we’re being watched!” But they got him back when he had to be put under for a minor surgery in the same hospital where they worked (think, having a mole removed) and they asked an orthopedic surgeon to come put a full leg cast on him while he slept. So he woke up in the recovery room with a full cast on and was shocked. But they told him right away it was a prank and he loved it. (You definitely have to know your target well for this one)

  281. Sancho*

    Mi sister works in an open area with cubicles. Her colleague to the left has a printed photo of a tiger with a motivational quote in German. She printed out the same photo but changed the quote to “Chicken soup and spring rolls” and then replaced the original one. The funny thing is the colleague didn’t notice the change for a couple of days, but would say every now and then, “How strange, I’m craving Chinese all of a sudden!”

  282. fogharty*

    Late to this, but the one prank of which I am most proud was several jobs ago when the office admin got a new car and would *not* stop talking about it. I’ve seen people make more of a fuss over their new (human) baby than she did about her VW Beetle.

    So one lunchtime, April 1, I put a note on her windshield saying “Sorry I hit your car, but I didn’t see any major damage, so it’s all good.” To be fair I wrote “April Fools!” on the back.

    She didn’t see that second part until much later – after she had frantically gone over the car inch by inch looking for the nonexistent damage.

  283. fogharty*

    I teach an evening class in computers for adults. One of my students and I planned a prank on her smirky, eye-rolling, patronizing teenager… she was going to take a screenshot of his monitor and immediately make it the wallpaper. I need to email her and find out how it worked out.

  284. UK Civil Servant*

    We had an ex-military manager who was slightly perplexed by our team’s geeky tendencies, and who *hated* jeans (dress code was casual – even he would wear polo shirts and combat trousers, but never denim). For his last day we all wore jeans and the brightest geekiest t-shirts we could muster. Even the senior manager who presented his leaving gift wore a Superman t-shirt: he took of his shirt and tie in the middle of the speech, revealing he was unexpectedly ripped! 8-0
    Ex-manager took it in the good humour it was intended. :-)

  285. Leetaann*

    Late to the party… I don’t usually do pranks because 1. I’m not very good at them and 2. they’ve always back-fired (see 1.)

    This year, however, I came up with a silly one that would be harmless. I have a huge jar of candy on my desk. Everyone knows about it. Everyone takes candy and a lot of people donate (I currently have 3 GIANT bags of candy provided by other people, waiting to go in the jar). And it’s good candy. People jokingly complain that I should have bad candy so they won’t eat any of it.

    So, Monday I came in and replaced all the candy with Unsweetened Applesauce cups.

  286. basementmatt*

    In the 90s I worked with a contractor who’d recently gotten his MCSE. He was a jerk and a braggart, claiming he would be able to address all our users’ Windows issues without any assistance from us. So, I created a problem for him to solve.

    I took a screenshot of his desktop with Word open but minimized. Then I made the screenshot his wallpaper. The final step was to move all his icons off-screen and hide the task bar.

    Three hours later, after uncounted reboots, he was in tears and on the verge of re-installing Windows when he finally asked for help. I showed him what I did and put everything back. He both vowed revenge and promised not to be such an ass. Fortunately and unfortmately, respectively, neither promise was kept.

  287. RLKD*

    I had a job I really loved for four years and was friends with almost everyone in the company. I would pull little pranks here and there but my favorites were always the simple ones. A group of about 15 people would work on these massive puzzles in the lunch room during lunch/stretching breaks, so of course, hiding one key piece of the puzzle (and always returning it! I’m not a monster!) during the course of a build was always funny.

    But my best one was the last one. My very last day, I came in extra early with an arsenal of those greeting cards that sing and play music when you opened them. I carefully cut out the noisemaker/speaker thing from about 20 cards and taped them to the inside of cabinets, drawers, under mugs and in other various hidden spots in the office. Open the fridge? “Tutti Frutti.” Pick up a heavy mug? “Happy Birthday.” Move a stack of brochures? Watch out–“Welcome to the Jungle.”

