What's a good way to prank your coworker?

abbadon420@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 119 points –

I got pranked with this website: https://updatefaker.com/

I recently switched from manual labor to office labour and learned the hard way to lock my screen :)

In hindsight it was hilarious, but I waited for maybe 20 minutes before I got suspicious. How can I take revenge?

90

Take a screenshot of their desktop. Set that as the background image. Right-click the desktop and uncheck View -> Display icons on desktop.

Also auto hide the task bar and move it to another edge.

What you do is take a screenshot of the desktop, rotate it 180° in MSPaint, set it as the background, hide and move the taskbar, hide desktop icons, and set the screen rotation to landscape flipped in the display settings. You'll get a desktop that appears normal but can't be interacted with, and a cursor that moves upside down and backwards. Rotate your victim's mouse the wrong way around if they're gullible and they'll think the mouse messed everything up,

Your just pranking the IT guy that will have to fix it. A user can't be expected to navigate a context menu.

Maybe the IT guy was the intended victim. You always want several layers separating you from your crime!

Here's one I witnessed in an office about 25 years ago. Some engineers filled a plastic 35mm film canister with a bunch of the waste paper from a three-hole punch. That's basically the little white circles of paper. Then they took a can of compressed air and, with the cap mostly on the canister, slowly filled the canister with super-cooled air from the compressed air canister. Then they fully sealed the cap and went to talk to the mark. They placed the canister nearby -- on the mark's desktop computer, I think. Just out of sight. To avoid arousing suspicion, they stayed and talked to him for 30 seconds or so. Then they walked off to go back to work (and watch the prank unfold from a distance).

That little canister sat there for a while, with the super-cooled air slowly warming to room temperature. As you know, the molecules of cold gasses are very close together, and they start to expand outward as they warm. So when this canister got warm enough, there was enough pressure inside to pop the lid off and distribute the little white paper circles in a perfectly random pattern in a circle about six feet around the mark.

It was glorious.

Ctrl + Alt + up arrow key sets the monitor output to be upside down.

I also am a fan of making the cursor huge and turning on pointer trails.

This happened to me. When you didn't know this is possible in windows, it takes a surprisingly long time to fix, but there's no real damage done.

These are good pranks with the right level of irritating. They make it hard to work but not impossible to do the work

If you are close you can plug in a second wireless mouse and mess with it occasionally.

If they don't lock their screen, the old take a screen shot of the desktop and make it the background is good.

@ryathal back in the day, when most wireless mice and keyboards had those little dongles, and people used to keep their computer tower either on the corner of their desk or under it, I used to have a prank war going with a coworker. We used to do dumb shit like fill a shit load of little cups up with water and set them everywhere in their office, or glitter/confetti in things that when you opened them it went everywhere. Or wrap everything on the desk in foil or saran wrap type things.

Coworker was older than me, and not the most computer literate guy. I'd go into his office, and disconnect the dongle, while he was away from his desk. Watching him rage about his piece of shit computer was always great amusement.

We did this years ago, we'd also SSH into random computers and make them say stuff when we were bored.

  • Screenshot their desktop
  • hide all icons
  • set screenshot as desktop background
  • watch them die inside as nothing works, not even a restart.

Optional step:

  • put your wireless mouse receiver in their computer and subtly click occasionally, or move when they move. Has to be subtle enough for them to question their sanity for a few hours.

I managed to do the above once. Worth it.

I did that with the bonus of flipping the screenshot upside down on photoshop first. Then flipped his screen.

That's a great addition. We used to screenshot it with an application open so they would keep trying to close the application. I had a coworker restart their computer several times before he realized what was going on.

Don't forget to move the taskbar to the other side of the screen and set to auto-hide.

DON'T do what I've done a couple of weeks ago - landed me my first HR meeting ever :D

I had to use my coworkers (lady around 50, not too clever with the computers) computer on remote desktop. As I was about to close it, I thought to myself "Perfect setup for a joke". On her computer, I went to https://pranx.com/hacker/ and put in on full screen. Literally like 30s later, our IT guy (he's in the same room as me) get a phone call and all I can hear is shouting in the earpiece. I say to him don't worry, I know what's this about, I'm going to sort it out. I went downstairs and boss's wife is running past shouting that we need to phone the police, I walk into the lady's room and she's hysteric. I say cool down, it's a joke.

Safe to say, they were not laughing (probably the fact that I still was, wasn't helping my case :D)

A very French joke: We used to use their email client and send to the whole team "Hey, I feel generous so tomorrow morning I will bring croissants for everyone. Look forward to it!"

