April Fools

I like gentle pranks. Do you? Don’t have any for you this year but I had a humdinger of an idea two years ago but I forgot it. I’m dangerous I am. Considering I’m so forgetful, I rarely wait for the day to pull a prank. Take the time I picked up my sister (a fashion plate in those days) at the airport, dressed in pajamas, bedroom slippers and carrying a teddy bear -back in the days when you could still meet arriving passengers. Little kids loved it. My sister was mortified -precisely the desired effect. Last night I tried to pull a prank on my better half by changing his Google language settings to Pig-Latin but he didn’t even laugh.

5. Change the Language Settings on Google When a co-worker leaves her computer unattended for a minute, quickly go to Google’s home page and click on “Preferences.” There, you can choose the interface language of the search engine. Klingon, Hacker and Yiddish are all excellent choices, but Elmer Fudd is our personal favorite. As Elmer, you can use the Google Diwectowy, perform a Google Seawch or find out if you’re ‘feewing wucky.’

I doubt he would have been as smug if I’d changed them to Klingon or Hacker (it’s hard to find “English” to change them back).

What’s the best joke you ever pulled?

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  1. Marie-Christine says:

    My coworkers were similarly moderate when someone left her cell phone ringing off the hook. They changed the screen image to a shot of ‘turn it off’ written on the office board. And they only changed the language to German, not the tempting Chinese, so she could change it back. But then she was holding it, totally puzzled, saying ‘ash-tongue? why is it saying ash-tongue??’…

  2. Andrea says:

    I slimed a co-worker’s pencil drawer and phone handle with hair goo…it was glorious…he then put tape over the sensor in my mouse and it took about an hour to figure out what happened. He had the better prank, I felt like an idiot.

  3. /anne... says:

    I’ve worked in IT for too long :-(.

    Take a screen capture of their desktop, then expand it to cover the entire screen. It looks like their desktop, but nothing works…

    Change all their colours to black on black. This works best with UNIX/SUN systems.

    Oh, and my favourite – xroach. Again, runs on UNIX, but you get cockroaches which hide behind windows, and periodically scurry around the screen. I’ve never looked to see if there’s a Windows version.

    We did a lot of this on one Defence project, where we had to lock our workstations if we left our desks. Anyone who forgot was fair game.

  4. Alan says:

    I got duped twice today big time.

    I sell domain names as a little hobby. The prices average between $500 and $1,500. This morning I received an email request to buy onlymysite.com for $20,000. The buyer was anxious to do the deal fast so with the fish on the hook, I quickly set up a transfer on escrow.com. Then after four emails back and forth answering questions, my wife emailed the word “GOTCHA”

    Tonight when I finished dinner I went to open my laptop and the LCD screen looked shattered and the plasma was leaking behind the screen. Turns out my 14 year old daughter playing hooky from school for a belly ache had nothing better to do than to download the screen shot and disable my screen saver.

    Revenge will be sweet!

  5. kim owen says:

    I’m not so computer savvy as you all…but the best/worst joke I’ve seen was performed by a few guys at my old office. The subject of the joke (“Butt”) left the office for a short while. I don’t remember now what Butt’s transgression was, but my other co-workers REALLY wanted to get him. They took a piece of leftover pizza and duct taped it to the side of his desk, the side facing the wall. After a week or so Butt’s office began to reek SO bad nobody would go in there. It took him forever to find the source of the smell. I only wish I had been there when Butt found the rotten pizza taped to his desk. EEeeewwww!

  6. Anita says:

    Heh. Once, many years ago, a co-worker and I set up one of our colleague’s workstations to make a sound like a toilet flushing every time he hit enter. It drove him crazy trying to figure out how to make it stop. I just wish I remembered how we did it :-)

  7. Babette says:

    My husband would always drive to the store even though bike paths crisscrossed our area which made for a quick walk and only about a 5 minute jog, it took almost as long in the car.

    He drove off for supplies, I jogged the bike path with my car keys. When he parked the car and went inside I moved the car to the other end of the carpark and then stood behind a tree near the original spot. I stayed so as to intervene before he called police to report a stolen car.


  8. Malissa says:

    The best prank I pulled was when I was a manager at Dillard’s in the homelines area we had these decorative containers that looked like urns for cremated ashes. I took a mixture of newpaper and cigarette ash and placed it in one and asked my employees who took the urn as a return so I could get the content back to the rightful owner. That was so much fun. For this years prank I sent my husband who is away at bootcamp for the second time in his life a letter telling him that I found out we were having twins, I’m not but I am pregant with our first child. As of today’s letter he sent on the 5th of April he still has not received my letter. The longer it takes the more nervous I get.

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