    Some were very obvious ( like frequently used kitchen cabinets) but I would bet money that some of them are still waiting to be found. I’ll sometimes get a text from my old coworkers when a “new” one pops up. Harmless fun, and still generating chuckles.

  288. Okay, great!*

    I worked at a massage office, and we used to use bracelets around the door handle to indicate if a room was being used. A new hire didn’t like the clatter they made, so she knitted/crocheted a blue teardrop to hang on her handle. Unfortunately, it looked more like a certain part of male anatomy, and she was told by management not to use it (but could make something else if she liked). She got sooo upset, and couldn’t stop mentioning, to anyone who would listen, about how “It does NOT look like a ****sack” and hung it up in the breakroom. I don’t think any of us would have even cared, but the more upset she got the more we couldn’t help but laugh at the situation. One evening, a few days after she transferred locations, I was heading out of my massage room and noticed the “teardrop” hanging from the outside handle. I snorted from trying too hard not to laugh, and the prank game of Hide the Sack around the office was born. The only rule was to never let clients see it.

  289. claudia grace*

    Late to the party, but the absolute work April Fools joke I ever was on the receiving end of has caused me to absolutely dread 4/1 in the office.
    Let me set the scene.
    April Fools fell on a Friday that year.
    A few weeks earlier, a direct report of mine had been transferred to work under another manager. I didn’t like the quality of his work, he spun a different story to the boss, so the solution was “maybe he’ll work out differently under someone else?” He didn’t, and the last day of March, a Thursday, Other Manager fired him because of all the same reasons that I couldn’t work with him. It didn’t go well, he hyperventilated, and had to be escorted out of the building.
    I go to sleep that night and dream that Fired Direct Report broke into my office through the window, trashed everything, and knocked my fish tank to the ground. In my dream, I saw my fish flopping around gasping for air next to the space heater I kept in there because the office was always cold.
    The next morning, I wake up and check my phone. I’d already missed several calls from this manager and had texts telling me to call him ASAP, it was an emergency. So I called him back. I hadn’t yet had my coffee, so I was groggy, but it seemed important.
    Other Manager: “Hey. So, I have bad news. The office caught fire last night.”
    Me: “What?!”
    OM: “Yeah, I’m on the scene now. The building is ok, but the sprinklers came on when the fire broke out and all the computers and the servers are shot. Everything’s wet.”
    Me: “Oh my god…”
    OM: “Did you leave your space heater on last night?”
    Me: “Uh…I don’t remember…”
    OM: “‘Cause the fire marshall says it looks like it broke out in your office. He also suspects arson of some kind. Your office is the most damaged of all. Your fish….well….I’m sorry.”
    Me: “….arson?”
    OM: “Yeah, FormerDirectReport is suspect No. 1.”
    Me: “Fuuuuck.”
    OM: “But if it wasn’t arson… well, it seems like it started at your space heater. So that’s why he wants to know if you turned it off last night.”
    Me: “…..” I literally couldn’t think. I thought maybe I had; would I be blamed for burning down the office? Was boss gonna fire me? What about all the other people who’s jobs I’d affected because I may have left my space heater plugged in. I had a moment of thinking ‘Am I still having a bad dream? Can I just wake up? Is this all even real?’ and then it dawned on me what day it was.
    I was pissed. And more than a bit traumatized.
    OM did this to one person each year. He came up with an elaborate lie to tell them, and it was always something traumatizing (the year before, he’d convinced an engineer that the part of a building the engineer had detailed a repair for had failed, fallen off the building, and killed a person).
    I still have some trust issues.

    1. Weyrwoman*

      Wow that’s a nasty thing to do to someone. I’d be traumatized with trust issues too!

  290. Wren*

    My partner arrived once to every item on his desk having been gift wrapped. The wrapping was done by a stressed new parent with a premie in the NICU who needed a silly diversion. He got a kick out of it (there was incredible attention to detail) and tried to proceed with work with as many items still in their wrappings for as long as possible.

    On another occasion, a junior employee swapped a few keys on his keyboard so that the home row spelled his name. He also enjoyed this and never changed it back since he touch types. Hilariously, over a year later, the same employee came with a question, and my partner asked him to log on to his account on my partner’s computer. The employee had trouble typing his password because of the swapped keys.

  291. Zach*

    This wasn’t an april fools joke, it took months to slowly come to fruition, but it’s honestly one of the funniest pranks I’ve ever done at work.

    My company has a handful of standing desks available at it. My boss happens to sit at one of these desks, but he never uses the standing feature of it. About once or twice a week my coworker and I would raise his desk about a half inch higher, then unplug his desk so that he couldn’t just press the button and lower it back down. We were banking on the idea that he would still be able to work (just a touch more uncomfortably than before) but be to lazy to actually figure out why he couldn’t lower his desk.

    Fast forward 2 months. His desk has become high enough that he can no longer raise his chair any higher, his arms are also raised higher than what would normally be considered comfortable to type at and he’s suddenly realizing that in order to look over his monitors into the rest of the office he has to stand. He calls the IT department to come over and look at his desk because he’s too embarrassed to send in an email and create a formal ticket in our internal ticketing system over something as stupid as “my desk is getting taller”. Meanwhile, my coworker and I are literally crying with laughter and taking a few photos at the sight of them trying to troubleshoot the issue. Eventually, since I don’t want to waste IT’s time with it I come over and plug his desk back in and tell him that we’ve been doing this for literally months and we relied on his laziness to keep the joke going.

  292. [A Cool Name Here]*

    Accidental prank

    My husband was the IT vendor for a small business where I was the beancounter and I had an accounts payable coworker. He was really into conspiracy theories, so it was easy to get his imagination going.

    One morning I had gone to work with a headache, but it was getting worse, so I told him I was going home around 9am. After I get in the car, I call my husband to let him know I’m going home. While I’m driving, my coworker calls me, telling me, “I’m outside in my car right now. Our office is bugged! Our boss is totally listening to our conversations!” My head hurts too much for me to care at that point, but it gets me wondering.

    When my husband got home that evening, I told him what my coworker said, and he started laughing. He was logged into their server remotely when we were on the phone, so he typed a message that somehow appeared on my coworker’s screen, telling him to behave since I had left for the day. Our boss didn’t even get out of bed until 10am, so there was no way it was our boss, but my coworker was convinced it was evidence that our boss had our office bugged.

  293. WantonSeedStitch*

    I’m just reminded of in Game of Thrones where King Robert’s squires are trying to put his breastplate on him but it no longer fits, and he sends them out to hunt for a breastplate stretcher!

  294. fogharty*

    Some very bored court officers and attorneys once had another attorney “arrested” for impersonating a 4H member because he wore a small 4H pin he had picked up somewhere. (one of my siblings was prosecuting)

    They held a “trial” over lunch, I think he was let go on a technicality… I can’t remember.

    Yes, it’s an actual law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/916

  295. Me Too*

    Some of my coworkers instituted a tradition of “decorating” the cubicle of a person who was on sabbatical. One cube was filled with balloons, another had everything in it wrapped in aluminum foil, and another was filled with items for a sports team its occupant hated.

  296. Ahem*

    Once a group of us from work went to see “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” That night I made a pod from crepe paper and hid it under a coworker’s desk.

  297. Former Admin turned Project Manager*

    I think the best prank I witnessed at work was when we got our new phone system. Someone was testing out the various ringtones that could be set and found that there were two that had a voice (choice of male or female) saying “Are you there?” instead of an actual ringtone.