The person would get plenty of "thank you" emails in reply and discover the trick. It was a small office so usually the person would bring the pastries. Yum!

We did this too, always a lesson in locking your computer. "Hey team I'll be buying lunch today since I forgot to lock my computer!"

Just make sure it's a small group and not 20 hungry people

Croissanting is an art form.

In my previous job we had the Constitution of Croissanting printed in every open space, because ignorance of the law is no excuse.

An old boss of mine would find people who left their computer logged in and would send an email to the department from it saying "I love you all so much!"

I worked in a different office and didn't realize that's what was happening. I just thought the Russian guy was happy to be in America.

I like this. It's wholesome

One day when I was visiting home office I ran into him in the elevator. My lead introduced me to him. I blurted out, "Oh the guy who sends the I love everyone!" emails.

He promptly started swearing and cursing our manager and saying what things he would do to him if he caught him in a dark alley and ranted for the duration of the elevator ride. Then shook my hand and said "Nice to meet you!" and went on with his day.

If you have fixed desks, put a piece of sticky note over the laser on their mouse. That or use the monitor settings to rotate their screen 180 degrees when they aren't around.

CTL + ALT + arrow keys will do it for ya

Not sure that this is a universally available hotkey for rotating screens. Certainly doesn't work on my laptop.

Alt + F4 works though.

I think it only works with external displays specifically running on an Intel integrated GPU, iirc

Small post it note over the sensor under the mouse.

Draw something unexpected on it for extra fun. Like dickbutt.

  1. Wait until you have to fart while coworker is away from desk.
  2. Position sphincter directly above the tube in the office chair.
  3. Lower chair as far as it will go.
  4. Fart as you raise the chair as high as it will go, sucking the gassy shit particles into the tube.
  5. Walk away.
  6. Watch the carnage when coworker sits and lowers the chair.

Isn't the exhaust hole is in the bottom?

Depends on the chair, I suppose. It definitely worked on the chairs I had in the US Navy back in 2006.
It doesn't matter though, you're still farting in their chair either way.

Put some tape over the optical sensor on their mouse. Bonus points if you print out a little dickbutt picture or something.

Here's one I started planning but never got around to actually pulling off. My team had recently moved from Windows to Mac, had a habit of leaving for lunch at the same time and for some reason never, ever locked their screens.

The prank would go like this: I'd grab a copy of a classic Mac emulator, a System 7 disk image and copies of all the Adobe apps circa 1980-whatever, so that they would come back from lunch one day to find all their beefy new Macbook Pros "downgraded" to looking like this, complete with working Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.

I deeply regret not doing this.

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !minivmac@www.gryphel.com

@rikudou@lemmings.world Looks like the URL structure of the site fooled your bot. Maybe an edge case to ignore, but do you think it's worth confirming that the link points to a Lemmy instance?

I work at an office which uses Macs. If you have terminal access to a coworker's machine, you can enter say "I'm watching you" and their computer will speak the text. Had a lot of fun with that until they figured out it was me.

Connect a 2nd wireless mouse keep it at your desk let the fun begin

Buy a live lobster, cut the rubber bands off, and hide in their lunch bag.

That’s a big lunch bag if you can hide in it. Hope it keeps you safe from that angry lobster.

Have any other monitors available?

If you do, literally change the monitor and hide the other one. Smaller the better.

Don't - one person's pranking is another person's bullying.

If you can't take a prank, you shouldn't pull a prank.

Edit: apologies, I misunderstood that you were pranked first. I'm not a prank fan but you obviously have cause to retaliate. I'll leave my original comment below.

This doesn't make sense. "It's just a prank bro… Can't you take a joke?"

If the person being pranked doesn't find it 'funny' what is it?

You just gave me an awesome prank to pull on my wife. Thanks!

We'd change their desktop background to something stupid

I am not sure this works anymore or if it ever did since I heard about it years ago, but when you send an email to someone on something like gmail who doesn't use some form of adblocker, be sure to put some hidden text in whatever color the background of their client is. Apparently they'll eventually start seeing ads for that specific thing you hid in the email since those emails are most certainly scanned so you can get targeted ads (especially gmail and most likely outlook as well).

You probably need to receive more than one email about a subject before you start getting targeted ads

Forgot to mention the part about it being something you need to constantly do. Thanks for the heads up.

In our office, any time someone leaves their screen unlocked, we turn everything upside down in the display settings. Good way to remind people to Win + L when they get up. 😆

Hit my boss with tellyourpartner.org earlier this week, a website that anonymously texts your partner with a list of STIs you select and a suggestion to get tested. Be careful tho it kinda back fired and he messaged a few of his exes lmao