Have you played any good practical jokes on anyone, or had a good one played on you? Here's one to start the ball rolling:

A few years ago, a couple of friends of mine decided to race Mini-stocks at the local circle track. Even though they would be competitors, they decided to share a shop. One guy, we'll call him Mr. C, had this Pinto all custom built, and had several guys on his pit crew. My friend F. had my old Mini which he was racing while he had another one built by the same guy who built Mr. C's car. I was crewing for F. as was one other guy, we were a little smaller operation than Mr. C's. Well, one evening Mr C. lost his engine and F. wound up with some front end damage...unrelated incidents, but we all were working pretty hard that next week to get the cars ready by Saturday night. Friday night late, two of us were working on F's car, replacing roll cage tubing, the radiator, sheet metal, etc. while Mr. C's crew was buttoning up the new engine and test running it. They all left about 11:00 pm with some snickers and snide comments about the amount of work we still had to do on F's car while they got to go home to bed at a decent hour. After they were gone, the guy I was working with said that we ought to sabotage Mr. C's car. Now, to back up a little, Mr. C and F. had been doing little things to each other's cars all season, like the time that F. pulled in off the track after hot laps and said that something was loose and making a lot of noise rattling around. We tore into things and found a crowbar in an area that no one had been working on. It couldn't go anywhere so it wasn't a danger, but man, it made some noise! Mr. C. was all innocence, but was grinning ear to ear. Well, we had the last laugh. After looking over at that car with it's new, fresh engine, I said, "Wouldn't it be too bad if it developed an oil leak?" I grabbed a quart of oil off of the shelf and carefully poured it on the floor right under the rear main seal. I thought of daubing some on the engine but decided it would be more fun if the engine was clean and dry and he couldn't figure out where it was coming from. We left about 2:00 am and when F's wife went into the shop the nxt morning, there was Mr.C with his car up on jack stands and him crawling all over underneath it with a light, trying to find that oil leak. We had told F. what we had done, so the first thing his wife said was, " What's the matter, C. got an oil leak?" He looked out from under the car, saw the grin on her face, and knew instantly! He swore up a blue streak and said that he was about to pull the engine, the only reason he hadn't yet was because there was no oil on the engine and he was still trying to figure it out! She came in just in time! (I've posted this in this forum because I felt that the general subject matter of the thread was more appropriate here, even though this post is automotive-related. Please don't have me shot if I have erred in judgement!) -TD

 

Hmmmn....a long time ago in another land.....some people would charge up a capacitor and leave it where another person might grab it.

 

Adult pranks from days gone by (a few within the last year, lol):

1) There is an old toilet, vanity, shower stall, and plumbing floating around amongst my group of friends. Every once in awhile, in a functional bathroom arrangement, it appears in someones front yard in the middle of the night. Take digital pics, open a one time email addy, and mail the pics to the person. Bonus points if the person doesn't have a pickup.

2) Right after Halloween, collect about 100 or more pumpkins (jack-o-lanterns) and place them in a buddies front yard with the faces pointing at the front window.

3) During the Christmas season, find an old tv (ideally a console model) and put it in a buddies front yard. Point the thing at the front window and plug it in to the Christmas lights so it works. More bonus points if they don't have a pickup.

4) Place a garage sale ad in the paper for a buddy/coworker when they are NOT having a sale. Sale begins @ 7:00am (means people show up at 6:30).

5) Place a for sale sign in front of a buddies/coworkers house and an ad in the Sunday paper while they are away for the weekend. Make sure the price is somewhat lower than fair market value to generate lots of atttention.

6) Find a ratty old couch in an alley, dead house plants in the pot, beat up old tv tray tables, old piece of carpet, etc, and set up an extension of the living room in the front yard. Arrange some beer cans on the tv trays, couch, and carpet so the new addition has the used look. Even more bonus points when the buddy/coworker doesn't have a pickup. Don't forget to take pics and send them to the person. Timing can work to your benefit on this one, do it when they are away for a few days. We did this to a lawyer I know and it was a riot; his yuppie neighborhood got to enjoy it for a few days, Even when his neighbors learned it was a prank, they thought it was funny.

Remember the recepient/victim needs to have a sense of humor and ideally they themselves have participated in these pranks in the past so they know it was their turn when the time comes.

 

Fatman, LOL, you reminded me of a prank my buddies and I played on a co-worker. We worked in a restourant, so one night a couple of us snuck outside, unscrewed the the boot at the base of his shifter in his car, and threw raw fish and clams in there, buttoned everything back up, and let it stink. It was the middle of summer and he never did find the source of the smell....LOL

 

Jack a guys car up and put the rear-end on jack stands so that it just sits high enough off the ground that the wheels don't get traction... but not high enough that he will notice...

My favorite jokes are from when I worked at a machine shop. We pretty much had an endless supply of ball bearings there. It was a blast to cut the bottom out of something or fill a hollow cavity in a part with ball bearings and set it strategically so that when the guy returned to his desk and moved it, ball bearings would scatter everywhere.