    One of the sales guys was out of the office on the day the phones were installed, so one of his counterparts snuck in and changed the tone to one of the “Are you there?” ringers. He spread the word to a few folks on the hallway so that when sales guy showed up to work the next day, folks would call every couple minutes. Hearing him in in his office replying to the new phone as through it was an intercom (“Yes, here I am!”) was hilarious. The gang who pranked him let him in on the joke fairly quickly, but others of us who knew what had happened would pass by him office and poke our heads in, saying “Hey, are you there?!” He totally found humor in the whole thing.

  298. That Work from Home Life*

    Late to the party, but I have one! Back in the mid aughts I was an editorial assistant at a big publishing house where all the assistants were recent grads. We were a tight knit team and very friendly inside and outside of work. One of our colleagues, “John,” was the office prank ringleader–always minor stuff like rearranging everything on your desk or emptying everyone’s staplers, etc. I can’t remember what exactly precipitated it, but I eventually decided that it was time to even the score. John had a Mr. Potato Head on his desk, so one day I kidnapped it, created a Facebook account for it (this was back when young ppl actually used FB haha) where I posted pictures of Mr. Potato Head in various settings and risky situations a la the Travelocity gnome. I also sent ransom notes to John threatening Mr. Potato Head’s wellbeing in a variety of ways unless he complied with my demands (all minor things, like giving up his stash of the “good” red pens, etc.). He was super into it and usually complied with my threats. When he didn’t I’d mail him pieces of Mr. Potato Head (like an ear or tongue) to show I was serious. It took John a REALLY long time to figure out I was behind it because the rest of the assistants threw him off my track constantly–even the ones who didn’t know it was me! Just desserts, my friends. Just desserts. When he figured it out about 3 months later I returned Mr. Potato Head to his desk where he enjoyed a permanent status as the newly minted office mascot. :)

  299. AnonJ*

    Back at my oldjob I found an old keyboard that was broken but not yet sent back to IT and popped off the letters I needed to spell “April Fool’s” by popping off and replacing the keys on a coworkers keyboard. We had a good laugh and then I put everything back as it was at the end of the day, so they didn’t have to do it. I thought that was a pretty good prank, harmless yet humorous.

  300. Wayne*

    Jan 24th, 2018. So – I bought a pack of 3 Annoy-a-Tron devices from thinkgeek.com a couple of weeks ago. Still sitting on my kitchen table. Kim (my middle one) comes downstairs yesterday morning (we were both off yesterday), and says “What’s this?”. I just said “something for a joke”, and left it at that. She goes back upstairs, and I see her purse is laying on the table. I open it, find a little zippered compartment, activate one of the disks, zip it in there, and put the purse back. Over the next 2 hours, I hear it go off faintly every 4 or 5 minutes, but she’s upstairs, doing laundry, showering, etc. Her friend Emily (a fellow nurse) comes over, and they go out for coffee.

    I’m puttering around the house. About 2 hours later, my phone rings. It’s Kim, and she shouts “I’M GONNA KILL YOU!!” I burst out laughing, figuring she found it. Well – she said they were in Emily’s car right out front of the house, hadn’t even left, and Kim heard a faint “meow”. Emily didn’t hear it, so Kim ignored it. The Dunkin’ Donuts is only about a mile away, took them maybe 3 minutes to get there. As they’re parking, Kim hears it again. “Did you hear that?” Emily says yeah! They look out the window, then get out and look around the car. Nothing. They get back in the car, and hear “meow”. Now they’re starting to worry. They look all through the car, then think, I’ve heard about this, maybe it’s in the engine, or up in the wheel well!. Kim Googles it, finds all these stories of cats going under the hood by the warm engine, starts to freak out. They open the hood, look all over, under, through, etc. Nothing. Now they’re afraid to drive off. Who to call? Animal Control? Fire Department? They call the Lincoln Park Police. Dispatcher listens to Kim, then says, ok, we’ll send an officer over. 5 minutes later, LPPD car shows up, followed by a second one. Kim explains, we’re not crazy, we’re not drunk, we’re not high, we hear this cat! So, they look all over the car, wheel wells, engine. Nothing. One keeps looking in the engine, the other starts looking around inside the car. “Meow”. Cop says, “I hear it!”, but still nothing. They finally say, there’s not much else we can do, but how about calling the nearby Honda dealer, maybe they know of more places to look in engine. Kim calls them, talks to service department. They said, we’ll send a mechanic over. 5 minutes later, he shows up. Looks all over the engine, climbs under the car, shining flashlight into all of the nooks and crannies from below. Nothing. He climbs in the driver’s seat, Kim’s in passenger seat, Emily’s in back. Looking under the dashboard, between the seats. Nothing. Then, “meow”. Mechanic says, “You know, that sounds like too perfect a meow. Are you sure you don’t have a toy or something like that in here?” They look through the seat back pockets, cup holders, then decide to check their purses again. Kim sees the little zippered pocket, opens it, and sees this little disk. “What the hell’s this?” “meow”. “AAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!”

