Favorite April Fool's/practical jokes?

**rb336** · February-03-13, 07:47 PM

all that talk about turning Belle Isle into a tax haven for the rich reminded me of the April Fool's Day story one of the morning news guys back in the 80s/90s did about it being sold to the Sultan of Dubai.

So what is your favorite practical joke that you have done, or had done to you?

My freshman year of college, my roommate got plastered March 31. I put a ton of Anbesol into his toothpaste - his mouth completely went numb when he brushed his teeth, and his reaction was priceless

**Jimaz** · February-03-13, 09:55 PM

Good one.

There were so many pranks that it's hard to choose one best.

The most elaborate one was to reprogram a System Manager's monitor so that it would display every single character exactly upside down. The effect was triggered by an invisible escape sequence hidden in the subject field of an email so I could wait until the optimum time to send the email.

The moment he checked his email, ¤BOOM¤ Australialand! He couldn't even narrow down which email had caused it. The ultimate way to recover from such chaos was usually to press Ctrl-C or Ctrl-Y but even that didn't work since the prank was embedded inside his own local monitor. He eventually had to cycle the monitor's power to recover.

He later confessed that he thought I had physically twisted his monitor bezel upside-down but nope, it was all done in software!

The manufacturer eventually closed that loophole.

[[No managers were harmed in this experiment.)

**WKL** · February-04-13, 11:00 AM

Sadly this one wont't work unless you have a really old phone, the kind where you could un-screw the microphone end.

Worked best in a office. After removing the cover of the microphone you could lift it right. It was just resting on two big contacts. Pocket the mike, replace the cover and leave a message on the victim's desk to call someone.

With mike out the contasts still kind of vibrate, so the victim could here just fine, but the person at the other end would only kind of hear the caller. In notice the victim is shouting at the top their lungs from repeated request to talk louder.

it was up to when to toss the mike on their desk.

**Jimaz** · March-31-13, 05:37 PM

From today's Free Press: You haven't lived here until... You take an April Fools' Day drive along M-00.

**Jimaz** · March-31-13, 07:03 PM

Originally Posted by WKL

Sadly this one wont't work unless you have a really old phone, the kind where you could un-screw the microphone end....

Thank you. Your post inspired me to search for an old phone prank in my office toy box. I found it!

It's one of those old handsets as you described.

Long ago I gutted it except for the speaker then added a sound generator chip, a battery, a mercury switch and some other odds'n'ends. It barely all fit inside the handset. The mercury switch was to mute the thing when it was level [[in the phone cradle) otherwise it made a loud WOOP WOOP WOOP noise until you hung it back up. It didn't need a cord.

I waited for my coworker to leave his desk then swapped it with his normal handset. The cord fit only loosely but I stuffed it in anyway just to make it look normal. When he returned, I called his number.

His phone rang, he picked up the handset, the cord fell out, it started wailing WOOP WOOP WOOP! [[as if complaining about its missing cord) so he frantically tried to plug the cord back in! This guy was an EE but it hadn't occurred to him to question how it could possibly make sound without the power from a cord! LOL! Then he hung it up, it went silent and I revealed the trick.

Another time I left it out on the desk, disconnected from any phone. Some joker came in and picked it up to pretend to have a mock conversation on this unexpectedly disconnected handset. WOOP WOOP WOOP! It startled him and he fumbled it. LOL!

Those were the days.

**Jimaz** · March-31-13, 07:38 PM

YouTube's ready to select a winner

**Maof** · March-31-13, 07:52 PM

i once taped down the button on one of the sales managers phone so when the phone rang and he picked it up, it kept on ringing...hahahaha. well, it just so happened that it was a conference call with one of our biggest accounts, steelcase! boy, he came out of that office so pissed

**Jimaz** · March-31-13, 11:41 PM

The best pranks are against fellow pranksters. The idea is to rig it so that, by triggering a prank against someone else, they unwittingly trigger your own prank against themselves. [[Of course this will backfire, eventually.)

Due to the statute of limitations, I'm not yet at liberty to reveal any human victims, but I did however successfully pull off such a prank on a cat.

[[No cats were harmed in this prank.)

There's an architectural feature we call a "roundabout" where you can walk from one room to another, and another,... around in a circle and again arrive where you started.
Cats enjoy chasing little quivering frightened victims.

I carefully measured a long length of string so that it would wrap around the roundabout for this exact effect. I attached a quivering cat toy to one end and attached the other end, loosely, to the base of the cat's tail. I carried the cat-toy end around the roundabout and dropped it in front of the cat.

All Hell broke loose.

The cat chased the toy around and around the roundabout, faster and faster. As the string gradually slipped along his tail, the cat confirmed he was closing in on his kill. Suddenly he pounced, snagged his victim, and so was startled by something capturing the tip of his tail! He unwittingly caught his own tail!

**rb336** · April-01-13, 10:38 AM

scope has a bacon-flavored version! well, they are putting the ads on youtube, anyway

**G-DDT** · March-30-16, 05:50 PM

In "The Irregulars" by Conant, there was listed an entry about a burly high ranking officer who liked to bring lower ranking servicemen into his quarters where various rugs laid on the grounds. He'd proceed to outdrink them until they each would pass out, and he'd take each one, roll them up in a rug [[with the head sticking out of one end) and prop them standing up in a row against the wall in a line.

Imagine waking up to that!

**G-DDT** · April-29-16, 01:02 AM

Like most things on the internet, I questioned if this was real, but I figured I'd squeak one last one in before April was up for this year:

I like the comment someone said "kids in Africa could've eaten that shampoo".

**Bigb23** · April-30-16, 01:35 AM

One of my favorites at work a long time ago was to wait till Saturday morning when all the hung over guys would hog toilet time on the two thrones we had for forty people.

Put a pinhole in a corner of two mustard packets, aim them, and place under the pads beneath the seat.

Mister party hard drops trou, sits down and gets a shot on his wiener, buns, and etc.