Working a 9-5 office job office can be a drag. Luckily, the camaraderie among coworkers can make any job worth going to, especially if they engage in silly office shenanigans. Harmless pranks can liven up the office and make the work week fly by...even if they go too far.
These people took to Reddit to reveal the office pranks that will live on in infamy at their companies. Some of them probably took things too far, but others went just far enough for hilarity to ensue. Content has been edited for clarity.
He Was Clearly An Easy Target
“I connected a bluetooth dongle to the back of their PC with a keyboard and mouse. All day, I would just knock the mouse around or type random letters and stuff. He thought he was hacked by the Chinese (his literal words). Every time I would do it for prolonged times, he would call co-workers over to his desk and it would magically stop. I had to give it up when he called IT over.
I also popped off the ‘M’ and ‘N’ keys from his keyboard and switched them. You’d be surprised how many people are hunt and peckers. Of course, his password had an M in it as his name started with an M. So the day started off great with those windows error bloops and then him calling IT to reset his password.
Another year, I convinced a bunch of my friends outside of work to call one of our salesmen with bogus opportunities and to keep referring to him by the wrong name. His name was Derrick, so they asked for Darryl, Darnell, Dirk, Rick etc insisting that they spoke to him last week.
One year, our manager was out on travel so I replaced all of his personal effects in his office with images that I took and printed of his personal effects. So all that remained was his desk and chair and a bunch of images of a monitor, PC, Stapler, file cabinets etc. Good times.”
Not Your Normal Interview
“Not me but a coworker…we had this interview room which was a small office with two glass windows on adjacent walls so we could see in and out while people where interviewing. My coworker ‘Pattie’ is going to be interviewing a software developer at 10 am this morning. One of the facilities guys goes into the room and tapes a remote controlled fart noise machine under the desk.
Interview is about to start, Pattie and the guy walk in and sit down, start interviewing.
We all gather by a colleagues desk who has a good vantage point of the window. We can see some back and forth talking going on. Facilities guy presses the button and their back and forth conversation immediately stops.
They just sit there looking at each other waiting for each other to excuse themselves, we’re trying to keep it together.
They sort of resume talking again and get into a back and forth when the facilities guy jams the button again. Same thing; both staring at each other and we’re roaring at this point.
He does this a few more times and then on the final go he just holds the button down for 10 seconds. Pattie and the guy both turn red. We are laughing so hard by now that she looks through the window and sees us, knows something is going on, looks around the under the table, and sees the fart machine. Interview guy bursts out laughing when he sees that and she is going apologetic on us, apologizing to him and stuff. She did a second interview a week or two later and he eventually got hired as our new sysadmin/dev. It was a great place to work.”
The Missing Bronco
“We have a pay lot across the street from where I work and people will park there because our actually designated parking spots are two blocks away. The guy that comes around in the pay lot isn’t very consistent. Some days you can get away without paying because he never comes to check. A coworker of mine sat by the window and would watch for the meter maid. If the meter maid showed up he would let everyone parked there know they needed to pay on the app.
One day, I was the only one parked over there from our department and I asked him to check to see if I had a ticket. I’d driven my husband’s Bronco that morning, huge rust bucket you can’t miss. He saw there was no ticket. Well, my husband came and switched cars with me later that day leaving me my Hyundai. I asked my coworker to check to see if the Bronco had a ticket, knowing he would look out the window and find the Bronco gone. So he looks, and looks, calls another coworker over to look, and starts freaking out that the Bronco is gone. I was on the phone, but watched from across the office the look of panic come across his face. There’s now three people scanning the parking lot for my car. Soon he sends me an office chat and asks if I moved my car. I tell him no, knowing full well the car was no longer in the parking lot.
He continued looking frantic, all three people confirming no rust bucket Bronco in the parking lot, and he comes over and says, ‘Your car isn’t there. I swear! I think it’s towed or stolen I seriously don’t see it.’ Well guys, this is when high school drama classes paid off because I too, was able to freak out. I rushed to the window, ‘scanned’ the parking lot, said ‘Oh my God’ a few times, apparently did pretty well with making it believable. Carried this on a few minutes. I let the guy sitting next to me in on the ruse, so in the best panic voice I could muster I call over to the guy sitting next to me and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s really gone! Should I tell him now or later my husband switched cars?!’
Thats unfortunately also the day he stopped watching for the meter maid in my behalf.”
Paranoid Is An Understatement
“I shared an office with a guy who was pretty paranoid. For instance, one time the receptionist accidentally burned some popcorn, and he ducked low to the ground and put his shirt over his breathing-holes to protect himself from smoke inhalation. He used to plan exit routes. He once looked out our second-story window and mused, ‘If there’s a fire in this building, I’m going to use that pile of pallets down there as a crumple zone.’