    Mind you, the entire time she’s telling this, I’m laughing hysterically. Best birthday present ever!

    2. Drax*

      I read this at work and I had to leave my desk I was laughing too hard. You pranked her and got so many more people too

  301. TacoTsunami*

    My ex was an electrical apprentice, and got handed a box of (identical) couplings to sort into left and right-handed varieties. When he asked how was supposed to tell them apart, the foreman incredulously asked if he had gone to any of the classes at all and walked off. They let him sort (and re-sort and re-sort) his entire first day.

    1. jcarnall*

      This would only really be funny if he quit the next day and moved on to a better job.

  302. Sally Forth*

    Everyone in our small office was given little pots of orchids as a gift from our board of directors. Six months after the last bloom died, they were all on our windowsills, sans flowers. Our receptionist looked up how we could get them to bloom again, bought the orchid mulch, and repotted them for us.

    On April Fools (about two weeks later) she brought in a fresh plant with multiple blooms and replaced the orchid on one of our coworkers’ windowsills. The shock on the person’s face when she saw all the flowers was hilarious!

  303. Weyrwoman*

    In my second run through college, I had two kids who didn’t pay attention or even respect the teacher (who was taking time out of his regular fulltime job to teach us his skill) so I started pranking them to make them pay attention. Since it was a tech major, and these two were a particularly dense sort, asking them if I could “do something really quick to [their computers] to make them run faster” worked. Some quick keyboard shortcuts later I had re-enabled net send (an old command prompt thing on windows that let you create pop up windows on remote machines), and would send the kids messages commentating on whatever they were doing while not paying attention. One of them freaked out (“Nice bank account you’ve got there.” and “Is that your girlfriend’s facebook?”) and panicked by calling for the teacher saying he’d been hacked. The other kid asked me how I did it. My vote’s always gone for mission accomplished because they stopped mucking around on school computers after that.

    On the office side there’s one that the whole department loved but I had nothing to do with. A coworker was out sick for a week+ in the open office space we worked in. One of the other long-time employees that was friendly with sick!Coworker pranked Sick’s desk by setting up plastic sheeting on pvc pipes to make an enclosed room complete with roof and CAUTION tape hung over it. Another coworker decided that it wasn’t enough and put foam hands (like from a baseball game) all over anything they could – the chair wheels, the keyboard and mouse, the corners of the monitor, etc. Sick!Coworker returned, laughed, and worked out of their little fake biohazard room for a solid couple weeks before they got tired of it.

  304. Beth*

    My experience of pranks has been as an unwilling victom of people who enjoyed hurting and humiliating other people, and especially loved how calling their cruelty a “prank” meant they could do whatever they wanted and get off scot-free.

    I really love the online silliness, fake ad spots, etc., that now characterize April Fool’s Day — it’s funny and harms no one. MUCH better than spending the day dreading what kind of nastiness might be pulled on me, or on some other, more vulnerable person.

