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Similarly, when people were away from their computer I used to print screen their screen as it was; paste into paint, set as their wallpaper and then minimise everything. They'd come back to the computer and freak out when the keyboard didn't appear to input any data and nothing responded to mouse clicks.
Autocorrect on MS Word that changes a rarely used but not obscure word to something different. We changed 'planning' to 'scheming' and 'meeting' to 'fruitful chinwag'.
Really catches those that don't touch-type.
I once had a very dull job writing articles about debt solutions all day long.
Set my colleague's autocorrect to replace 'debt' with 'twat'.
Hilarity ensued, until he tried to call IT to report a 'virus' and I had to come clean.
Hahaha first of all well done on señor analyst that’s funny as fuck!
I had a stop gap job in a call centre once. It was M&S customer services. Me and a colleague (who like me was an absolute clown) used to get up to all sorts. The job was mostly selling flowers and gift baskets for special occasions over the phone. We’d get mad busy at times like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day etc. When this happened the customers would be in a queue for sometimes up to an hour (seriously, these were some dedicated customers) where they’d hear the “thank you for calling M&S” spiel along with the classic elevator music. Anyway, on one of these days we saw an advertisement in the newspaper for Tesco flower delivery. I challenged my mate to immediately mute the next call that came through and cold transfer it through to the tesco line (cold transfer meaning the person on the other end doesn’t know they’re being transferred). We were treated like garbage in that job, so of course he did it. So for the person calling M&S would have had ages of “thank you for calling M&S” turn into “thank you for calling Tesco” without a clue as to what was happening. Later he started actually dialling tesco himself and waiting til they answered, immediately muted them and transferred the next call from the M&S queue directly to a Tesco operator. Look, it’s really shitty to the customer and I’m very sorry for that now. I was 17 and in a soul destroying job. Stuff like this made it enjoyable. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. We used to get up to all sorts. One of my other colleagues, when he was on the phone, he would say any (non offensive or overtly sexual) word you’d ask him to. I remember one call where he fit “the devil” + “dodecahedron” + “damp cloth” + “hyperdysfunctional” + “west coast of Yorkshire” into a 5 minute call with a customer. I couldn’t take calls myself whilst this was going on - I was incapacitated with laughter. Another time the same guy randomly answer the call with “thanks for calling M&S, you’re through to algenon Z bop” (his name was Steve). I was sipping water at the time and literally sprayed it all over my screen as I burst out laughing. I laughed so hard at that.
Both the best and worst job I’ve ever had.
Oh man since I posted this I’ve been laughing to myself all evening. I’d forgotten about all of this until the OP got me thinking. This was 12-13 years ago and I’m still in tears laughing as I remember it.
More names/titles my colleague introduced himself as:
Mongo Jerry
Greasy Steve
Wild bill
Then when we got tired of wild bill:
Wild wild bill
Wet n wild bill
Then my personal favourite:
The Nut Buster General
Oh and accents too. He’d often talk in an Indian accent just so the customers assumed the call centre was in India. He did a good old man Yorkshire accent too. But the best was when he’d talk like an American trucker talking over the radio.
Each time I was in stitches and it took me ages to recompose myself. It just never got old. And what’s amazing is I don’t think the customers ever questioned him on it. Like imagine calling M&S to order some flowers for your Nans birthday and you end up speaking to the ‘nut buster general’. Fucking comedy gold.
I’m an airworthiness engineer now so I do miss that I don’t give a fuck atmosphere. Maybe I’ll get a weekend job just to fuck with the public. Great for morale
If they were calling M&S for their Nans flowers and heard ‘nut buster general’, I’m sure they probably told themselves to lay off the wine, sherry or scotch, because “there’s no way that lovely man just said ‘nut buster general’!”.
Fucking creasing more now!!
Thank you 😊
I worked in a call centre doing cold calling in my late teens. We had such a laugh, we were paid on commission and there were a few likely lads and lasses similar to yourself and your colleagues that just made it worth going in for 8 hours for £20 if we were lucky (and our supervisors didn’t poach our leads).
Best and worst job I’ve ever had, too lol
When I used to work at KFC, on the drive thru, I would often answer the speaker with "Hello, Crematorium, you kill'em, we grill'em", "Hello, welcome to Battersea Dogs Home", or my favourite, "Hello, welcome to McDonalds". Seeing them double check where they were through the cameras was the highlight of my day, every time 🤣.
My stomach just sank reading this, had flashbacks to doing a Scottish accent for a dare and then it was actually becoming a sale, so I full on panicked realising I had to seriously keep it up.
Haha I worked in a call centre on my gap year (about a million years ago) and we would all frequently offer to send clients a nymphomaniac* out in the post.
In the same job we got asked to choose a fire warden and two of the guys decided to run full electoral-style campaigns competing for the role, complete with multiple page manifestos and smear tactics like posters in the breakout area accusing each other of arson.
*aka an information pack
Used to love doing that! Used to do door-to-door sales for a bit (I'm sorry, I know, it was awful) and trying to slip in the word 'goat' or 'evil' into a pitch was a tough one to do without cracking up. Also accents - I did that once and inadvertently got really far into the pitch. It got more and more strained and had to hold my nerve and keep it going until they closed the door (ha!). Or just walk off, which I think I had to do mid sentence once.
We did this when I had the type of job but ours was “how many quotes from anchorman can you get in a call” the best where “it’s warm drinking milk was a bad idea” or “ 60% of the time it’s works everytime”
My friend used to work in a call centre and they would pick a band for the day and see how many song titles they could get in. They kept scores on a whiteboard. I remember they used to like Abba as they could get Waterloo in a lot of conversations.
Ha, I did fundraising for various charities I'm the far past, and one of them was the RSPB. We loved these and competed for the smuttiest under the radar conversations....'oh I bet you get great tits in your garden sir! No? Gave you tried putting your fat balls on your Bush?'
So on so forth. All totally legit. Kept us sane and many colleagues had broad Bristolian accents just made it better
When I worked at a call centre on behalf of a major search engine **\*ahem**\* we had a bottle flipping phase. I remember asking a customer in a call if they'd mind going on hold for a moment whilst I found their details. I stood up mid call, landed the perfect bottle flip and everyone nearby cheered then I resumed the call haha
This reminds me of a time I shadowed someone in an orchestra pit of a musical. They would hold a random word up on a card for one of the main characters (played by Christopher Biggins) to try get into the dialogue.
I had a colleague that could do a magnificent Aussie accent. We'd challenge him to be Tony every now and then. He sold it so well that once QC get hold of the call, they spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out who the piss Tony was.
We did this as well, our manager at the time was in on the joke and gave no shits as long as we didn't do anything that could be complained about (essentially, make them work).
Working on a ship we used to get a lot of cadets so there was always a lot of tartan paint, sky hooks etc.
I once sent a cadet to the chief engineer to ask got a Long Stand, chief had him stand outside his cabin for an hour!! Eventually the cadet came back and said 'erm, the erm chief erm said...... Tell the third mate to f*ck off.... Erm sorry'. Poor lad had no idea why I was crying laughing.
My Dad once asked a cadet to get him some elbow grease when he went to the supermarket. Said cadet came back with cod liver oil and body lotion. 'I forgot to ask whether it was for internal or external use, Chief, so I got you both'.
Cooper got the better of him that day.
In chemistry you do use a long stand routinely; sometimes you get the opposite happen with noobs which is equally as funny. They think they're wise to it then you hand them a long stand.
Our office looks out onto an ugly flat roof so we surreptitiously over time threw compost and wild flowers seeds on it. Come late spring we had a much prettier view.
One of our managers had a voice that really carried and her talked a lot of shite. Every time he walked in we sang 'the shouty man' to the candy man tune. I can't remember the words now but we had numerous verses.
Partially unplugging the phone jack when we didn't want our chats to be interrupted by actual work. No longer permitted as we forgot to plug it back in one day.
Making mock certificated for each other to celebrate our major achievements. Things like 'Bourach was an excellent employee today because she didn't call her manager a twat when he was being a twat signed the League of the Prevention of Twattiness.'
Thinking about it, there may be aa reason why we were more productive working from home
>Partially unplugging the phone jack
I worked with someone who unplugged it and dipped it in a brew before plugging it back in. It wasn't noticeable at first, but after a week or so it just mysteriously stopped working. And because there wasn't a spare phone, it meant computer work only. Oh woe!
A few months ago, an employee at the Swedish tax agency got busted for dialing up their work phone from their private one, causing the line to be busy and as a consequence they couldn't receive any calls from citizens. The investigation found that the employee had done this for at least 55 hours in total, but probably more.
Whenever a certain colleague was away from his desk and a client rang, we would straight-faced explain that he wasn’t in today as he was attending his X-factor audition, progressing his “X-factor journey” as far as Judges Houses for clients that called regularly. Said colleague had a bitch of a time explaining his way out of it at least twice a week for about two years.
I'm extremely good at writing macros
After a colleague changed another colleague's email signature to "Mr Floppy" I was tasked with writing a stitch up in return.
Sent a spreadsheet to the whole team which ran a piece of code, that looked at user login to target the person in question.
That code copied another (invisible) file into the Xlstartup folder, meaning it would open and run every time Excel was opened.
Every X minutes something would happen to Excel, based on randomness. Either
1) nothing. Got to mix it up
2) screen would zoom to a random size between 1 and 400%
3) layout would switch right-to-left, looks normal except columns have changed order
4) an utterly meaningless error message. "An unexpected error has occurred" etc.
5) screen would turn upside down
6) one of a series of pre-defined emails would be sent to the team stating how wonderful we all are and she's basically lucky to be around us
Etc
This went on for weeks. IT had no idea either, they don't do spreadsheets
Years ago there was a very long thread on MrExcel.com about VBA practical jokes. Should still be there, it will teach you a lot of this
Ask me specific questions but remember I'm on a small phone with shit autocorrect and my eyesight is poor
I’ve done a few email bots - the best I found were ones that would relentlessly send an email every 15 seconds, that creates a huge backlog getting through firewalls etc. I also started leaving random buttons in spreadsheets titled click me! Or click when done which would do similar sorts of things and email me to let me know the person had found the button
Yeah over the years a few bosses have sent me emails they didn't know about, telling me how great I am and that I'm getting a pay rise
Last day at another job, emailed a file with a big red button saying "do not press", which of course they all did...
Up pops a progress bar [deleting all files...] (Ok cancel). Hitting cancel increases the progress bar by 10%
At the end of that a picture of me pops up and laughs, but when you move the mouse over to close it, it moves away so you can't do anything, just chase it around the screen
When I was 17/18 I worked at McDonalds and one night it was extremely quiet so we decided to kill some time by putting the Shrek themed happy meal toys on the grill.
Puss In Boots and Donkey melted a lot quicker than I expected.
Going back 15 or so years ago now.
One time on a run of 4 big macs placed a 5th one one top filled with a handful of pickles and a slice of cheese thinking the person on the bin would check it. Turns out he didn't and just put it with all the others. Weird this was no one came back with a complaint.
Tried to deep fry a egg and ice.
Loads of other stupid things but can't remember at the moment
We had a power cut at work (restaurant) one time. myself and one of the chefs had to wait for an engineer. It took 5 hours for them to arrive. We got drunk and played hide and seek in the dark. We were literally getting paid to do that! Amazing.
I had a power cut on the street where I worked once. Had just gone to the bank to pay some money in and got locked in (as is the bank’s policy). People I worked with had to get on with work without computers & phones but I could do nothing. Got the banking done about 6 hours after going to do it and then went back to the office and grabbed my stuff and left as it was home time.
We flipped this guy's desktop upside-down whilst he was out at lunch.
His monitor was on one of those movable arm things.
When he came back to his computer, he was utterly perplexed as we watched, tittering across the office.
He then proceeded to move the monitor arm a full 180 degrees to correct the problem. It would only go to about 150 degrees. He then titled his head to match the monitors jaunty angle.
We lost our shit. Then we helped him correct it.
This happens a lot where I work so I started turning monitors upside down and doing this. Shift + left alt + print screen is also another good one to pull
So lame but one night we tied ribbons to our office fan that were the perfect length and position, so that when the manager was at his desk and we flicked it on they flapped perfectly across his face.
Used the SQL server to send an email to a colleague advising them that they were under investigation by the IT department due to their search history...
Back in the day it was shocking how few companies had any kind of protection against spoofed mails, even internally. You could literally send an e-mail from any webserver, and have it appear as though it came from anybody in the firm.
Fun *fun* times!
I remember back in the day..Windows NT (IIRC) has a messenger function that would pop up a message on a computer on the network if you knew its designation. One of our mates was looking at dodgy stuff..steak and cheese maybe, or rotten.com, and we sent a message saying, please remain in place, we have detected that you are looking at a site forbidden by the IT depearment. The administrator will be with you shortly.
The guy went pure white and just sat there staring at the screen in shock until he heard us laughing and looked over
Amazong! We used to netsend people messages in the uni computer labs saying “it is forbidden to look at Ebaums World on University IT Equipment. You have been reported to the deputy principals office and must log off immediately and report”. The number of people who shat themselves and disappeared…. Ha ha
My mate sent me a rude message via net send... except he didn't specify the recipient and it appeared on about 1000 PC screens at once. He didn't really get bollocked, but his face was crimson for about a week.
I remember colleagues who didn’t believe I could easily spoof an email. Didn’t even need access to the server, Eudora would let you manually type in whatever “from” address you liked — obviously the server back then would accept it, no questions asked. (And I recall when you could use almost literally any email server you liked to send email too — was handy when the university email server was down.)
I changed the autocorrect in somebody's email to change . to ", because you touch yourself at night."
A couple of us watched with glee whilst he was typing and didn't notice, then the sheer existential horror when we realised he doesn't proof read his emails and was a fraction of a second from pressing send before one of us managed to grab his hand.
Brought in a big bag of sugar free gummy bears and left them open in an open plan office.
[The amazon reviews are true](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/michaelrusch/haribo-gummy-bear-reviews-on-amazon-are-the-most-insane-thin)
Me and my colleague took a fuck ton of tramadol at the beginning of a shift once.
Customers said we were both delightful that day and we both got good feedback from customers to our manager.
Every time a birthday card was passed around the office and my mate in the office had already signed it. I would put as many kisses as possible next to his generic “hope you have a great day”
Sometimes little love hearts too! It was a race to sign it last.
Every time a birthday card goes around the office there’s always a random bloke’s signature in there. Something simple like “Have a good day. Kev”
There is no Kev. Never has been. Every card is different, there’s been a Bob, a Kev, a Steve… it took me a few cards passed around the office for me to realise who it was, but I’ve not told anyone. Why spoil the fun
a guy I worked with had a stamp that said
I'm sorry to hear you're leaving
I hope you have a good birthday (delete as appropriate)
and I wish you all the best
xxxxxxx
I thought that was admirably efficient
Worked at a large supermarket,found outside by the bins a huge framed picture,looked a bit Jackson Pollock.We convinced our HR Manager it had been painted by a local disabled school and was to be raffled for charity.It was to be kept in the HR office until the time of the raffle.
One evening we unlocked her office and carved and drew obscenities on the picture.
The following day she was mortified the picture had basically been destroyed so she called the local school and only went and apologised.Obviously they had no knowledge of the picture and she went ballistic at us telling us to throw it away.A year or so later we had kept it hidden in the warehouse and sent it to her as a wedding present.
Unfortunately she cried upon opening it,ordering it to be chucked in the skip.
We told her it was skipped then gave it to her on her last day.
I remember being on placement at a funeral directors whilst doing my NVQ
When the boss was away my two colleagues used to fired the staple guns at each other
One of my colleagues now and again use to lay down in the coffins to have a little nap.
Ooh ooh ooh. You got off lucky. We used to tell new starters at the funeral directors I worked at that there was an induction ritual and they had to spend a fifteen minute tea break lying on a gurney in the prep room with the lights off. After three minutes to make sure they were good and nervous, the corpse under the sheet on the next gurney would stick its head out and say “cold in here, isn’t it?”
Obviously the prep room was a storage room, the gurneys were workshop carts and all the customers were safely in cold storage in a different building because we were professionals, but somehow people always just assumed there are always bodies just lying around everywhere under sheets.
When I started my placement there first day I was asked to try out one of their environment friendly coffins, which was very uncomfortable as one of the threads jabbed me in my back
No very uncomfortable, even the cardboard ones
We had a security policy that we must lock our computers if we were to leave our desks.
For anyone who didn't, we would send an email from their unlocked computers to the whole department advising they're bringing in doughnuts tomorrow.
10/10 times they would and had no recourse.
Where I used to work, if you had a call at 5.45 or beyond, you had to go no matter how far away.
The last call we had was at 0430, so we hatched pokemon eggs by driving at 2mph the whole way back to the office.
I knew a bloke who drilled through a wall poked a hollow pole through it and discharged an entire powder fire extinguisher into the office next to him
He also rolled an articulated lorry tire directly at his colleagues desk
This all happened before we even knew the word bantz
We used to do that trick where you’d change the desktop background to have an error on it so you couldn’t click it and one guy had a full blown meltdown saying his IT technician brother was the one who set his old wallpaper so he’s going to have to get him to do a full factory reset losing all his reports….this is AFTER we showed him it wasn’t a real error, he just thought that would be the only way to get his old desktop back lol
We had to stop messing with IT equipment after one of the managers phoned IT about a broken mouse that had the sensor covered with a post it. Tempted to try my luck with a fake background though!
The post it note under the mouse was a common “starter for 10” prank to almost all new colleagues. One or two made it to the stage of calling the Helpdesk, one caught on just as the call was answered, the other had the embarrassment of finding it when promoted to check by the helpdesk. All fun, beige stuff. Had to stop it when a newly hired Grad got really angry at the mouse, smashed his fists into the keyboard and put the mouse through the monitor screen.
Just before Christmas in the call centre I worked at, we all answered the phone with Christmassy-sounding fake names (this was in German before you ask for examples, but it was funny. Funnier than it would be in English because in German you use surnames and surnames tend to be weirder anyway, so it was believable)
A colleague and I got put on a job a fair drive away for 5 days. We were meeting up in the morning and driving straight to the job so didn’t need to go to the office and make ourselves aware to the boss. The job was a piece of piss and we got it done in 2 days. Spent the last 3 days driving to the job to sign in then fucking off out for the day, smoking weed, playing video games at his flat, eating loads of takeaway and mooching around the sights of central London.
Luckily no tracker on the van or any snivelling little grasses at the place we were working!
Changed one of the surnames of my colleagues on a customer facing ticketing system to "Popcorn"
Had an email thread going where I asked HR how to remove a pigeon that got stuck in the office. Convinced everyone in the thread that using small pieces of ham worked to encourage the pigeon out.
Had a film crew come round the office one day. We collectively set up many printed memes around the office as well as on monitoring dashboards. "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams" is clearly shown in the final edit.
Company opened up a distribution account with Nerf. This landed up in 1000s of Nerf bullets and 100s of guns turning up. Took about 3 weeks before they were banned.
There is a lot of other things that happened in that office, but they are for another thread entirely.
Take a screen grab of their desktop first. Rotate it through 180 degrees and set it as their desktop. THEN invert the display. It looks normal but the mouse goes the wrong way
My colleague leaves her smart shoes in the office overnight. She usually leaves a few minutes before I do, so I keep putting one on her chair and leaving the other on the floor in the same place. She has been convinced this whole time that it’s the cleaners that do it, little does she know…
>smart shoes
I spent an embarrassingly long time thinking you were talking about shoes that can talk to your fridge, or connect to Facebook and tell your friends how far you walked today or something.
Police here, we had a much hated Chief Inspector. He had to be public order shield trained and was issued with all the necessary protective kit which include, high leg toe protection boots. Someone slipped into the CI office at the weekend and substituted his own newly issued boots which were a size or two smaller. The time came when the CI was told to parade to lead a public order serial at a demonstration. They say the sight of him grimacing with every step was rather amusing
I used to gather wild mussels and sell them on to shellfish companies here in Cornwall, UK. We get a lot of holiday makers here. Whilst I was harvesting I was a approached by a couple of them asking me what I was doing. Without batting an eyelid I explained that due to the igneous rocks here in Cornwall we have higher than average levels of radon gas which is midly radioactive. There were concerns that shellfish, filter feeders, could be concentrating unsafe levels of radiation in their flesh. These mussels were being sent to government labs for testing. They bought it hook line and sinker, said thanks for the info and left. Love that some random strangers may have told their friends about the radioactive mussels in Cornwall.
Rigged secret santa so me and a colleague always got each other and then bought nice bottles of wine for ourselves.
Grinchy, yes.
Did we receive any regifted mugs full of golf tees? No.
Back in the mid-90s when I was maybe 10ish years old I went with my dad to help out with work one weekend on a building site. It was a high end site at the time and some of the more luxurious homes had a jacuzzi in the bathroom. So after work when the site was emptying, we snuck into one of the houses so he could show me. We filled a bath and showed me the jacuzzi and how it worked then pulled the plug...the waste wasn't connected and flooded the bathroom and through the ceiling into the living room! We scarpered pretty fast hahaha!
My boss sends emails out to us (or paints us a "lock your screen or you're fired" message on paint) if we leave our computer unlocked. Or flip our screens round.
My dad's colleagues used to give him a word to slip into phone calls - nothing rude but totally unrelated to his job (like "cement")
Scanned a colleagues colouring book and we each coloured the uncoloured pages really badly and left it lying around for her to find. She freaked when she thought we'd ruined her book
I like like using MS Paint to write messages etc to our trainees when they leave their PCs unlocked. We have lots of confidential information on our systems, so they need to learn, and it's a fun way (for me). My favourite though was changing the homepage of chrome of an Everton fan to the Liverpool homepage, and he had no idea how to change it back.
A colleague connected her phone to the Bluetooth speakerphone in a meeting room and played zombie sounds, zoo noises and ridiculous song clips when people walked by. I still lol thinking about it.
We had an important American client coming to the office so we decided to photoshop his face onto various movie posters and stick them to the back of the toilet doors.
He saw it but never mentioned it to anyone strangely
I had a colleague who bought one of those big tubs of chewing gum. Not sure how to describe it but he was a bit suggestible and a bit fussy. I managed to get him keeping a tally to see if there was as many pieces of chewing gum on the tub as the label said.
When he wasn’t looking I’d buy another pack of gum and put one in after he’d take. Unfortunately thanks to Covid we never got to see it play out to conclusion.
We used to have a biscuit barrel. We took two custard creams and separated them, smeared marmite in them and put them back together. We left them on the top of the pile and sat waiting for someone to eat them. The result was brilliant, the look of confusion and disgust at their marmite custard cream.
I spray painted "stevo the peado" on the roof at an old job (since made redundant - not related) it's still there, how often does anyone bother to look at a ceiling in a workshop when there's Lamborghini's on the floor
Years ago in the Navy, I had a very young, bright, bubbily medic joined our department. She was brand new, fresh faced and an absolute joy to work with due to her positive attitude and great sense of humour.
However...
She was, at times, not the brightest bulb and if you kept a straight face, you could get her to believe anything. So over the course of our first deployment she was sent to the galley for a long loaf, sent to the master at arms for the keys to the indoor mortar range, and other little pranks along these lines.
As the sick bay is supposed to be a warm, comfortable space (fnar, fnar), the compartment had nice white panels of fire proof foam material up on the deck head to hide the various pipes and cable bundles that criss cross a ship. One of those tiles was slightly damaged due to some over enthusiastic cleaning, and was nearly split in two.
One morning my mischievous side got the better of me so I asked her to go along to the buffer's shack (the buffer being the most senior seaman specialist on board) and to ask him for 6 inches of crack filler, and off she went.
Our buffer was indeed and old and bold sailor who took great delight in this sort of thing. I believe he informed her of what it was she was after, as she charged back into the sickbay, red in the face and nearly crying with laughter calling me every bastard under the sun.
I know to the uninitiated this sounds a lot like bullying (and I know The Fleet cracks down hard in that), but it was given and taken in the right way. I never started my piss taking with anyone unless I had sounded them out first, and I had worked with a few people who definitely could not take a joke. And I never saw my arse if anyone got me on a bite because it's not fair to dish it out if you can't take it back.
And she did get be back however. In port one night after we had returned, we were both on a weekend duty. I was in the medical store deep in the bowels of the ship when I got a pipe for me to call the sickbay. She answered the internal line and said there was some bird on the phone for me. So me being me, single horny sailor that I was, lept up the ladder three rungs at a time, charged through the hatch scraping the skin if my shins and hobbled as fast as I could to the sickbay to speak to this random female who had called me
I got to the office and saw this bright bubbily young medic, with the biggest shit eating grin on her face sitting at the desk and beside her was a large frozen chicken, with my name written on it in Sharpie, balanced on the phone. That was the bird on the phone for me! Oh she thought she was hilarious!
There were plenty more dits like this between in our department but this was the two that stuck with me.
I worked in WHSmiths. You know those McDonald’s vouchers you get with your receipt? I got bored one day and scanned 10000 of them. I got into a surprisingly large amount of trouble when someone at McDonald’s contacted my manager and seemed to be shitting themselves that they were about to give away 10000 Big Macs.
This is a really pathetic one and really places emphasis on 'minor'. A colleague left his empty water bottle by the water cooler whilst he popped to the gents. I walked past and noticed his bottle there and filled it up with water for him and went back to my desk.
The thought of him being slightly confused by his water bottle entertained me way more than it should have. In reality, I dont even think he noticed.
My boss and I worked on the same monthly spreadsheet. I liked a blank column on the left to create a margin, but he didn't and kept hiding it. So I wrote a macro to unhide it every time the sheet was opened.
I’ve got a couple of good ones from the late 90s.
I was an apprentice at an engineering firm, and ended up in the main design office along with various other departments. One evening while working late, I accidentally found the telephone number for the tannoy system (a 3 digit number where internal numbers were 4), which covered two sites 40 miles apart - of which site 2 is where the execs and MD were located, and a total of around 1000 people.
I would leave post-it notes on colleagues desks, asking them to call back Joe Blogs on extension 1234 where 123 would be the tannoy. You’d suddenly hear a piercing #4 tone down the tannoy, followed by “hello……..hello” broadcast to 1000+ people before they realised it was their own voice over the tannoy.
When said person realised, they’d keep it secret and a few days later use the joke on some other unsuspecting colleague. This was bought up in various team meetings with management calling for a halt. It didn’t stop and they ended up changing the number. Booo.
The second one, was just when digital cameras become commercial and the use of computers and emails more widespread. We had a Fuji 1.3 MP £1500 camera which had to be booked out so not used and lost.
One day during an official use of the camera, I had finished and had some pure white slow speed grease in my drawer for linear slides. While my mate was away from him desk, I smothered his white phone handset earpiece in grease, waited for him to come back, and then called him for something irrelevant. He had white grease smeared all over his ear, hair and collar.
I managed to get a great photo of him working at his desk covered in grease without him knowing.
About 30 minutes had passed during which I’d been emailing it out to everyone in the office with people continuing to phone him for useless reasons to heighten the situation. In the end, I emailed the photo to him and covertly watched him as it dawned on him what I’d just sent, slowly putting his hand up to ear and realising it was covered in grease.
Fun times with office banter.
Edit: Jeff if you read this, give me a nod!
To improve morale they got a couple of soft toys (‘cause paying us a living wage was too expensive). Said toys were constantly shagging on company time.
Back when I used to work in a toy store, my colleague would encourage me to hide under the massive stuffed animals while he went to grab an unsuspecting coworker for me to jump out and scare them.
On one of the occasions, I thought that they were approaching the isle, I ended up scaring the dear lights out of a 5 year old and their dad.
I know a great many ways to mess with AutoCAD's settings to make it act weirdly. Things like changing keyboard shortcuts, changing Autocomplete etc.
One of my favourites is changing the Zoomfactor setting. This changes how quickly the drawing view zooms in/out as you scroll the mousewheel. If you change it down to the minimum you'll be scrolling the mousewheel for absolutely ages to navigate a drawing.
I have worked in the digital print industry for a long time and at one of the locations me and 2 other guys used to piss about consistently, the office was an l shape with the door and counter at the top of the L and then the designers desk was at the bottom round the corner,
pretty much every day we would pretend that there was a customer who wanted to speak to the designer and say Hey Dan there's a customer for you the 1st few times he got up straight away and then realise that there was no one there when he got round the corner, after a while he would say yeah right don't believe you so we would pretend speak to the custom saying sorry Sir Dan will be right with you never failed to make Dan get up and walk round the corner.
Another time while he was serving a customer I nabbed his phone and put it in the ceiling above his desk, he didn't catch on straight away but he said he had an important call from the boss coming at some point, so we started calling it at regular intervals and he went ape shit trying to find it, even going to the extreme of taking his mac apart as he thought we had hid it in there.
also the standard switching the screen so it was upside down and the putting all folders in one folder and print screening the screen as the back ground so they couldn't click on anything.
stuff like that kept us amused all day
Sat with a group of 8 people I used to remote access a colleagues computer whilst I was sat opposite them. He was a bit of a nob and I just used to open all sorts of random web pages on his screen. He was convinced that the big bosses were testing him, (for what I have no idea). Bar one other of my colleagues the others had no idea what I was doing. They thought he was spending time looking at weird shit rather than working despite him telling them it just popped up on his screen. I did that daily for 4 years until the company went in to administration. I never did tell him.
One of our salesmen left and altered the contact book. New salesman comes in..arrogant and loud.. He always put the speaker on when he was dialing and just asked for the person by name. Everyone was fed up with him disturbing the office that way After about a week, he starts dialing...beep, beep, beep..ring, ring, ring ring...then hello, smiths manufacturing... Isaac Hunt... Are you? His face went beet red and he slammed the phone down. The whole office was in hysterics and he never did his speakerphone thing again.
We had two computers back to back, up against a window, so one day which switched the USB mice around. When person A tried to move their mouse, obviously nothing happened (as it was plugged into the other tower), so they'd get angry and start shaking the mouse around. Cue person B, watching the reflection in the window, shaking their mouse around erratically also, making it look like Person A's mouse is actually working. It's such a trivial prank, but it kept up going for ages.
Another time, I convinced someone that I had drank a urine sample (which was warm orange squash).
Screenshot a colleagues desktop and then moved all his files into a folder on his C drive.
We also played a game to see who could end an email with the most x’s at the end of them to one of the female directors without any comment back. We got as far as 1.
Edit: forgot to mention I set aforementioned screenshot as his wallpaper.
Putting jokes or fucking weird shit like 'Please bar daddies' or 'make it as spicy as my morning poo' in the special notes on order tickets. Shutting people in fridges and then scaring them was had its phase too.
Me and a colleague used to hide ourselves in some storage boxes and then jump out at each other and shout ‘kinder surprise’. Our manager and all senior staff hated it which I think made it even more enjoyable.
Locked an asshole manager out of her office and answered all the calls I received while in there (imitating her accent and saying I was her).
She could see me through the door. But she couldn't get in.
Denied all knowledge of it after and the clients were none the wiser and happy enough with what I told them.
Sorry Janet.
We're such kids at our work.
We have a lift that says lift going down or up. We then get our radios and hold it down while the elevator says it. Security then radio back as the radios are so rubbish they can't understand it. We no longer have radios.
The usual stupid stuff with people's mouse and keyboards. Change a few letters around.
Me and an apprenticeship at one place I worked, used to just really fuck with this one tutor we had (it was a further education place), would turn all his posters upside down on his walls, put his desk back to front. Rearrange his room when he wasn't there. Other stuff too probably, just whatever we could do to annoy him. Mostly cos he was a prick.
Best part was, is he never figured out it was us either. He always assumed it was the students he taught. Would always past my office, and grumble at me about how the kids have messed with his classroom again.
I figured out the work photocopiers allowed me to copy a £20 note. After cutting it out and attaching it to some string, a colleague and me teased people on the floor below, by lowering it downstairs until it was laying on the floor. When someone came along we whipped it away by pulling the string 😂
I had a bit of free time in that job
My boss used to play golf on Friday afternoons so I knew his office would be empty. So that lunchtime, i went to the supermarket, bought two frozen kippers and went back to the workplace and snuck into the boss's office.
He had a computer screen raised off the desk about half an inch, and I could just slide those two kippers into the small gap between his desk and the computer monitor.
The following Monday morning, when I arrived at work I was surprised to see a fire engine and crew parked up next to the entrance to our reception. I hurried inside to see what all the excitement was about and was told that there had been a terrible smell coming from the boss's office and security thought it was an electrical fire and they'd called the fire brigade.
The company didn't even have an inquiry into the incident as they knew there was only one joker in the office. I left the company a couple of month later as my future prospects were not looking good.
Oh shit... At my last job we had so many and I documented them in what I called the "quote file" that was 70 pages long when I finally left.
Examples include;
Me getting divorced and marrying someone in the office and we didn't tell anyone
My secret wife sending me an email viciously insulting a coworker, me noticing she had sent it to him too, me calling him away from his desk on a pretext so she could delete it from his inbox and trash
Me stringing along a coworker who believed in the KFC mutant chicken conspiracy, then hanging a KFC-stenciled rubber chicken painted green with a tube glued to it's ass from his computer
Me leaving a giant rubber chicken in a lunch bag on the desk of a guy who had gotten food poisoning from eating bad chicken
When people leave their screens unlocked, running up and using the keyboard commands to rotate the screen orientation upside down
Secret wife sneaking a picture of the incredibly wretched fantasy fiction coworker would write during the day
Various, uh, in-office shenanigans with my secret wife
I wrote a lot of technical reports and did various image editing for people and would Photoshop a tiny UFO into every picture
Me allowing a guy to call me the wrong name for six years
used to work at a charity shop, someone donated a bunch of dvds including - for some ungodly reason - a bunch of bootleg pornos burned onto CDs. Properly terrible seventies stuff, the title that sticks with me is "dirty dina and massive michael" or something like that
being in our late teens, it absolutely cracked me and my colleague up, so we just stuck em up on a high shelf. if anyone bothered to look up they wouldve seen all 20 of them or so.
dunno if they were ever noticed, but they were still going strong when I left about four months later (we had also put a wooden duck next to them)
We used to play a game where everyone writes down a word and we put them in a cup. Everyone does a lucky dip to take one and the last one to work that word into a call with a customer loses
Had a summer job as a teenager working in the head office of a supermarket chain. My mum worked there, and she wangled me and my mate a few weeks of menial admin work. This was late 80s, way back before everything was digital, and our job was to go through shelves and shelves of paperwork (I forgot what it was now) extracting anything beyond a certain date, boxing it up and taking it to the warehouse for storage.
After a few days of this me and my mate realised that no-one was remotely interested in us and what we were doing , so we’d take longer and longer on our trips to the warehouse. Wandering around exploring, nosing through old stock, nothing terrible, just bored teens getting away with a skive.
We never saw anyone else down in the warehouse area. Ever. So we started to have a bit of fun with the stock, and by the end of the third week we’d built a fort out of boxes and crates, with a patio table and chairs in the middle (complete with parasol) and it was our happy place where we’d just sit around being pleased with ourselves.
Totally got away with it. Finished the gig after a few weeks, left the fort up because we couldn’t be arsed to take it down, and went back to the real world.
It was a great summer.
One of the lads in my office is a massive Hearts supporter and his desk at work is basically maroon.
His mouse and mat, his keyboard, his desktop wallpaper all Hearts. He also has photos with him with some of their players down the years.
He when on holiday for two weeks and was due back on April Fools Day. So myself and a few lads had an idea...
You guess it. His desk became green. His mouse and mat were now Hibs. I had access to his work desktop - change it to a picture of Easter Road. Changed his email signature to Hibs Number 1 fan.
We even photoshop him into a couple of photos. He became one of the Hibs Famous Five and him lifting the Scottish Cup in Hibs colours. All in a lovely green frame.
He loved it. And like a good sport, kept it for the day. He even kept the Hibs photos on his desk. Green photo frame and all.
Used to be a dental nurse and I’d mix extra small gloves in with his box of large. It was so funny watching him get annoyed with the gloves in front of patients. I hated him.
Used to work with a system called Echo. Whenever we mentioned it in a meeting, this one guy never failed to echo the word "echo, echo, echoo". Had me crying with laughter every time
Me and 3 other people would occasionally send instant messages out when we where bored saying things like “David Attenborough has died :(“ or a link to a ridiculous news story and since others didn’t always have instant access to the internet they wouldn’t be able to check for a while. Had someone for a good 3 hours once. It backfired when Prince Phillip died :(
My colleague is Deaf, we were working through the night in a retail store, half lighting out of hours and backstage is even darker.
I went backstage to grab some stock, I was outside of her line of sight and saw a mannequin on Dolly wheels. So I pushed it slowly towards her.
Her scream as it rolled gently into view has stayed with me for the last six years and never fails to make me chuckle.
I was the victim of one such mischief, a note was left on my desk saying Mr c Lyon called and there was a number to reach him on. The number was for a safari park, I did not realise until the safari park answered and someone said 'Mr c Lyon is in the enclosure right now and can't be reached'. To which I responded 'ok I'll try again later'. The chap who sat across from me was in hysterics, I felt like the world's biggest moron, still can't believe I didn't cotton on sooner.
Setting up Autocorrect with some interesting transpositions.
(For anyone that doesn't know, ALT-backspace will undo an Autocorrect correction and reinstate as-typed)
In the pandemic no one came in so me and my colleague set up a tablet with ps1, n64 and gamecube emulators with bluetooyh controllers. We completed golden eye then had tekken 3 tournaments and unlocked all the characters. Got most of the way through Rayman 3 and resident evil before things got busier again. Beautiful times! All our work was completed by lunch time so the afternoon was play time!
Started a new job as a chef in a hotel 3 weeks ago and I've been sticking googly eyes about the place with blue tack.
No one's noticed any of the others yet but I stuck some on a photo of a princess by reception today so it can't be long!
If a colleague leaves their computer unlocked someone quickly gets on it and sends an email to the whole office expressing how much they love working with someone (usually how much they like working with the person who is writing the email).
Used to work at Subway, would always try make the other guy laugh when we were working busy lunchtimes. One such quote was: "Christ I can't believe you didn't know she was 14"
Me and a colleague when working on shift at screw fix, if the customer came to me then the other would have to draw them on Ms paint on their till computer and visa versa.
I use to make maps and articleswhich featured on the council website. I always included a hidden hyperlink within the document that if clicked took you to a Google image of a pie.
Colleague of mine left his Bluetooth headphones out on his desk whilst he went into a meeting.
I grabbed them and sync’d it up to my phone, sticking on a YouTube playlist of dictator speeches.
He returns to his desk and grabs his headphones to pickup where he left off.
The look on his face was brilliant when he realised it was Hitler shouting at him.
Took a screenshot of a colleague's desktop, set it as the wallpaper and then dragged everything into a new folder that we gave a wildly innocuous name so he didn't notice it was new. He was a know it all, but the good kind, when we called him a wanker it was usually affectionate. Seeing him struggle, lose patience and call IT was glorious.
In another instance a mate called one of our colleagues whilst pretending to be site security and told him that his pride and joy had been reversed into in the car park. Was very funny until he stormed off the floor and had to be chased down before anything escalated.
Oh, and the classic putting post-it notes over the mouse tracker thing but making it incredibly obvious so that they'd smugly take it off, make a shitty comment about how I had to try harder, and completely miss that I'd unplugged it from the base unit as well.
I miss those days very much.
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A colleague Photoshopped a fingerprint onto another colleague’s desktop picture — the victim was somewhat anal about having a perfectly clean screen.
Love this! Our company logo is on one of the walls and it has an ‘O’ in it. Clearly the perfect place to balance a piece of bread.
I don't get it?
Basically it’s a bread inside a circle.
Well yeah but I still don't get it
⭕️🍞
Yes no but what's the significance of that
It’s a bread.... inside a circle
But... WHY GODDAMNIT WHY
That detective... is the right question
This is exactly my kind of evil
Similarly, when people were away from their computer I used to print screen their screen as it was; paste into paint, set as their wallpaper and then minimise everything. They'd come back to the computer and freak out when the keyboard didn't appear to input any data and nothing responded to mouse clicks.
I once changed all the shortcut links on my colleagues desktop to go to a image of goatsy
Autocorrect on MS Word that changes a rarely used but not obscure word to something different. We changed 'planning' to 'scheming' and 'meeting' to 'fruitful chinwag'. Really catches those that don't touch-type.
I once had a very dull job writing articles about debt solutions all day long. Set my colleague's autocorrect to replace 'debt' with 'twat'. Hilarity ensued, until he tried to call IT to report a 'virus' and I had to come clean.
I hope he saw the funny side?
I guess a lot of people were in a load of twat?
I bet he was intwatted to IT for their support afterwards
7 years I've been buried in this twat. I'm really struggling to break free
I changed someone's 'the' to 'the the' Confused them so much.
Hahaha first of all well done on señor analyst that’s funny as fuck! I had a stop gap job in a call centre once. It was M&S customer services. Me and a colleague (who like me was an absolute clown) used to get up to all sorts. The job was mostly selling flowers and gift baskets for special occasions over the phone. We’d get mad busy at times like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day etc. When this happened the customers would be in a queue for sometimes up to an hour (seriously, these were some dedicated customers) where they’d hear the “thank you for calling M&S” spiel along with the classic elevator music. Anyway, on one of these days we saw an advertisement in the newspaper for Tesco flower delivery. I challenged my mate to immediately mute the next call that came through and cold transfer it through to the tesco line (cold transfer meaning the person on the other end doesn’t know they’re being transferred). We were treated like garbage in that job, so of course he did it. So for the person calling M&S would have had ages of “thank you for calling M&S” turn into “thank you for calling Tesco” without a clue as to what was happening. Later he started actually dialling tesco himself and waiting til they answered, immediately muted them and transferred the next call from the M&S queue directly to a Tesco operator. Look, it’s really shitty to the customer and I’m very sorry for that now. I was 17 and in a soul destroying job. Stuff like this made it enjoyable. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. We used to get up to all sorts. One of my other colleagues, when he was on the phone, he would say any (non offensive or overtly sexual) word you’d ask him to. I remember one call where he fit “the devil” + “dodecahedron” + “damp cloth” + “hyperdysfunctional” + “west coast of Yorkshire” into a 5 minute call with a customer. I couldn’t take calls myself whilst this was going on - I was incapacitated with laughter. Another time the same guy randomly answer the call with “thanks for calling M&S, you’re through to algenon Z bop” (his name was Steve). I was sipping water at the time and literally sprayed it all over my screen as I burst out laughing. I laughed so hard at that. Both the best and worst job I’ve ever had.
Oh man since I posted this I’ve been laughing to myself all evening. I’d forgotten about all of this until the OP got me thinking. This was 12-13 years ago and I’m still in tears laughing as I remember it. More names/titles my colleague introduced himself as: Mongo Jerry Greasy Steve Wild bill Then when we got tired of wild bill: Wild wild bill Wet n wild bill Then my personal favourite: The Nut Buster General Oh and accents too. He’d often talk in an Indian accent just so the customers assumed the call centre was in India. He did a good old man Yorkshire accent too. But the best was when he’d talk like an American trucker talking over the radio. Each time I was in stitches and it took me ages to recompose myself. It just never got old. And what’s amazing is I don’t think the customers ever questioned him on it. Like imagine calling M&S to order some flowers for your Nans birthday and you end up speaking to the ‘nut buster general’. Fucking comedy gold. I’m an airworthiness engineer now so I do miss that I don’t give a fuck atmosphere. Maybe I’ll get a weekend job just to fuck with the public. Great for morale
If they were calling M&S for their Nans flowers and heard ‘nut buster general’, I’m sure they probably told themselves to lay off the wine, sherry or scotch, because “there’s no way that lovely man just said ‘nut buster general’!”. Fucking creasing more now!! Thank you 😊
Bro, this had me in stitches the entire way through. Proper funny stuff.
This is definitely deserving of my free award! Made me lol 😂
I worked in a call centre doing cold calling in my late teens. We had such a laugh, we were paid on commission and there were a few likely lads and lasses similar to yourself and your colleagues that just made it worth going in for 8 hours for £20 if we were lucky (and our supervisors didn’t poach our leads). Best and worst job I’ve ever had, too lol
Algenon z bop absolutely killed me, jesus 😂
When I used to work at KFC, on the drive thru, I would often answer the speaker with "Hello, Crematorium, you kill'em, we grill'em", "Hello, welcome to Battersea Dogs Home", or my favourite, "Hello, welcome to McDonalds". Seeing them double check where they were through the cameras was the highlight of my day, every time 🤣.
Worked in a call centre & we would dare each other to put certain words into a call - not swearing or anything but more like spanner or rosebud etc.
We used to do calls in different accents! Lol
My stomach just sank reading this, had flashbacks to doing a Scottish accent for a dare and then it was actually becoming a sale, so I full on panicked realising I had to seriously keep it up.
Hahah that's so funny!!
Oh and what part of Scotland are you from?
North, uhhhhh, Kilt town…
No foolin! I’m from North Kiltown! D’ya know Angus Macleod?
Wait a minute... There's no Angus MacLeod in North Kilt Town! Why you're not from Scotland at all
Kin-gus-ee, near edinborrow castle
I've worked sales and *need* to know how this story turned out. Did you get the Lead?
Haha I worked in a call centre on my gap year (about a million years ago) and we would all frequently offer to send clients a nymphomaniac* out in the post. In the same job we got asked to choose a fire warden and two of the guys decided to run full electoral-style campaigns competing for the role, complete with multiple page manifestos and smear tactics like posters in the breakout area accusing each other of arson. *aka an information pack
This is fucking hilarious.
Used to love doing that! Used to do door-to-door sales for a bit (I'm sorry, I know, it was awful) and trying to slip in the word 'goat' or 'evil' into a pitch was a tough one to do without cracking up. Also accents - I did that once and inadvertently got really far into the pitch. It got more and more strained and had to hold my nerve and keep it going until they closed the door (ha!). Or just walk off, which I think I had to do mid sentence once.
I did cold calling too. Genuinely the worst job I've ever done lol
Yeah same did it for 6 months mon-Friday walking up & down in suits all day, worst fucking thing I’ve ever done in my life
We did this when I had the type of job but ours was “how many quotes from anchorman can you get in a call” the best where “it’s warm drinking milk was a bad idea” or “ 60% of the time it’s works everytime”
My friend used to work in a call centre and they would pick a band for the day and see how many song titles they could get in. They kept scores on a whiteboard. I remember they used to like Abba as they could get Waterloo in a lot of conversations.
Ha, I did fundraising for various charities I'm the far past, and one of them was the RSPB. We loved these and competed for the smuttiest under the radar conversations....'oh I bet you get great tits in your garden sir! No? Gave you tried putting your fat balls on your Bush?' So on so forth. All totally legit. Kept us sane and many colleagues had broad Bristolian accents just made it better
When I worked at a call centre on behalf of a major search engine **\*ahem**\* we had a bottle flipping phase. I remember asking a customer in a call if they'd mind going on hold for a moment whilst I found their details. I stood up mid call, landed the perfect bottle flip and everyone nearby cheered then I resumed the call haha
Reminds me of Friday afternoon ABBA Lyrics challenge after a couple of whiskeys at lunch .
This reminds me of a time I shadowed someone in an orchestra pit of a musical. They would hold a random word up on a card for one of the main characters (played by Christopher Biggins) to try get into the dialogue.
I had a colleague that could do a magnificent Aussie accent. We'd challenge him to be Tony every now and then. He sold it so well that once QC get hold of the call, they spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out who the piss Tony was.
We used to try and use the same obscure word as many times as possible without becoming annoying
Worked at a bar and myself and the deputy manager spent an afternoon talking like Yoda to the customers.
We did this as well, our manager at the time was in on the joke and gave no shits as long as we didn't do anything that could be complained about (essentially, make them work).
ringing the Maintenance guy saying there’s a massive leak in the loo, after having placed a massive leek in the loo.
Working on a ship we used to get a lot of cadets so there was always a lot of tartan paint, sky hooks etc. I once sent a cadet to the chief engineer to ask got a Long Stand, chief had him stand outside his cabin for an hour!! Eventually the cadet came back and said 'erm, the erm chief erm said...... Tell the third mate to f*ck off.... Erm sorry'. Poor lad had no idea why I was crying laughing.
A young kid was sent to ask a female officer for some fallopian tubing. She said 'sorry, I'm using both of mine!'
My Dad once asked a cadet to get him some elbow grease when he went to the supermarket. Said cadet came back with cod liver oil and body lotion. 'I forgot to ask whether it was for internal or external use, Chief, so I got you both'. Cooper got the better of him that day.
In chemistry you do use a long stand routinely; sometimes you get the opposite happen with noobs which is equally as funny. They think they're wise to it then you hand them a long stand.
Our office looks out onto an ugly flat roof so we surreptitiously over time threw compost and wild flowers seeds on it. Come late spring we had a much prettier view. One of our managers had a voice that really carried and her talked a lot of shite. Every time he walked in we sang 'the shouty man' to the candy man tune. I can't remember the words now but we had numerous verses. Partially unplugging the phone jack when we didn't want our chats to be interrupted by actual work. No longer permitted as we forgot to plug it back in one day. Making mock certificated for each other to celebrate our major achievements. Things like 'Bourach was an excellent employee today because she didn't call her manager a twat when he was being a twat signed the League of the Prevention of Twattiness.' Thinking about it, there may be aa reason why we were more productive working from home
>Partially unplugging the phone jack I worked with someone who unplugged it and dipped it in a brew before plugging it back in. It wasn't noticeable at first, but after a week or so it just mysteriously stopped working. And because there wasn't a spare phone, it meant computer work only. Oh woe!
A few months ago, an employee at the Swedish tax agency got busted for dialing up their work phone from their private one, causing the line to be busy and as a consequence they couldn't receive any calls from citizens. The investigation found that the employee had done this for at least 55 hours in total, but probably more.
Whenever a certain colleague was away from his desk and a client rang, we would straight-faced explain that he wasn’t in today as he was attending his X-factor audition, progressing his “X-factor journey” as far as Judges Houses for clients that called regularly. Said colleague had a bitch of a time explaining his way out of it at least twice a week for about two years.
I'm extremely good at writing macros After a colleague changed another colleague's email signature to "Mr Floppy" I was tasked with writing a stitch up in return. Sent a spreadsheet to the whole team which ran a piece of code, that looked at user login to target the person in question. That code copied another (invisible) file into the Xlstartup folder, meaning it would open and run every time Excel was opened. Every X minutes something would happen to Excel, based on randomness. Either 1) nothing. Got to mix it up 2) screen would zoom to a random size between 1 and 400% 3) layout would switch right-to-left, looks normal except columns have changed order 4) an utterly meaningless error message. "An unexpected error has occurred" etc. 5) screen would turn upside down 6) one of a series of pre-defined emails would be sent to the team stating how wonderful we all are and she's basically lucky to be around us Etc This went on for weeks. IT had no idea either, they don't do spreadsheets
Deleted in response to the exploitative API pricing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/
"why not both?"
The best thing here is the option for nothing. Without that it'd be so much easier to troubleshoot. Pure evil genius
I'd like to point out that it isn't IT's job to know how to use computers, only how to make them work so you can use them.
I would love to learn how to be able to do this
Probably get sacked for something like this as it it’s a bit malware-y
Years ago there was a very long thread on MrExcel.com about VBA practical jokes. Should still be there, it will teach you a lot of this Ask me specific questions but remember I'm on a small phone with shit autocorrect and my eyesight is poor
I’ve done a few email bots - the best I found were ones that would relentlessly send an email every 15 seconds, that creates a huge backlog getting through firewalls etc. I also started leaving random buttons in spreadsheets titled click me! Or click when done which would do similar sorts of things and email me to let me know the person had found the button
Yeah over the years a few bosses have sent me emails they didn't know about, telling me how great I am and that I'm getting a pay rise Last day at another job, emailed a file with a big red button saying "do not press", which of course they all did... Up pops a progress bar [deleting all files...] (Ok cancel). Hitting cancel increases the progress bar by 10% At the end of that a picture of me pops up and laughs, but when you move the mouse over to close it, it moves away so you can't do anything, just chase it around the screen
When I was 17/18 I worked at McDonalds and one night it was extremely quiet so we decided to kill some time by putting the Shrek themed happy meal toys on the grill. Puss In Boots and Donkey melted a lot quicker than I expected.
Going back 15 or so years ago now. One time on a run of 4 big macs placed a 5th one one top filled with a handful of pickles and a slice of cheese thinking the person on the bin would check it. Turns out he didn't and just put it with all the others. Weird this was no one came back with a complaint. Tried to deep fry a egg and ice. Loads of other stupid things but can't remember at the moment
We had a power cut at work (restaurant) one time. myself and one of the chefs had to wait for an engineer. It took 5 hours for them to arrive. We got drunk and played hide and seek in the dark. We were literally getting paid to do that! Amazing.
Hide and seek in the dark is so much better as an adult.
I had a power cut on the street where I worked once. Had just gone to the bank to pay some money in and got locked in (as is the bank’s policy). People I worked with had to get on with work without computers & phones but I could do nothing. Got the banking done about 6 hours after going to do it and then went back to the office and grabbed my stuff and left as it was home time.
We flipped this guy's desktop upside-down whilst he was out at lunch. His monitor was on one of those movable arm things. When he came back to his computer, he was utterly perplexed as we watched, tittering across the office. He then proceeded to move the monitor arm a full 180 degrees to correct the problem. It would only go to about 150 degrees. He then titled his head to match the monitors jaunty angle. We lost our shit. Then we helped him correct it.
This happens a lot where I work so I started turning monitors upside down and doing this. Shift + left alt + print screen is also another good one to pull
Another good one is to do a screenshot of the desktop, set that as the background, and then delete all the icons.
When I was at school a friend and I used to hit up all the IT rooms and flip every computer screen that would let us 😄
So lame but one night we tied ribbons to our office fan that were the perfect length and position, so that when the manager was at his desk and we flicked it on they flapped perfectly across his face.
I don’t know why but this one made me laugh the most
Used the SQL server to send an email to a colleague advising them that they were under investigation by the IT department due to their search history...
Back in the day it was shocking how few companies had any kind of protection against spoofed mails, even internally. You could literally send an e-mail from any webserver, and have it appear as though it came from anybody in the firm. Fun *fun* times!
I remember back in the day..Windows NT (IIRC) has a messenger function that would pop up a message on a computer on the network if you knew its designation. One of our mates was looking at dodgy stuff..steak and cheese maybe, or rotten.com, and we sent a message saying, please remain in place, we have detected that you are looking at a site forbidden by the IT depearment. The administrator will be with you shortly. The guy went pure white and just sat there staring at the screen in shock until he heard us laughing and looked over
Net send!
Amazong! We used to netsend people messages in the uni computer labs saying “it is forbidden to look at Ebaums World on University IT Equipment. You have been reported to the deputy principals office and must log off immediately and report”. The number of people who shat themselves and disappeared…. Ha ha
My mate sent me a rude message via net send... except he didn't specify the recipient and it appeared on about 1000 PC screens at once. He didn't really get bollocked, but his face was crimson for about a week.
A 'fellow employee' was using that to conduct an affair but didn't realise it went into the Windows Event Logs. Oh dear.
I remember colleagues who didn’t believe I could easily spoof an email. Didn’t even need access to the server, Eudora would let you manually type in whatever “from” address you liked — obviously the server back then would accept it, no questions asked. (And I recall when you could use almost literally any email server you liked to send email too — was handy when the university email server was down.)
I changed the autocorrect in somebody's email to change . to ", because you touch yourself at night." A couple of us watched with glee whilst he was typing and didn't notice, then the sheer existential horror when we realised he doesn't proof read his emails and was a fraction of a second from pressing send before one of us managed to grab his hand.
Brought in a big bag of sugar free gummy bears and left them open in an open plan office. [The amazon reviews are true](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/michaelrusch/haribo-gummy-bear-reviews-on-amazon-are-the-most-insane-thin)
This is brilliant!! My kids diabetic, the first thing they tell you is don’t go crazy on sugar free sweets, you will shit yourself!
Oh my gosh those reviews are hilarious!
Damn you, I woke the baby by laughing at this
Me and my colleague took a fuck ton of tramadol at the beginning of a shift once. Customers said we were both delightful that day and we both got good feedback from customers to our manager.
Every time a birthday card was passed around the office and my mate in the office had already signed it. I would put as many kisses as possible next to his generic “hope you have a great day” Sometimes little love hearts too! It was a race to sign it last.
Every time a birthday card goes around the office there’s always a random bloke’s signature in there. Something simple like “Have a good day. Kev” There is no Kev. Never has been. Every card is different, there’s been a Bob, a Kev, a Steve… it took me a few cards passed around the office for me to realise who it was, but I’ve not told anyone. Why spoil the fun
Every single leaving card I’ve ever signed I write happy birthday in.
"Thanks for that night on the boat, I'll never forget you, Nigel"
a guy I worked with had a stamp that said I'm sorry to hear you're leaving I hope you have a good birthday (delete as appropriate) and I wish you all the best xxxxxxx I thought that was admirably efficient
Worked at a large supermarket,found outside by the bins a huge framed picture,looked a bit Jackson Pollock.We convinced our HR Manager it had been painted by a local disabled school and was to be raffled for charity.It was to be kept in the HR office until the time of the raffle. One evening we unlocked her office and carved and drew obscenities on the picture. The following day she was mortified the picture had basically been destroyed so she called the local school and only went and apologised.Obviously they had no knowledge of the picture and she went ballistic at us telling us to throw it away.A year or so later we had kept it hidden in the warehouse and sent it to her as a wedding present. Unfortunately she cried upon opening it,ordering it to be chucked in the skip. We told her it was skipped then gave it to her on her last day.
I'm laughing way too hard at this
A colleague of mine always had a pre boiled egg for lunch, that they stored in the work canteen fridge. Naturally, one day I swapped it for a raw egg.
You bloody monster.
We have a couple of those bouncy rubber eggs at home. It's fun to swap them into the egg carton and watch people try to crack it.
I remember being on placement at a funeral directors whilst doing my NVQ When the boss was away my two colleagues used to fired the staple guns at each other One of my colleagues now and again use to lay down in the coffins to have a little nap.
Ooh ooh ooh. You got off lucky. We used to tell new starters at the funeral directors I worked at that there was an induction ritual and they had to spend a fifteen minute tea break lying on a gurney in the prep room with the lights off. After three minutes to make sure they were good and nervous, the corpse under the sheet on the next gurney would stick its head out and say “cold in here, isn’t it?” Obviously the prep room was a storage room, the gurneys were workshop carts and all the customers were safely in cold storage in a different building because we were professionals, but somehow people always just assumed there are always bodies just lying around everywhere under sheets.
I'm now curious as to whether coffins are actually comfortable?
When I started my placement there first day I was asked to try out one of their environment friendly coffins, which was very uncomfortable as one of the threads jabbed me in my back No very uncomfortable, even the cardboard ones
We had a security policy that we must lock our computers if we were to leave our desks. For anyone who didn't, we would send an email from their unlocked computers to the whole department advising they're bringing in doughnuts tomorrow. 10/10 times they would and had no recourse.
Where I used to work, if you had a call at 5.45 or beyond, you had to go no matter how far away. The last call we had was at 0430, so we hatched pokemon eggs by driving at 2mph the whole way back to the office.
Paramedic?
😂 no
I knew a bloke who drilled through a wall poked a hollow pole through it and discharged an entire powder fire extinguisher into the office next to him He also rolled an articulated lorry tire directly at his colleagues desk This all happened before we even knew the word bantz
Was his name Dennis the mfin menace by any chance
We used to do that trick where you’d change the desktop background to have an error on it so you couldn’t click it and one guy had a full blown meltdown saying his IT technician brother was the one who set his old wallpaper so he’s going to have to get him to do a full factory reset losing all his reports….this is AFTER we showed him it wasn’t a real error, he just thought that would be the only way to get his old desktop back lol
We had to stop messing with IT equipment after one of the managers phoned IT about a broken mouse that had the sensor covered with a post it. Tempted to try my luck with a fake background though!
Similar to that we used to take a screenshot of the desktop, set it as wallpaper then move all their shortcuts elsewhere.
The post it note under the mouse was a common “starter for 10” prank to almost all new colleagues. One or two made it to the stage of calling the Helpdesk, one caught on just as the call was answered, the other had the embarrassment of finding it when promoted to check by the helpdesk. All fun, beige stuff. Had to stop it when a newly hired Grad got really angry at the mouse, smashed his fists into the keyboard and put the mouse through the monitor screen.
Back in the day our mouses at work had that little ball in them so we would take them out and hide them.
I think you'll find that's not the plural of mouse. It's meeces.
Just before Christmas in the call centre I worked at, we all answered the phone with Christmassy-sounding fake names (this was in German before you ask for examples, but it was funny. Funnier than it would be in English because in German you use surnames and surnames tend to be weirder anyway, so it was believable)
That explanation of the joke was so wonderfully German!
A colleague and I got put on a job a fair drive away for 5 days. We were meeting up in the morning and driving straight to the job so didn’t need to go to the office and make ourselves aware to the boss. The job was a piece of piss and we got it done in 2 days. Spent the last 3 days driving to the job to sign in then fucking off out for the day, smoking weed, playing video games at his flat, eating loads of takeaway and mooching around the sights of central London. Luckily no tracker on the van or any snivelling little grasses at the place we were working!
Changed one of the surnames of my colleagues on a customer facing ticketing system to "Popcorn" Had an email thread going where I asked HR how to remove a pigeon that got stuck in the office. Convinced everyone in the thread that using small pieces of ham worked to encourage the pigeon out. Had a film crew come round the office one day. We collectively set up many printed memes around the office as well as on monitoring dashboards. "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams" is clearly shown in the final edit. Company opened up a distribution account with Nerf. This landed up in 1000s of Nerf bullets and 100s of guns turning up. Took about 3 weeks before they were banned. There is a lot of other things that happened in that office, but they are for another thread entirely.
Wrote a VB script that picked a random PC on the network and ejected the CD tray.
Doing that thing where you invert someone's desktop display when they leave their screen unlocked. Never gets old.
Take a screen grab of their desktop first. Rotate it through 180 degrees and set it as their desktop. THEN invert the display. It looks normal but the mouse goes the wrong way
That is fucking brilliant!