He refused to throw bloody nose tissues in the regular trash because they were a biohazard, so he kept them in his desk drawer until he could find a safer way to dispose of them (yes). He had like four weapons at home in case the government tried to take his weapons away. He was a 9/11 truther. He would deliberately watch videos of people getting maimed and killed to desensitize himself. He took one semester of Capoeira in college and thought he was a martial arts master, often practicing moves like Mac from Always Sunny.
Anyway, one time I noticed that the company hired a guy to come install security cameras at our building. With my boss’s permission, I bought a fake security camera and installed it in our office late at night, pointing right at his desk.
He came in the next day and was noticeably upset. He tried to laugh it off like ‘Haha, big brother’s watching us.’
I just said, ‘Haha, yeah.’
But then it kept nagging at him. He was like, ‘Are you okay with this?’
I was like, ‘Well yeah, I don’t plan on doing anything wrong, so.’
So then he gets up and he says, ‘Well I’m going to do this!’ and he closes the office door partially such that the corner of the door blocked the line of sight to his desk, and he sat back down.
So I texted my boss and said, ‘He blocked the “camera” with the door.’ So seconds later, my boss appears, and he asserts his dominance by opening the door back up while staring right at my coworker.
So my coworker says, he really says, ‘Actually, I did that on purpose because I don’t appreciate being spied on while I’m working!’
My boss says, ‘Why? What’s the problem?’ and then we both start playing the if-you-have-nothing-to-hide angle pretty hard.
Sensing that we were starting to suspect he had something to hide, he started to get defensive and finally exclaimed, ‘Sometimes I like to pick my nose, okay? And I don’t want people taking footage of it!’
I got my coworker to angrily tell our boss that he picks his nose.
I couldn’t have dreamed for a better outcome to that prank.”
A Well-Timed Prank!
“I’m not usually a prankster, but I did get one guy good. He was known as a major prankster. He had this fancy car that he mentioned to me at an earlier contract, but he hadn’t told me what it was because he was trying to keep his contract prices secret and the car would have had people curious.
On the current contract, he would usually come to work in beat up Land Rover, and as it was night shift, if he parked in the roadway near the worksite gates, his habit was to leave side lights on. One night, I saw a Triumph Stag parked with side lights on. At the time, it was considered a fairly fancy car. On the way down to the platform (we were doing renovations to the platforms at Kensington), I pondered on what to do if he was there. I had checked there was no sign of the Land Rover, so that would mean the Triumph was almost certainly his.
As I spotted him on the platform, moving a heavy paving slab, the idea came to me. Walking up to him, I said, ‘Hi Kevin, you didn’t park your Land Rover round the back, did you?’
‘Err, no I didn’t,’ and the way he reacted to my mention of the Land Rover made me pretty certain the car was his.
‘Oh good, if you had done, you probably wouldn’t be able to get it out any time soon, some idiot came out of the Tiara hotel across the way, and he plowed his jag into a Triumph Stag right outside the gates, never seen such a tangled mess.’
He goes white as a sheet, and almost drops the paving slab in his hurry to put it down safe, and starts hurrying away. Before he got off the platform, I couldn’t hold the laughter any longer, he realized he’d been had and came back. He was a bit cheesed off, but was a good enough sport that he could take a joke as well as dish them out. He then explained why my joke caused such an strong reaction. In the year he had the car, it had spent half that time being repaired due to two incidents, one while sitting at a red light, and once while parked. And he had just got it back from the last repair! Lucky timing for my joke.”
CEO Versus COO
“I used to work in a small business that was run by two best friends in their late 50s. It was a very chill business, and they had fantastic senses of humor. It was like having two squabbling brothers who were both very talented in their respective fields. The two of them had a yearly ritual where they’d play pranks on each other on their birthdays.
On the COO’s birthday, the CEO gave him fake documents that made it look like he’d sold the company to a random dude in India. CEO pretended to be incredibly enthusiastic and naive, saying how ‘giving all our customer data to India will help our business!’ COO responded by casually moving CEO’s wheelchair to the other side of the room until he apologized for stressing him out.
On the CEO’s birthday, the COO changed the workplace safety policy to require that the CEO had to wear water wings, a bicycle helmet, and several balloons ‘for visibility.’ The CEO, who had a wheelchair already, was a super good sport about it and kept annoying the COO by pretending to be significantly more disabled than he actually was. This went on for the entire day, until the COO got so annoyed that he reverted the safety policy.”