  305. Todd*

    My coworkers pulled a hilarious prank on me Monday! I was finishing something up in the morning and overheard them chatting about how good the donuts were. (For reference, our boss won a gift cert for a dozen donuts a month for a year a couple months ag0) I popped out and said “Donuts?” “They’re in the back room.” So I go on my silly rant “Geez, why would you put the donuts in the back room when you know I have the biggest sweet tooth in the whole office??” (which would, actually, be a good reason to keep them away from me). So we all head over there and I open the Jack’s Donuts box…to find a tray of VEGGIES and APRIL FOOLS written on the lid! I actually flinched upon seeing the broccoli. Then they brought out the real donuts they’d bought, and the whole room dissolved in laughter. One coworker was giggling so hard I thought she’d pee herself. And I hadn’t noticed till later but they were recording video of the whole escapade. Best April Fool’s Day I’ve had in years!

  306. queenbeemimi*

    Here’s one that went deeply awry:

    Years ago, when my mother worked in state government, she and her friend were working late and decided, as a prank on the rest of the office, to change the brightness and contrast on the computer monitors so they were completely dark (obviously this was back when monitor brightness/contrast were adjusted using external controls like buttons or wheels; you couldn’t do this on a 2019 computer).

    When they came in the next morning– running late, as usual– they found that office management had freaked out, assuming the monitors were broken, and called in the capital to investigate whether there had been sabotage or a power surge. The state threw out and replaced a dozen perfectly good monitors. Some of them had been brand new.

    My mom and her friend never confessed what they’d done, and I have grown up someone who does not pull pranks.

  307. DreddPirate*

    Not a workplace prank, but the pledge-master at my fraternity used to give a pledge a bag of assorted colored sprinkles and one match, then send them into an unlit room and tell them they had 10 minutes to sort the sprinkles by color.
    (One guy actually took off his t-shirt and made a torch)

  308. Mrs. H. Kenway*

    Oh, I’m late! But I love this story. This one was my mom, but it’s one of my favorite pranks of all time.

    My mom was an ER nurse (she’s retired now). She worked for a large private hospital on Miami Beach for a long time, and the overnight shift–her shift–were a pretty wild crew, as ER staff tend to be, IME. One night, all the nurses got together and put an O2 tank in one of the beds, covered it with blankets, and drew a smiley face on a blown-up glove to look like a face. Then they put a winter hat on top of the fingers, so it looked like a person if you didn’t look too hard. They ran a couple of EKG wires from the machine to under the blankets, and they were ready to go.

    At the nurse’s station was, of course, a row of monitors with the ekg readings of patients in real time. The nurses turned one of them on–the one corresponding to the dummy’s room–and, when they heard the doc (I’ll call him Joe, he was a great guy who loved pranks) coming, set it to a teaching program that would run a V-Fib reading (basically, that would she the patient having a heart attack or about to have one. It was v-fib or v-tach, I don’t recall exactly, so if I’m not correct, medical pros, trust me–they had it right, even if I don’t!), designed for medical students etc. to learn to recognize such danger signs.

    They all stood there chatting, waiting. Even the nurse who was supposed to be checking the monitors turned away (and I promise, there were NO patients there that night, it was very slow).

    Suddenly Joe catches sight of the monitor. He yells, “CODE!” at the top of his lungs, *vaults himself over the nurse’s station wall,* (it was a half-wall) and tears off for the room, screaming as he goes to get the cart, get ready, all hands, etc. The nurses follow at a slow trot.

    In the room, Joe shrieks, “WHERE ARE YOU? CODE! CODE, DARNIT!” [language edited] as he grabs the crash cart and paddles for the defibrillator and starts frantically rubbing them together. The nurses gather around the dummy and just stand there, waiting, trying to hide their grins. “CLEAR! CLEAR!”