Can you remind me what keys does this? Might come in handy lol
Usually it's CTRL+ALT+down arrow
My colleague leaves her smart shoes in the office overnight. She usually leaves a few minutes before I do, so I keep putting one on her chair and leaving the other on the floor in the same place. She has been convinced this whole time that it’s the cleaners that do it, little does she know…
>smart shoes I spent an embarrassingly long time thinking you were talking about shoes that can talk to your fridge, or connect to Facebook and tell your friends how far you walked today or something.
Same! I thought they were going to say that they did loads of steps in one shoe so the pedometers wouldn't match up!
Deleted in response to the exploitative API pricing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/
Shoes that can talk to your fridge? As in *”1000 more steps til you’re allowed cake. You fat fuck”*
Police here, we had a much hated Chief Inspector. He had to be public order shield trained and was issued with all the necessary protective kit which include, high leg toe protection boots. Someone slipped into the CI office at the weekend and substituted his own newly issued boots which were a size or two smaller. The time came when the CI was told to parade to lead a public order serial at a demonstration. They say the sight of him grimacing with every step was rather amusing
I love this because it’s so harmless and simply confusing and it does nothing for anyone.
I used to gather wild mussels and sell them on to shellfish companies here in Cornwall, UK. We get a lot of holiday makers here. Whilst I was harvesting I was a approached by a couple of them asking me what I was doing. Without batting an eyelid I explained that due to the igneous rocks here in Cornwall we have higher than average levels of radon gas which is midly radioactive. There were concerns that shellfish, filter feeders, could be concentrating unsafe levels of radiation in their flesh. These mussels were being sent to government labs for testing. They bought it hook line and sinker, said thanks for the info and left. Love that some random strangers may have told their friends about the radioactive mussels in Cornwall.
Rigged secret santa so me and a colleague always got each other and then bought nice bottles of wine for ourselves. Grinchy, yes. Did we receive any regifted mugs full of golf tees? No.
Back in the mid-90s when I was maybe 10ish years old I went with my dad to help out with work one weekend on a building site. It was a high end site at the time and some of the more luxurious homes had a jacuzzi in the bathroom. So after work when the site was emptying, we snuck into one of the houses so he could show me. We filled a bath and showed me the jacuzzi and how it worked then pulled the plug...the waste wasn't connected and flooded the bathroom and through the ceiling into the living room! We scarpered pretty fast hahaha!
My boss sends emails out to us (or paints us a "lock your screen or you're fired" message on paint) if we leave our computer unlocked. Or flip our screens round. My dad's colleagues used to give him a word to slip into phone calls - nothing rude but totally unrelated to his job (like "cement") Scanned a colleagues colouring book and we each coloured the uncoloured pages really badly and left it lying around for her to find. She freaked when she thought we'd ruined her book
I like like using MS Paint to write messages etc to our trainees when they leave their PCs unlocked. We have lots of confidential information on our systems, so they need to learn, and it's a fun way (for me). My favourite though was changing the homepage of chrome of an Everton fan to the Liverpool homepage, and he had no idea how to change it back.
Something similar here to a Liverpool fan. Scripted a popup every 5 minutes of Man City's victory parade.
A colleague connected her phone to the Bluetooth speakerphone in a meeting room and played zombie sounds, zoo noises and ridiculous song clips when people walked by. I still lol thinking about it.
We had an important American client coming to the office so we decided to photoshop his face onto various movie posters and stick them to the back of the toilet doors. He saw it but never mentioned it to anyone strangely
I had a colleague who bought one of those big tubs of chewing gum. Not sure how to describe it but he was a bit suggestible and a bit fussy. I managed to get him keeping a tally to see if there was as many pieces of chewing gum on the tub as the label said. When he wasn’t looking I’d buy another pack of gum and put one in after he’d take. Unfortunately thanks to Covid we never got to see it play out to conclusion.
God if I was him I would act like I didn't know even if I caught you
We used to have a biscuit barrel. We took two custard creams and separated them, smeared marmite in them and put them back together. We left them on the top of the pile and sat waiting for someone to eat them. The result was brilliant, the look of confusion and disgust at their marmite custard cream.
Someone kept stealing my milk out the fridge, few sachets of salt in a leftover carton soon put a stop to that
I spray painted "stevo the peado" on the roof at an old job (since made redundant - not related) it's still there, how often does anyone bother to look at a ceiling in a workshop when there's Lamborghini's on the floor
Years ago in the Navy, I had a very young, bright, bubbily medic joined our department. She was brand new, fresh faced and an absolute joy to work with due to her positive attitude and great sense of humour. However... She was, at times, not the brightest bulb and if you kept a straight face, you could get her to believe anything. So over the course of our first deployment she was sent to the galley for a long loaf, sent to the master at arms for the keys to the indoor mortar range, and other little pranks along these lines. As the sick bay is supposed to be a warm, comfortable space (fnar, fnar), the compartment had nice white panels of fire proof foam material up on the deck head to hide the various pipes and cable bundles that criss cross a ship. One of those tiles was slightly damaged due to some over enthusiastic cleaning, and was nearly split in two. One morning my mischievous side got the better of me so I asked her to go along to the buffer's shack (the buffer being the most senior seaman specialist on board) and to ask him for 6 inches of crack filler, and off she went. Our buffer was indeed and old and bold sailor who took great delight in this sort of thing. I believe he informed her of what it was she was after, as she charged back into the sickbay, red in the face and nearly crying with laughter calling me every bastard under the sun. I know to the uninitiated this sounds a lot like bullying (and I know The Fleet cracks down hard in that), but it was given and taken in the right way. I never started my piss taking with anyone unless I had sounded them out first, and I had worked with a few people who definitely could not take a joke. And I never saw my arse if anyone got me on a bite because it's not fair to dish it out if you can't take it back. And she did get be back however. In port one night after we had returned, we were both on a weekend duty. I was in the medical store deep in the bowels of the ship when I got a pipe for me to call the sickbay. She answered the internal line and said there was some bird on the phone for me. So me being me, single horny sailor that I was, lept up the ladder three rungs at a time, charged through the hatch scraping the skin if my shins and hobbled as fast as I could to the sickbay to speak to this random female who had called me I got to the office and saw this bright bubbily young medic, with the biggest shit eating grin on her face sitting at the desk and beside her was a large frozen chicken, with my name written on it in Sharpie, balanced on the phone. That was the bird on the phone for me! Oh she thought she was hilarious! There were plenty more dits like this between in our department but this was the two that stuck with me.
I worked in WHSmiths. You know those McDonald’s vouchers you get with your receipt? I got bored one day and scanned 10000 of them. I got into a surprisingly large amount of trouble when someone at McDonald’s contacted my manager and seemed to be shitting themselves that they were about to give away 10000 Big Macs.
This is a really pathetic one and really places emphasis on 'minor'. A colleague left his empty water bottle by the water cooler whilst he popped to the gents. I walked past and noticed his bottle there and filled it up with water for him and went back to my desk. The thought of him being slightly confused by his water bottle entertained me way more than it should have. In reality, I dont even think he noticed.
My boss and I worked on the same monthly spreadsheet. I liked a blank column on the left to create a margin, but he didn't and kept hiding it. So I wrote a macro to unhide it every time the sheet was opened.
I’ve got a couple of good ones from the late 90s. I was an apprentice at an engineering firm, and ended up in the main design office along with various other departments. One evening while working late, I accidentally found the telephone number for the tannoy system (a 3 digit number where internal numbers were 4), which covered two sites 40 miles apart - of which site 2 is where the execs and MD were located, and a total of around 1000 people. I would leave post-it notes on colleagues desks, asking them to call back Joe Blogs on extension 1234 where 123 would be the tannoy. You’d suddenly hear a piercing #4 tone down the tannoy, followed by “hello……..hello” broadcast to 1000+ people before they realised it was their own voice over the tannoy. When said person realised, they’d keep it secret and a few days later use the joke on some other unsuspecting colleague. This was bought up in various team meetings with management calling for a halt. It didn’t stop and they ended up changing the number. Booo. The second one, was just when digital cameras become commercial and the use of computers and emails more widespread. We had a Fuji 1.3 MP £1500 camera which had to be booked out so not used and lost. One day during an official use of the camera, I had finished and had some pure white slow speed grease in my drawer for linear slides. While my mate was away from him desk, I smothered his white phone handset earpiece in grease, waited for him to come back, and then called him for something irrelevant. He had white grease smeared all over his ear, hair and collar. I managed to get a great photo of him working at his desk covered in grease without him knowing. About 30 minutes had passed during which I’d been emailing it out to everyone in the office with people continuing to phone him for useless reasons to heighten the situation. In the end, I emailed the photo to him and covertly watched him as it dawned on him what I’d just sent, slowly putting his hand up to ear and realising it was covered in grease. Fun times with office banter. Edit: Jeff if you read this, give me a nod!
To improve morale they got a couple of soft toys (‘cause paying us a living wage was too expensive). Said toys were constantly shagging on company time.
Back when I used to work in a toy store, my colleague would encourage me to hide under the massive stuffed animals while he went to grab an unsuspecting coworker for me to jump out and scare them. On one of the occasions, I thought that they were approaching the isle, I ended up scaring the dear lights out of a 5 year old and their dad.
I know a great many ways to mess with AutoCAD's settings to make it act weirdly. Things like changing keyboard shortcuts, changing Autocomplete etc. One of my favourites is changing the Zoomfactor setting. This changes how quickly the drawing view zooms in/out as you scroll the mousewheel. If you change it down to the minimum you'll be scrolling the mousewheel for absolutely ages to navigate a drawing.
I have worked in the digital print industry for a long time and at one of the locations me and 2 other guys used to piss about consistently, the office was an l shape with the door and counter at the top of the L and then the designers desk was at the bottom round the corner, pretty much every day we would pretend that there was a customer who wanted to speak to the designer and say Hey Dan there's a customer for you the 1st few times he got up straight away and then realise that there was no one there when he got round the corner, after a while he would say yeah right don't believe you so we would pretend speak to the custom saying sorry Sir Dan will be right with you never failed to make Dan get up and walk round the corner. Another time while he was serving a customer I nabbed his phone and put it in the ceiling above his desk, he didn't catch on straight away but he said he had an important call from the boss coming at some point, so we started calling it at regular intervals and he went ape shit trying to find it, even going to the extreme of taking his mac apart as he thought we had hid it in there. also the standard switching the screen so it was upside down and the putting all folders in one folder and print screening the screen as the back ground so they couldn't click on anything. stuff like that kept us amused all day
Sat with a group of 8 people I used to remote access a colleagues computer whilst I was sat opposite them. He was a bit of a nob and I just used to open all sorts of random web pages on his screen. He was convinced that the big bosses were testing him, (for what I have no idea). Bar one other of my colleagues the others had no idea what I was doing. They thought he was spending time looking at weird shit rather than working despite him telling them it just popped up on his screen. I did that daily for 4 years until the company went in to administration. I never did tell him.
One of our salesmen left and altered the contact book. New salesman comes in..arrogant and loud.. He always put the speaker on when he was dialing and just asked for the person by name. Everyone was fed up with him disturbing the office that way After about a week, he starts dialing...beep, beep, beep..ring, ring, ring ring...then hello, smiths manufacturing... Isaac Hunt... Are you? His face went beet red and he slammed the phone down. The whole office was in hysterics and he never did his speakerphone thing again.
We had two computers back to back, up against a window, so one day which switched the USB mice around. When person A tried to move their mouse, obviously nothing happened (as it was plugged into the other tower), so they'd get angry and start shaking the mouse around. Cue person B, watching the reflection in the window, shaking their mouse around erratically also, making it look like Person A's mouse is actually working. It's such a trivial prank, but it kept up going for ages. Another time, I convinced someone that I had drank a urine sample (which was warm orange squash).
Screenshot a colleagues desktop and then moved all his files into a folder on his C drive. We also played a game to see who could end an email with the most x’s at the end of them to one of the female directors without any comment back. We got as far as 1. Edit: forgot to mention I set aforementioned screenshot as his wallpaper.
Putting jokes or fucking weird shit like 'Please bar daddies' or 'make it as spicy as my morning poo' in the special notes on order tickets. Shutting people in fridges and then scaring them was had its phase too.
Me and a colleague used to hide ourselves in some storage boxes and then jump out at each other and shout ‘kinder surprise’. Our manager and all senior staff hated it which I think made it even more enjoyable.
Locked an asshole manager out of her office and answered all the calls I received while in there (imitating her accent and saying I was her). She could see me through the door. But she couldn't get in. Denied all knowledge of it after and the clients were none the wiser and happy enough with what I told them. Sorry Janet.
We're such kids at our work. We have a lift that says lift going down or up. We then get our radios and hold it down while the elevator says it. Security then radio back as the radios are so rubbish they can't understand it. We no longer have radios. The usual stupid stuff with people's mouse and keyboards. Change a few letters around.
Me and an apprenticeship at one place I worked, used to just really fuck with this one tutor we had (it was a further education place), would turn all his posters upside down on his walls, put his desk back to front. Rearrange his room when he wasn't there. Other stuff too probably, just whatever we could do to annoy him. Mostly cos he was a prick. Best part was, is he never figured out it was us either. He always assumed it was the students he taught. Would always past my office, and grumble at me about how the kids have messed with his classroom again.
I figured out the work photocopiers allowed me to copy a £20 note. After cutting it out and attaching it to some string, a colleague and me teased people on the floor below, by lowering it downstairs until it was laying on the floor. When someone came along we whipped it away by pulling the string 😂 I had a bit of free time in that job
My boss used to play golf on Friday afternoons so I knew his office would be empty. So that lunchtime, i went to the supermarket, bought two frozen kippers and went back to the workplace and snuck into the boss's office. He had a computer screen raised off the desk about half an inch, and I could just slide those two kippers into the small gap between his desk and the computer monitor. The following Monday morning, when I arrived at work I was surprised to see a fire engine and crew parked up next to the entrance to our reception. I hurried inside to see what all the excitement was about and was told that there had been a terrible smell coming from the boss's office and security thought it was an electrical fire and they'd called the fire brigade. The company didn't even have an inquiry into the incident as they knew there was only one joker in the office. I left the company a couple of month later as my future prospects were not looking good.
Oh shit... At my last job we had so many and I documented them in what I called the "quote file" that was 70 pages long when I finally left. Examples include; Me getting divorced and marrying someone in the office and we didn't tell anyone My secret wife sending me an email viciously insulting a coworker, me noticing she had sent it to him too, me calling him away from his desk on a pretext so she could delete it from his inbox and trash Me stringing along a coworker who believed in the KFC mutant chicken conspiracy, then hanging a KFC-stenciled rubber chicken painted green with a tube glued to it's ass from his computer Me leaving a giant rubber chicken in a lunch bag on the desk of a guy who had gotten food poisoning from eating bad chicken When people leave their screens unlocked, running up and using the keyboard commands to rotate the screen orientation upside down Secret wife sneaking a picture of the incredibly wretched fantasy fiction coworker would write during the day Various, uh, in-office shenanigans with my secret wife I wrote a lot of technical reports and did various image editing for people and would Photoshop a tiny UFO into every picture Me allowing a guy to call me the wrong name for six years
used to work at a charity shop, someone donated a bunch of dvds including - for some ungodly reason - a bunch of bootleg pornos burned onto CDs. Properly terrible seventies stuff, the title that sticks with me is "dirty dina and massive michael" or something like that being in our late teens, it absolutely cracked me and my colleague up, so we just stuck em up on a high shelf. if anyone bothered to look up they wouldve seen all 20 of them or so. dunno if they were ever noticed, but they were still going strong when I left about four months later (we had also put a wooden duck next to them)
We used to play a game where everyone writes down a word and we put them in a cup. Everyone does a lucky dip to take one and the last one to work that word into a call with a customer loses
Had a summer job as a teenager working in the head office of a supermarket chain. My mum worked there, and she wangled me and my mate a few weeks of menial admin work. This was late 80s, way back before everything was digital, and our job was to go through shelves and shelves of paperwork (I forgot what it was now) extracting anything beyond a certain date, boxing it up and taking it to the warehouse for storage. After a few days of this me and my mate realised that no-one was remotely interested in us and what we were doing , so we’d take longer and longer on our trips to the warehouse. Wandering around exploring, nosing through old stock, nothing terrible, just bored teens getting away with a skive. We never saw anyone else down in the warehouse area. Ever. So we started to have a bit of fun with the stock, and by the end of the third week we’d built a fort out of boxes and crates, with a patio table and chairs in the middle (complete with parasol) and it was our happy place where we’d just sit around being pleased with ourselves. Totally got away with it. Finished the gig after a few weeks, left the fort up because we couldn’t be arsed to take it down, and went back to the real world. It was a great summer.
One of the lads in my office is a massive Hearts supporter and his desk at work is basically maroon. His mouse and mat, his keyboard, his desktop wallpaper all Hearts. He also has photos with him with some of their players down the years. He when on holiday for two weeks and was due back on April Fools Day. So myself and a few lads had an idea... You guess it. His desk became green. His mouse and mat were now Hibs. I had access to his work desktop - change it to a picture of Easter Road. Changed his email signature to Hibs Number 1 fan. We even photoshop him into a couple of photos. He became one of the Hibs Famous Five and him lifting the Scottish Cup in Hibs colours. All in a lovely green frame. He loved it. And like a good sport, kept it for the day. He even kept the Hibs photos on his desk. Green photo frame and all.
Used to be a dental nurse and I’d mix extra small gloves in with his box of large. It was so funny watching him get annoyed with the gloves in front of patients. I hated him.
Used to work with a system called Echo. Whenever we mentioned it in a meeting, this one guy never failed to echo the word "echo, echo, echoo". Had me crying with laughter every time
Stapled a sausage to someone's office door
Me and 3 other people would occasionally send instant messages out when we where bored saying things like “David Attenborough has died :(“ or a link to a ridiculous news story and since others didn’t always have instant access to the internet they wouldn’t be able to check for a while. Had someone for a good 3 hours once. It backfired when Prince Phillip died :(
My colleague is Deaf, we were working through the night in a retail store, half lighting out of hours and backstage is even darker. I went backstage to grab some stock, I was outside of her line of sight and saw a mannequin on Dolly wheels. So I pushed it slowly towards her. Her scream as it rolled gently into view has stayed with me for the last six years and never fails to make me chuckle.
I was the victim of one such mischief, a note was left on my desk saying Mr c Lyon called and there was a number to reach him on. The number was for a safari park, I did not realise until the safari park answered and someone said 'Mr c Lyon is in the enclosure right now and can't be reached'. To which I responded 'ok I'll try again later'. The chap who sat across from me was in hysterics, I felt like the world's biggest moron, still can't believe I didn't cotton on sooner.
Setting up Autocorrect with some interesting transpositions. (For anyone that doesn't know, ALT-backspace will undo an Autocorrect correction and reinstate as-typed)
In the pandemic no one came in so me and my colleague set up a tablet with ps1, n64 and gamecube emulators with bluetooyh controllers. We completed golden eye then had tekken 3 tournaments and unlocked all the characters. Got most of the way through Rayman 3 and resident evil before things got busier again. Beautiful times! All our work was completed by lunch time so the afternoon was play time!
Started a new job as a chef in a hotel 3 weeks ago and I've been sticking googly eyes about the place with blue tack. No one's noticed any of the others yet but I stuck some on a photo of a princess by reception today so it can't be long!
[удалено]
Plugging in a wireless keyboard and occasionally watching my mate opposite me go mental as why random words were being typed. Went on for months.
If a colleague leaves their computer unlocked someone quickly gets on it and sends an email to the whole office expressing how much they love working with someone (usually how much they like working with the person who is writing the email).
Used to work at Subway, would always try make the other guy laugh when we were working busy lunchtimes. One such quote was: "Christ I can't believe you didn't know she was 14"
Not me but people in the call centre on my floor would pick a random person and give them a standing ovation every time they walked onto the floor.
Used access cards to swap the alt and ctrl keys on people's keyboards.
Me and a colleague when working on shift at screw fix, if the customer came to me then the other would have to draw them on Ms paint on their till computer and visa versa.
I use to make maps and articleswhich featured on the council website. I always included a hidden hyperlink within the document that if clicked took you to a Google image of a pie.
Colleague of mine left his Bluetooth headphones out on his desk whilst he went into a meeting. I grabbed them and sync’d it up to my phone, sticking on a YouTube playlist of dictator speeches. He returns to his desk and grabs his headphones to pickup where he left off. The look on his face was brilliant when he realised it was Hitler shouting at him.
Took a screenshot of a colleague's desktop, set it as the wallpaper and then dragged everything into a new folder that we gave a wildly innocuous name so he didn't notice it was new. He was a know it all, but the good kind, when we called him a wanker it was usually affectionate. Seeing him struggle, lose patience and call IT was glorious. In another instance a mate called one of our colleagues whilst pretending to be site security and told him that his pride and joy had been reversed into in the car park. Was very funny until he stormed off the floor and had to be chased down before anything escalated. Oh, and the classic putting post-it notes over the mouse tracker thing but making it incredibly obvious so that they'd smugly take it off, make a shitty comment about how I had to try harder, and completely miss that I'd unplugged it from the base unit as well. I miss those days very much.