Same office, I did a lot of graphic design there for our first web page and we had a program called gif2exe, you could take any gif image file and make it an executable so that as soon as it was clicked on it would pop the image up full screen on the computer. You could also determine what keys you had to push to exit it.. so I would always make it something like ctrl+shift+9+down arrow+stand on your head... you get the picture. These could easily be put on the server and then we would change a shortcut path on the guys desktop to point to it. The next time he clicked on My Computer, or AutoCAD... he would get, well... not what he was expecting. We started out using nudes... but they enjoyed that too much. So since I had corel and a digital camera we had some fun with some doctored up pics we had from around the office. Nothing like coming in, firing up your computer, clicking on AutoCAD and having a picture of your face on a very nude and overweight persons body go full screen on your monitor, and not having any way to get it off there before everyone see's it. Ah, those were the days.

I got mine though... we designed parts for the bottling industry so at times we got bottles and caps for testing. My cubicle was backed up to the stair case, which was cool becuase I had a closet there under the stairs right behind my chair. One day I came in and a guy asked me for a network cable that he knew I kept in there, so I opened the door to get it... they had built a chute under the stairs and filled it with about 3000+ bottle caps. When I opened the door it rained bottle caps on me for 30 seconds... looked like the ping pong ***** on Captain Kangaroo, before it was over with I was better than ankle deep in bottle caps in my cube... that was great, I don't think I ever topped that one.

 

I have never been a drinker.. during my single days I would go to a party, mix booze with some coke and keep topping it off with coke. Then I would drive my drunk friends home. One night they conspired to get me drunk and kept pouring booze in my drink. I woke up the next morning in the Blue Top Motel ($2.50 a night.. even the cockroaches wouldn't stay there), in bed with a girl that looked alot like Danny DeVito. My clothes, money and keys were not there. I wrapped a blanket (which I took off a sleeping Danny) around myself and went to the office where I was allowed to use the pnone after I threatened the clerk with a slow death. I reached a friend (one of those that had put me there) and told him to come pick me up like his life depended on it because it did. The whole bunch showed up a little later in two cars (one mine), laughing their tails off. I dressed, promised revenge on them all, and left them and Danny there.
Dono

 

That one is hard to top dono.

 

Auto pranks

Some nicer pranks
I would have to say live bait and defroster vents go hand in hand. I like to use potatos in rusted mufflers as well, smells nice.

Some mean ones, I'm not proud of these.
Pole barn spikes placed against the tires, back up boom.
A long rope to the crank the other end to any kind of frozzen dead animal, don't try it!!
intake full of water, my car wont crank.
Soft ball stuffed and crimped into rice rod tail pipe, I can't be sorry for that one. Boy do they get mad!!!

Chain the dirve shaft to the tail pipe.

It is funny what age will do you, now I'm just a nice guy for the most part, I do relaps some times but I never get as mean with the pranks now.... Well... hehehe. Nevermind

 

Me and some buddies once put another friends Honda CVCC( the little old aircooled model), in the back of a pickup in the high school parking lot. The car was so little we even got the tailgate closed.

 

The difference between a practical joke and Vandalism is :
Damage to something.

Somethings when damage is involved ....just aren't funny

 

A few years ago I bought a 50 gallon drum full of little plastic bb s about half the size of a regular bb s. Then I waited for a coworker to make the mistake of leaving her keys on the counter. About a month or so later I had my chance....took her keys, and made a copy. A month or so after that I opened her S-10 and filled up the cargo portion of her rig. I 'may' have put some of the bbs in her heater/ac ducts.

 

An ex girlfriend and I set up a buddy of mine with another girl on a blind date. Now this girl was ugly, and I mean roadkill looked better than her, and she had an attitude to go with it. I showed my buddy a picture of some other girl so he would come along. The amazing thing, my buddy was a complete gentleman the whole night, at least until we dropped the girls off at home. To this day he won't let me set him up anymore, don't know why

 

cable ties on the driveshaft....

extra *parts* on the bench after the engine is assembled.. a lifter is enough to cause coniptions...or an inner valve spring...

I have a lot more stories, but as 95% of them feature the misuse of explosives I'm going to keep quiet about them...

 

when i was younger a whole bunch of us used to go camping ( like twenty or thirty of us at a time) and one of the guiys there would sleep like a corpse in the box.... for a prank one day we put a dead raccoon on his chest while he slept.... it was hysterical when he woke up and saw that staring at him LOL

 

One of my college roommates really liked Navel oranges. Guaranteed he would eat two or three a day, and he always picked the biggest orange.

I carefully peeled the biggest one (it was tasty) and glued the peel back together using Krazy Glue & put it back in the fridge. I made a point of being there when he went to get one. Rob picked it up, realized it was too light and put it back, chuckling at me.

I needed something to weigh it down. I found a potato the right size and glued the peel back together around that. It was perfect - it was just the right weight and the peel fit tight.

Again I waited. Rob grabbed the orange from the fridge and sat down on the couch to eat it. When he ripped open the peel, the orange was brown and scaly. He nearly had a heart attack.

Cheers,
Eric