    He’s just about to put the paddles on the dummy when he realizes what he’s going on. My mom said he stood there for a few seconds, impotently holding the paddles, looking back and forth between the bed–the ridiculous smiley face of the blown-up glove–and the grinning nurses, before yelling, “YOU MOTHER—-ERS!” and practically falling to the ground with laughter.

    They kept the deflated smiling glove tacked to the bulletin board for a while, if memory serves.

    They used to prank each other all the time there, but that’s the only one I really remember.

  309. ProcrastinationGoals*

    I thought of another one!

    One of our vendors for cybersecurity products (we’re an IT company) sent out a little promotional item that was similar to those cards that you open and they play music, but it had a little screen that played a short promo video for the cybersecurity company. Well, one of our techs, a bright young thing, for want of a better word “hacked” the card and changed the video. He then proceeded to email our sales contact for the vendor and said he had improved their promo item. He attached a video of the card being opened and rickrolled them hard. We later heard that our sales contact loved it and had sent it to all the staff in both their Aussie and American offices.

  310. Sack of Benevolent Trash Marsupials*

    I’m really late to this but the only office prank I have ever experienced was at a family-owned business that used to give out a frozen turkey to every employee for Thanksgiving. They gave out each frozen turkey in a white plastic bag.

    One of the salesman would come around that day and shoot the breeze in your office, holding his turkey, and then at some point in the conversation, would say, “Think fast!” and toss the big white bag at you – which would make you scream and dodge what you were sure was 15 pounds of frozen turkey, but turned out to be a bunch of wadded up newspaper, which would bounce harmlessly on the ground while you were cowering out of the way.

    He got me the first year, and after that, it was fun to watch the newbies react.

  311. Thundersnow*

    One of my co-workers was incredibly into the band One Direction, so a few years back some of my officemate bought a paper Harry Styles mask and told her he was in the building. She got some pictures with “Harry” and hung the mask up in her cubicle. She was genuinely excited about the effort and about having more 1D memoribalia

  312. Tata*

    so back in the day, I was head wait at restaurant, a few of ladies would prank the new hostesses by sending them to convenient store next door with a empty plastic bag & to ask for steam for hot dog bun steamer. The convenient store clerks were in on it as well.

    1. jcarnall*

      You must have had really high turn-over of new “hostesses” when they realised the head waiter thought it was fun to waste their time and publicly humiliate them.

  313. the cat's pajamas*

    A friend who works in IT security keeps a sticky note on their monitor with “password123” written on it, and waits to see who is brave enough to comment on it. (Not their real password)

  314. M*

    One of the universities in my home city had a long-running annual student-led competition to “steal” the most interesting object. (Not an unusual thing for uni students to do, but wait for it:)

    Back in the ’70s, a group of students stole the national (not-from-the-USA) TV station’s weather-map. During live transmission. Like, literally: dressed up in maintenance uniforms with clipboards, marched brazenly through the station and onto the set, grabbed the weather-map (long enough ago that it was basically a large board on wheels that you could stick things to), and wheeled it off as the weatherperson cried “hey, wait, I need that!”.

    Various harder-to-prove stories include that they once stole the police chief commissioner’s office door, and that several students were once arrested trying to chisel out the foundation stone of a highly-recognisable internationally-iconic building.

  315. Bager*

    I once left my phone at the reception desk I worked at while I went to the toilet. When I came back, one of my coworkers had changed the phone background to a huge picture of a Pikachu.

    I still have that background. It’s adorable.

  316. Picker of Nits*

    We recently had a teapot maker go off the rails and decide that his teapots didn’t need proper labeling, and it turned into a whole thing that escalated up multiple levels of management in multiple departments while unacceptable teapots piled up past deadline.

    4/1, we got an e-mail from one of our nitpickers saying that another teapot maker had gone off the rails in a similar fashion, and grandboss proceeded to freak out… until co-worker sent another e-mail with a macro of the Most Interesting Man In The World saying “I don’t always make jokes on April 1st… just kidding, I do”. I devoutly hope grandboss hadn’t already started the escalation process.

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