Office Pranks

[Chuckpebble]

So I went out to pick up a sandwich and when I get back to my desk, I find that my cool Portal TF2 wallpaper has been replaced with a picture of two scantily clad dudes in a gay pride parade. And these are not the type of dudes what should be scantily clad, ever.

I know exactly who did it. And I'm gonna get him, but I don't want it to turn into a war where we change each other's desktops to increasingly NSFW images. I wanted to be a little more subtle.

So, I made this little CSS file that I'm going to set his browser to use:

p {color: pink !important;}
body {
background-image: url(http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:iE1rqVyNC8i1oM:http://www.blogcdn.com/www.urlesque.com/media/2009/03/penispacifier.jpg) !important;
background-repeat: no-repeat !important;
background-position: center center !important;
}

What do you think? Too much? Personally, I think its perfect. I'm quietly biding my time right now. Waiting till he leaves his computer. I'll recount the results after I do it.

So, to make this a real thread, anybody have any good office prank stories?

Love to hear 'em.

Edited March 26, 2010 by Chuckpebble
'young' instead of 'going', weird

[monkeyarmada]

Attack is the only defence in this type of office battle, it reminds me of Jason in our office. He's gay, so our small infantile brains figured he wouldn't appreciate what we as hetro men do, or somthing... We put a picture of some hot 'lady garden' action on his screen and he nearly puked on his keyboard.

Previous attempts of gay pride style pics didn't seem to worry him that much!

My best effort by far was supergluing my bosses mouse to his mouse mat (a glass one), his face was a picture.

[Armchair General]

A friend of mine once stapled another friend of mines' Road Traffic Accident jacket sleeves together so when he jumped out of the ambulance to put his jacket on at a collision, with the police, fire brigade and members of the public watching him, he epically struggled to get his hands out through the ends of his sleeves.

He felt he had to persevere, as he just thought he couldn't get it on properly, but ended up with just a few fingers poking through the end. Picture the scene, mashed up cars, people in pain, and a six foot five giant with the majority of his arms trapped inside small sleeves, working with just a few fingers poking out. Much mirth was had by all

He did take it off shortly after, but not before everybody had a good laugh. P.S. The ambulance service has the darkest humour of all the medical professions

I have never worked in an office so only have outside pranks to tell.

[syntheticgerbil]

Shit on Deborah's desk.

NisCkxU544c

[Xeneth]

The company I'm at now is not into the pranking, but I've certainly worked in environments where leaving your workstation unlocked was basically taboo and you'd get "punished" for it nine times out of ten.

I don't think any of the ones I've been a part of were particularly epic, but...

• Post-It or tape over the optics under the mouse. High result-to-effort ratio.
  
• The classic terrible desktop swapout of course, but the best version of that was when IT did it to a guy remotely while he was sitting at his desk!
  
• There was a cell phone charger that was really weird, it was designed to house the entire cord inside the AC converter somehow, so it resembled a mouse... The one-two punch was switching the coffee addicts brew out for decaf and replacing the mouse on the same morning...
  
• Turning the display on monitors upside-down. As I recall there was a shortcut in Windows XP that made doing this very simple, but I can't seem to repro. it right now.
  
• There was a bad tester that we were pretty sure was sleeping out in his car and using the bathrooms to take spit baths in the morning. He was always sort of socially creepy and tended to touch people at weird times, etc. Letting him go was a nerve wracking experience for my lead, who started to get really elaborate heartfelt stalker emails from the guy afterwards... which were of course actually sent by HIS boss!
  
• Someone called in sick and it was all too obviously to play the latest WoW expansion or some shite... The rest of us did OT that night, and every single item in or on his desk got wrapped up into a giant office katamari using the cords and supplies from his workstation. I wish we had taken a picture of it.
  

[Kreyszig]

During my vacation a few years back, some of my co-workers decided that my office needed more metal.

[Chuckpebble]

It worked pretty awesome.

I edited my co-worker's internet options before he got to work this morning. The sweet thing was that I put the CSS file on a network share so that I could edit it throughout the day.

I started off simple by just making his text pink. He actually asked if it was "breast cancer awareness day or something."

Later, I changed the font for all of his links to webdings. He called me and another dude into his office to show us. I easily shrugged this one off.

Finally, I used the code I showed above proper. It was hilarious. It sets a picture of a phallic ring pop for the background image of the body of every HTML page, dead center. The way it worked was great. It was the very first thing to load when you'd visit a page, so you'd get a quick subliminal flash of a penis pop before the rest of the page contents covered it up. He caught on with that.

He says, "I guess this is what I get for putting gay porn on Joey's desktop..."

[Xeneth]

Awesome update, this is an instant office prank classic, and shows off just how far a little web/admin know-how can take you!

[Moelman]

Yeah that's really a sweet idea, and you pulled it off very nicely

[Scrobbs]

Oo-er.

[Chuckpebble]

So here's a quick guide for the upcoming holiday...

I can show how to do this quickly in Safari and IE/Outlook express. Firefox has a user defined CSS file as well, but its buried in a really hard to find folder and you can't manually point it to any file you choose, so that kind of ruins the fun of it.

Step 1. - Create a new plain text file and save it as something innocuous with a .css extension. Then paste the following code into it.

/*Change text and background colors*/
/*body, p, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {
color: pink !important;
background-color: purple !important;
}*/

/*Change background image*/
/*body {
background-image: url(PASTE IMAGE URL HERE) !important;
background-repeat: no-repeat !important;
background-position: center center !important;
}*/

/*Change hyperlink font to webdings*/
/*a {
font-family: webdings !important;
}*/

Step 2. - Save the CSS file to a network share where you can easily edit it and your victim has access to it.

Step 3. - If you're using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, on the victim's computer go to:

Start > Control Panel > Internet Options

Click Accessibility

Check the box next to Format documents using my style sheet

Browse to and select your custom created style sheet.

If your target is using Safari, go to Preferences

Under the Advanced tab and browse to your file by clicking the drop down next to style sheet.

Alright, setup is complete! On to step 4. Unleashing hell!

Some basic understanding of code is required here. Everything in the file I had you create is actually commented out.

/*stuff*/ is used to comment out multiple lines.

To turn something on, simply uncomment a block of text by removing the /* before it and the */ after it.

Change text and background colors

Use anything you want here for the text color and the background colors. red blue green orange yellow etc. should all work fine. white on white should get a few WTFs. Be careful not edit anything but the actual color name, without adding or removing spaces.

Change background image

All you need to do here is paste a URL between the brackets in URL().

Find any suitable image, animated gif, what have you, and paste its actual URL in there. Good to go.

Change hyperlink font to webdings

This one is very noticeable. You can also use wingdings 1 2 3 etc., just make sure to enter the name exactly as its listed otherwise it might not work.

These fonts aren't available on a Mac so find appropriate ones.

Here's a sample: