April Fools Pranks
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Howdy and welcome to my free April Fools Pranks page. I am collecting these
tricks and jokes from the internet and email etc, just like all my other
pages I am trying to get them all up on the web. Please be aware that
these April Fools Pranks are not meant to be taken literally.. Most of them
are just tall tales, and I dont want anyone to go ahead and hurt somebody
just cos you read a pranks page. They are pretty funny tho.. so read on
and enjoy
REMEMBER: THESE April Fools Pranks ARE JUST
THAT april fools pranks : DO NOT TRY ANY OF THESE AT HOME!!!
Tell someone you can pin a glass of water to the wall -- a real glass,
not a paper cup, using an ordinary straight pin. Naturally they won't
believe, so you set out to prove it.
Get a glass of water and a pin. Hold the glass up to the wall and start
to pin it up. And then drop the pin. You've got the glass in position
just right, so you ask your victim real nice to get the pin for you. When
they bend down to pick it up, dump the water on their head.
This works especially well when there's a crowd of people watching. It
can also be very dangerous for the joker, so be careful if you try it.
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One joke that we did in residence was the Hungarian Fire Drill, I don't
quite know why it is called that. Anyway..
The victim is on the pot in the dorm washroom. Everyone grabs a bucket
(we used the waste baskets from our rooms) and fills the buckets with
water. Take a paper bag and set it on fire, toss it under the door into
the stall. Yell fire as everyone tosses the water into the stall. Needless
to say the fire as well as the victim get very wet.
This one fellow in the house was hit a number of times and took to relieving
himself in other locals. We followed him a couple of times and nailed
him in many parts of the residence.
Later of course we conspired with our victim to get back at the original
instigator of the drill. The guy in the stall had a bucket of water, and
when the the instigator tossed the bag in we all hit him.
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It is common for draftsmen to sprinkle SCUMEX (powdered rubber eraser)
on tracings prior to doing any drawing on it. This reduces smearing of
the pencil marks and such and results in a cleaner tracing.
At a former employers we had replaced the Scumex at one draftsmans desk
with dried parmesian cheese. It looked about the same. It was extremely
interesting watching him draw for a while and then begin to smell the
paper. Took the poor dude almost 10 minutes to guess that he had been
gigged!
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I just pulled one on somebody -- I slipped some of those anti- shoplifting
strips into the lining of the victim's favorite jacket. I was set to pull
another one, but didn't get the chance - to cut out a silhouette of a
gun from metal and hide it in a piece of carry-on luggage.
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Two teachers at my high school started a practical joke war that culminated
in a junk mail war of huge proportions. They finally called a truce and
got it cleared up and the mail stopped, EXCEPT for the military mail that
one had signed the other one up for. He wrote (honestly) that he had graduated
from a fine college and was interested in the Marines, Air Force, etc.
etc. When I left, about two years after this, he was still getting PHONE
CALLS from 2-4 times a month.... they were VERY persistant even over he
(loud) objections that he was 45 and not interested in a career change...
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New secretary (second day on the job) answers telephone as is told in
official tones: "This is the phone company. We are testing a new
circuit wiring scheme in your offices. Please keep everyone off the phones
for the next 10 minutes. We will be verifying the correct wiring of your
system by passing HOT STEAM through the wires. Instruct your employees
to place their phones on the floor, or, better yet, wrap them in towels
to avoid scalding themselves. We will advise you when the tests are complete
*click*" After momentary panic, the secretary begins a frenzied "Paul
Revere" routine, running from desk to desk while glancing frequently
at her watch. Just as the 10 minutes are about up, she bursts into her
boss's office (while he is in the midst of an important long-distance
call) and, screaming, grabs the receiver from his hand and flings the
whole phone under his desk...
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one time in my undergrad days, it was snowing like mad out. someone decided
it was time a make a snowball. then someone else suggested that we should
put this snowball in this one guy's room-- nobody liked this guy-- so
when the word got around, half the people in our dorm section came out
and help! we got this sucker so BIG that it must be at least 4 feet in
diameter. it took about 6 person to haul the darn thing up 3 flights of
stairs. we got the snowball into this guy's room while he was out, turn
off the heat in the room and left all the windows open, so the snowball
won't melt too fast. well... the turkey came back 3 hours later and found
a HUGH snowball sitting in the middle of his room, and started melting!
I still have the picture of the snowball. (if you really wonder how big
the snowball is, just imagine a snowball the size of a normal dinning
room chair!)
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This reminds me of a similar stunt we used to enjoy at the dining hall
in my undergrad days. The food service used opaque plastic salt and pepper
shakers with pop-off tops that could be pried off with a knife blade if
you were persistent enough.
PREPARATION (in a restroom nearby):
Empty salt ( or pepper) from a previously 'acquired' container and fill
about 1/3 full with concentrated lemon juice.
Place a thin tissue across the opening, poke it down a bit to form a depression,
and fill the depression with about a teaspoon of baking soda.
Cover (from the inside) the holes of the top with tape of the appropriate
color.
Replace top on container and trim visible tissue from around the top.
Carry the device to dining hall (upright and as stable as is possible...
for your own sake).
After discretely placing the shaker on your table (only place it near
to you... see caveat #1 below), observe the next person to use the salt
(pepper). (S)He will shake lightly at first, then harder as nothing comes
out. Due to the breakdown of the tissue and the pressure resulting from
the classic acid/base reaction, the top will pop off (quite spectacularly)
amidst a shower of foam. Your victim (as will as everyone around) should
have quite a reaction, since one does not usually observe this type of
behavior in a salt (pepper) shaker!
CAVEATS:
The top will come off with some force. If the holes are sealed well,
this will happen on about the second or third shake. Once, though, due
to poor sealing, it took about 5 seconds, during which time our victim
started looking at the shaker to examine the "foamy stuff coming
out" of the holes... we quickly grabbed the shaker from her to direct
the top towards the ceiling before it went off. So, watch carefully!
The "foam shower" (lemon juice & soda) may ruin you victim
meal... be prepared to pop for another one.
Don't do this if your victim or anyone near ground zero is dressed up
(this joke will flop at board meetings and the like).
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This joke has been done 50 (yes, 50) years ago by my father-in-law.
First, a little background:
He lived in a small village, north-west of Quebec City along the St-Laurent
river. In those days, toilets were located outside the house in what we
call in good ol' french canadian 'becosse', from 'back house' I think.
These are a little wood shack with no floor over a hole in the ground
where you ... You can guess.
Now, for the joke:
He and a friend were thrown out of a party by the doorman.
When it was really dark,, the doorman went to investigate what was knocking
at the window. They had suspended a rock to the window frame so it hung
right it the middle and tied another string to the rock and hid behind
the 'becosse' where they pulled that second string to make the rock knock
in the window. That's an old trick. The doorman wouldn't fall for that
one. So he followed the second string in the dark and soon concluded that
they were hidding behind the 'becosse'.
He ran toward the merely visible wood structure...
But my father-in-law and his friend had taken care of moving the shack
six feet ... Boy he fell in the sh*t !!
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REMEMBER: THESE April Fools Pranks ARE JUST THAT
-> JOKES : DO NOT TRY ANY OF THESE AT HOME!!!
This one hasn't come up despite the presence of UCLA on the net. I'm
led to the sad conclusion that the tradition has died.
In the mid '70s, just before it was overrun by fanatic Dungeons &
Dragons (tm) players, the UCLA Computer Club was host to a long series
of "glitter traps." Example: joke subject sits at a desk, pulls
out a drawer. A string runs from the back of the drawer, up the wall,
into the false ceiling, over to a spot directly over the subject's head,
where it triggers the trap: a mousetrap whose action snaps a card away
>from its position covering a funnel, releasing a handful of glitter,
which flows down the funnel, through its spout, through a hole in the
ceiling acoustic tile, onto the subject. It was wonderful to watch: a
muffled snapping noise, a quiet "chuff," and the slow, glittery
descent of a cloud of brightly colored dust, to settle over the head and
shoulders of a club member who by now has assumed an expression of appreciative
resignation.
Another, more short-lived ploy was to suspend a wooden horseshoe by a
string from the ceiling in the corridor, such that the horseshow dangles
a couple of inches above the top of an upright broom. Most conventional
brooms will stand on their straws with a little coaxing. We attached a
sign labeling the horseshow "wood magnet." Quite a few people
took it at face value.
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Another Cow joke I attribute to my 'Ol chemestry prof was the placement
of a cow onto the roof. I would presume a fairly storng roof, but once
up there it would be hard to hide the fact to the cow that any direction
would be down.
Another pratical joke involved the use of outhouses. Once the target
has established himself you take up the slack on the attached rope which
has been measured to set up tremendious harmonics in the structure. When
the rope transfers your strumming to the outhouse, it usually falls apart
with a most revieling nature..
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I was once in a nice family-style restaurant when I observed some kids
supergluing the dishes to the table. They also attached the silverware,
napkins, salt, pepper, etc. If it wasn't already nailed down, it was now.
They stayed long enough to let the glue set, and then paid and left. They
watched as the poor busboy tried to get the stuff off of the table.
Also funny is supergluing a quarter to the sidewalk. I know its old,
but in the city, with the diverse types of people around, it gets really
amusing. I watched this old lady whack at it with her cane for about 10
min. cursing......
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A few months ago I saw a newspaper clipping which told of a newspaper
in Illinois (I think...) which ran a story warning consumers that, on
such-and- such day, Illinois Bell would be "blowing the dust out
of the phone lines" and that all phone owners should cover the earpiece
of their phones with a bag to catch the dust.
Bell made them print a retraction, after receiving numerous calls asking
what sort of bag to use ...
People, they is amazing.
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When I was in college our RA told us of a good one that (supposedly)
some friends had pulled a couple of years earlier. These two guys made
up a concoction of all kinds of left overs, semi-pureed it in a blender,
and filled a hot water bottle with it. One of them took the hot water
bottle, taped it to his stomach inside of his shirt and put a short piece
of hose into the top so that it came up to the front of his shirt collar,
but not visible. They both went to a local pub and sat at the bar, acting
already slightly intoxicated. After having a couple of beers the guy with
the hot water bottle says that he is feeling sick a couple of times and
"barfs" VERY loudly all over the bar to attract attention. Naturally
this causes the patrons to move away from him, all except his buddy, who
calmy pulls a fork out of his coat pocket and begins EATING the stuff.
;-) I don't know how true it is, but I'd love to have been there watching
faces if it was...
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I can't resist a few:
Once you have stolen a dormmate's room keys, the room is yours to plunder.
As a variation, steal the dorm keys but reverse the lock (so the keyhole
faces INTO the room); we had a mechanical engineer who got this down to
about 20 seconds. Then loudly announce to the victim you own the keys,
but "let" them win the race back to their room. PRESTO! Locked
inside their own room (with no keys). If you've fixed the phone to continually
ring, they get very pliable after about 10 minutes.
We connected our secretary's electric typewriter to a variac (can vary
the line voltage). At about 40-50 volts (out of the
the little ball makes three or four jerky attempts before finally striking
a faint imprint. Fairly pathetic looking, actually.
Reverse the horizontal yoke leads on terminals (so the text comes out
backwards from right to left). This works best on a software team who
thinks they have just released the firmware for screen drivers. Besides,
hardware people figure it out too quickly.
Hand lotion inside of an air hose on the final assembly line is effective,
but very vindictive. Use with caution (now, I'm not saying I ever did
this, but I "saw" it done once :-)
And the standard saran wrap across women's toilets, Karo syrup, flour
in the shower, water-filled surgical tubing jammed in a drawer....ah,
for the good old days!!
REMEMBER: THESE April Fools Pranks ARE JUST
THAT -> JOKES : DO NOT TRY ANY OF THESE AT HOME!!!
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One night when you have a few friends around, take turns calling the
same phone number, a really obnoxious acquaintance that won't recognize
your voices is always a good choice. When the person answers, try to leave
a message for John Smith (or any name that sounds real). Insist that you
have the right number and even read their number to them. Have a bit of
fun here, and stretch this on as long as possible. Repeat several times,
once or twice an hour. Let everybody have a turn at calling. Just as the
party is breaking up, call one last time. Tell the poor soul answering
the phone that you are John Smith, and ask "Are there any messages
for me?" This is sure to get a groan.
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Seven friends once pulled this at my college cafeteria. One put a hot
water bottle filled with pea soup down his chest; he sat at the head of
a table, with the other six friends sitting along the sides. When the
cafeteria was pretty full of people, he made a loud noise (to attract
attention), stood up, bent over and squeezed his chest. This caused a
huge gush of green liquid to spew all over the table; the other six immediately
began to eat this green liquid. I think a lot of food went uneaten that
night.
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Here's one that my roommate and myself did to a residence buddy. One
morning (early) we taped together a bunch of sheets of newspaper to cover
the victims doorframe. Then taped this big sheet over the doorframe which
left a gap of about two or three inches between the sheet and the door.
Then we filled the gap with paper balls right to the top of the doorway.
When he opened the door he was showered with a barrage of paper balls
(makes a nice mess too!) Of course, the door has to swing in for this
to work!
My roommate was (and is) rather inventive and can be quite nasty. He
buttered all of the toilet seats in our wing of the residence (fortunately
told me first). He also buttered doorknobs at one point. We wrapped celophane
over the toilet bowl then replaced the seat: this one can be really messy!
Try this: hang a shower curtain out a window. When the person below reaches
out and pulls it in, pour a bucket of water onto the shower curtain. Listen
to hear the results. Requires a nosy neighbor below you.
Six friends of mine and myself tried a less complicated version of the
classic dismantling of a car and putting it back together somewhere strange.
We lifted a friends car that was parked between two other cars and turned
it so that the front and back end were facing the neighboring cars. This
posed quite a problem for our friend when he decided to go home. Requires
either a small car or a lot of very strong people! :-) I take no responsibility
for any back injuries that result from this. Of course I take no responsibility
for any of my actions. :-)
There are, of course, some fairly standard pranks that are pulled in
residence. Typically, people are shafted on their birthday which is therefore
a hazardous date to reveal. Total demolition of a room is quite common,
but lacks any real humor. A common shaft is to remove everything from
the victims room and set it up somewhere else exactly as it was. The best
examples I saw of this were: a room moved to the roof of a science building,
a room moved to the front courtyard of the residence (really funny when
it started to snow!) and a room moved to the dining hall.
When I was younger, I had a practical joke genius for a working companion.
We both worked in the same computer store for a while. He left and became
manager of another store. I remember receiving an envelope with his firms
return address on it. Inside was a very silly brochure. I said aloud "There
has to be something else in this envelope". So I looked and of course
there was a sheet of paper. It read "No there is nothing else in
this envelope!" I could never get him back for anything that he pulled
but he was an inspiration. The last practical joke that I will relate
was one that he taught me and it requires a bit of time to prepare. First
you need: iodine cristals and some amonium hydroxide. Mix the two together
and a brown sludge will form. Drain off the excess liquid and let the
sludge dry. The result? Snap powder, a pressure sensitive explosive. Just
sprinkle this on the floor and watch people's reactions. Its quite amusing.
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I have lived in several different houses with a bunch of guys. Needless
to say things got pretty rowdy sometimes and many were victims of some
pretty funny jokes. One of the favorites as I recall (and still is) is
to go into the bathroom while the victim is taking a shower, and pour
a bucket of extreeeemmmlly cold water on them over the top of the shower
curtain. This is quite a shocking experience, and if you are fast enough
you can get away before the victim finds out you did it.
I remember one guy I lived with getting this all the time. One time he
got sick of putting up with it and jumped out of the shower into the hall
squirting shampoo at everyone in sight. The next time this happened the
guys were ready with a camera to take pictures of him as he ran out of
the bathroom. These pictures were later shown at his bachelor party.
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Got a neighbor that's a real pain in the ass? Do they have a lawn? Do
they have a garden that's accessible? Yes to all the above? Great! Go
out and get yourself some grass-killer and fill the suckers hose with
the stuff. Then sit back and wait for them water their lawn! Nuff said?
Does the person that you want to get even with drink red wine? If so,
have I got one for you! Get yourself some Neutral Red, a water soluble,
crystalline, red dye. Mix some into the persons wine and wait for them
to take a leak. (Nuetral Red comes out as red as it goes in, and people
have a tendancy to get really nervous when they start pissing what they
think is blood!
(I'm surprised nobody mentioned this one yet.) Go to a pet shop and buy
a fancy looking pet collar and leash. Then, the next time you see a dead
animal in the road, attach the leash and collar setup to its neck. Attach
the whole thing to revengees rear bumper, making sure to toss dead animal
under the car so it won't be seen. When revengee drives away, chances
are he/she will be stopped by either a cop or a member of some animal
lovers group for draggin some poor defenseless pet down the road. Either
way, they are gonna have some awful quick explaining to do!
Last, but certainly not least, is a great stink bomb. This one takes
a bit of time for preparation, so it's not too good for spontaneous revenge.
(But it's worth the time!) Get a quart jar with a rubber seal. (Mason
jars work quite well.) Pour about 1/4 to 1/2 inch of crystal Drano along
with about an inch or so of warm water into the jar. Place the lid on
the jar and allow the mixture to sit in a warm place for about an hour.
Take the lid off and add six egg whites, (no yokes). Add a quarter cup
of Methylene Blue, then fill the jar to within an inch of the top with
water. Seal the jar tightly and allow to sit for four to six weeks. (I
warned you it takes a while!) When the 'bomb' is ready to use, you can
either throw it like a molitov(sp?) cocktail, or shake it up and pour
the contents out, making damn sure you don't get any on yourself. The
results have to be seen, or is that smelled, to be beleived!
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Is everyone out in net land familiar with Sensormatic? They are the company
that make the large plastic clips that set off alarms when you exit a
department store. I used to work for a department store and the is what
we did.
Open up the clip and remove the shiny piece of paper. It is about an
inch long and about half an inch wide. This is the "thingy"
(that is the technical word for it) that sets off the alarm. This "thingy"
is easy to insert into a pen case, lining of a jacket ...
We did this to a co worker and needless to say, he had problems wearing
a particular jacket to work.
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We have various local spots where the teenagers park, cruise, hold drag
races, drink beer etc. We happen to own a white 1983 Dodge Diplomat, the
exact kind of car used by the State Patrol around here as well as many
law enforcement agencies nationwide. (Actually our car WAS a state patrol
car, but that's another story). Anyway, my brother in law, who is a cruiser,
would occasionally borrow this car and drive it down to the cruising spots.
Needless to say, when they saw him coming there was brief but furious
activity. He finally had to stop doing this because it made his friends
so mad.
People hate to pass us on the freeway too. It is not unusual to see some
Camaro or Porche come zipping along through traffic until he is about
2 car lengths behind us, then decelerate to a perfect 50 miles per hour.
It takes him about 10 seconds to look us over, decide we aren't in uniform,
notice that we don't have state license plates, and make up his mind.
He will then typiclaly test how fast his car will accelerate to about
90 mph.
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They had a 'witchy' old lady next door that was constantly complaining
about everything and everyone in the neighborhood. After one really good
round about kids and pets messing up her spotless front yard, my buddies
planned what turned out to be a better joke than they originally thought.
Juvenile as we all were, they planned to write some dirty words in her
meticulously-groomed front lawn with some kind of powder that would stand
out. The only thing they could find was some Ortho Super-Gro Lawn Food
(white powdery stuff). They wrote the message in the dead of night, and
next morning it was bold and white for the world to see. The 'kicker'
came after. She came out, saw the graffiti, and immediately grabbed a
hose and WATERED IT OFF!
To this day, those sections of grass are just a little bit greener than
everything around them, and the words can STILL be read!
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This reminds me of a story that a former roommate related to me. In college
he and a group of friends got revenge on complete strangers. ....Well,
let me set up the situation.
Y'know how sometimes you gotta park real far away from your destination
because certain types of people like to take up two parking spaces...?
Well, he and his friends got a little ticked about this, especially during
weekends at the school. One day, they decided to get even with every "#@@#$#@$&&
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" that took up "their" space. They turned the car sideways.
As he said, "He wanted that space so bad, now he can have it for
a loooong time!"
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In a similar vein, tell your victim that you have a test of coordination
you would like him to try with you. Find a door with a fairly large crack
between the door and the wall when the door is open. (You know, over by
the hinges; across the width of the door from the doorknob...) You need
an egg (NOT hard-boiled), and a wood floor (you don't want the egg cracking
on carpeting, do you??). Now, have your victim get on the opposite side
of the door from you, and put 2 fingers through the door. Hand him the
egg, in those two fingers. Working with him, trade the egg back and forth
a couple of times, moving UP the door frame. After you have his confidence,
leave. He will be trapped there, holding this egg by two fingers through
the door. If he lets go and nobody takes the egg, it will crash to the
floor. Best to do in the person's own room.
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A few years ago some members of the infamous Dartmouth Outing Club pushed
an occupied one-seat outhouse off its foundations, onto its door. The
victim tried in vain for a few minutes to roll the entire building onto
a different side, but soon gave up, as it was too heavy. She then was
forced to climb out through the seat, and over the pit near the bottom
(now side) of the outhouse.
The followup to this episode was that some `friends' seized me in the
middle of the night and tied my feet in a noose suspended in a tree. But
that's another story.
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This practical joke is hearsay. A fellow student some years ago related
the following. Apparently another student was a bit of a braggar. His
favourite topic was his car, and one sub-topic was the terrific gas milage
(pre-metric) it got.
So it began one evening. Fill up a one-gallon container of gas each night
and pour it into the victim's gas tank. Wait for the story each day to
get better and better. Repeat until it cannot be taken any more. I believe
2 weeks was sufficient.
Finally the moment (days) of truth. Each night for 2 weeks, the effect
was reversed, and one gallon of gas was REMOVED from the victim's tank.
It was amazingly effective at reducing some of the stories. I suspect
the truth was never revealed to the victim.
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Another harmless practical joke to be played on people living in multiple
story apartment buildings is as follows: Knock on victim's door. Say,
"I've got to use your window, someone's about to jump from an apartment
above yours." Run to window and look outside, but don't let victim
look. At this point your accomplice dumps a rag-filled dummy either from
the window above or from the roof. The dummy should be fully closed; for
added realism put some plastic bags of fake blood inside the clothes.
On the sidewalk below, a third accomplice puts down a plastic sheet, then
covers it with a sheet painted to resemble the sidewalk. After the body
hits, let the victim see the gore, then convince him to run down and help
while you stay and call the ambulance. As soon as the victim has left,
signal your accomplice to remove the sheets and the dummy and head for
some prearranged hiding place. Then you leave the apartment and disappear
somewhere in the building; later, you make your way downstairs and leave.
The victim will race downstairs expecting to find a dead bloody body and
will instead see only clean, empty pavement. Of course, it is best done
late at night since the joke would be spoiled by a passer-by who informed
the victim of the "body's" fate. The fun comes imagining the
victim trying to convince the police or anyone else of what happened!
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In our residence the lounge door can be locked (or unlocked) by any room
key from the floor. You can also remove the handles from a door (ie the
lock comes too) and switch the handles.
We did this to one guy, he was the only one who could lock the door to
the lounge (we never locked anyway) but everyone could get into his room.
Every night for a week (at about 3:30 am) someone would go in and do something
to him while he was asleep (nothing really nasty). As he was a sound sleeper,
it actually took him a week to figure out what was going on.
Disclaimer: Kids at home, Don't try this.
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This one reminded me of a joke some of the guys on our floor pulled on
another guy while he was in the shower. While he was in the shower, they
took all his clothes and even his towel and hung them outside in the hall
(over water pipes in the ceiling - we were in the basement). I don't know
how long he stayed in there and/or whether or not someone ever gave him
back his clothes. The worst part of this one was that there were 2 shower
stalls in the bathroom - and I happened to be in the other one; it could
of happened to me!!
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In my younger days, while employed at a warehouse, I was the butt of
the usual april fools pranks directed at newcomers.(Fetch me a light-bulb
repair kit, son;etc) As days passed, I noticed that one of my antagonists
was actually afraid of his terminal. This was at the time when the press
was full of accounts of the dangers of X-rays from color TV's, and this
guy was deathly afraid of the noise made by the high-voltage section of
the CRT as it warmed up. Each morning he sat in his swivel chair, coffee
in his left hand, and with the chair as far as possible away from the
terminal, used his right hand to quickly flick the ON switch, and then
jerked it away from THE CERTAIN DEATH THAT AWAITED. After the racket settled
down, he would wheel up to the terminal and commence operations. This
situation was too good for yours truly to pass up. I went upstairs and
pulled out a stock item, a stadium buzzer, used by high schools on the
football fields to announce the end of a quarter. I came in early the
next morning and installed it in one of his file boxes, near the terminal.
I ran the wires out to the next office via a pass-thru, and alerted all
of the staff (but him) of what was about to transpire. He entered the
room, coffee in hand, and sat in his chair. All others were heads-down
in work. He adjusted his chair to the proper distance, reached way out
for the switch, and as soon as he pulled, I plugged in the cord. As the
buzzer sounded, he assumed the facial expressions of one who has seen
death reaching it's skeltal fingers to snatch him from the land of the
living. Coffee flew to the ceiling, and for a few brief seconds before
hitting the opposite wall, a new world land speed record for backward
swivel-chair operation was established!
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Preface: The person that this is played on must be someone who really
deserves it because it takes several people to pull off. He must also
live on the first floor of his dorm. It must also occur in the winter
in a suitably cold and barren area like Dartmouth.
PHASE 1:
We did this trick to someone we found very difficult to live with. When
the victim was away from his room we began to pile up a large amount of
snow outside of his window. The conditions were perfect. His window was
divided into two sections. One didn't open, the other (in theory) swung
outward like a door. The snow was wet and packed heavily and easily. (On
colder days a hose may be used to harden the snow.) We built a huge pile
of snow which reached six or eight feet back from the part of his window
that swung. We then, as a demoralizing factor, put a cosmetic layer of
snow which completely covered the section which didn't open.
When we had finished the outside work we went into his room and closed
his shade and curtain so that he would not notice what we had done until
it was too late.
PHASE 2:
We then waited for him to come home. Luckily his room was on a side of
the dorm away from the entrance so that our work wasn't visible from the
approach. He arrived and entered his room. We listened outside his door
until we heard his shade go up and a sudden "What the F--K?"
as only pure, white snow was visible through the window. At this point
we wedged a paperback book between his door and the frame. (Similar to
using pennies, but more effective.)
We then sat back and listened as he started towards the door. "Allright,
who put all the snow outside my...what the F--K? OPEN THIS DOOR!"
The show got more exciting as he, thinking that he could still just go
out the window, walked over, opened his curtain, tried to open the window,
and became aware of the magnitude of the problem facing him. He had no
phone, and so could not call the campus police to come help him. His neighbors
would not heed his cries, because most of them had assisted us with the
trick.
We eventually released him, but only after he had come to the realization
that he needed to be more considerate of those living around him, or else
face living out the rest of a prematurely shortened life in a small, snow
covered dorm room.
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My favorite dorm practical joke involved collecting newspapers for about
3 months by everyone. When a guy on my floor had a three hour lab we crumpled
up newspapers and completely filled his room from floor to ceiling. When
he returned, he had to go in through in the bathroom, and wasn't even
able to get the door open far enough to get through.
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Want some fun times! Heres the way:
While your friend is sleeping, carefully water down his mattress. (If
he sleeps in a waterbed, just give it a few punctures)
Take an extension cord, clip off the cube-tap, seperate the wires, and
strip the two ends, exposing about two inches of bare wire.
Wrap one end around his left big toe, the other on his right.
Stand near an electrical outlet, plug the poor unsuspecting soul in!
This is a great ice breaker for your new roommate, etc. Cleanup is a bit,
er, messy, but well worth the gag. You can be guarenteed that the victim
will be impressed! And think of it: No retaliation! It's the perfect practical
joke! And to think that nobody's posted it yet.
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About nine years ago the book "The Adolescense of P1" was very
popular at the computer shop where I was employed. In case you don't know,
this is about a hacker named Gregory and a computer program he wrote which
is self- perpetuating. Years later he is employed as an honest Systems
Analyst and has almost forgotten about his "child." Then the
system downstairs prints out "CALL GREGORY" and locks up ...
followed by a thickening plot, some humorous, some frightening.
I worked nights. It wasn't hard to replace the boot file on our system
disks with another that typed out "CALL GREGORY" before replacing
itself with the original.
It's funny that there haven't been more computer april fools pranks posted
here. What a marvelous opportunity the computer affords the practical
joker!
I designed and wrote a point-of-sale system which was first installed
in 1976, after which I left the company. At midnight, December 31, 1977
every system in the country stopped whatever it was doing, flashed every
light and sounded every beeper on every cash register, printed "Happy
New Year" on every printer, and went back to whatever it was doing.
I wonder how that happened?
Some of the least elaborate april fools pranks are the most effective. Go
with a couple of friends, stand near some busy street corner, and take
a great interest in some point near the top of a tall building, or maybe
just up in the sky. Watch the reactions of people around you.
Take an old windowshade, go to a gymnastics show or anywhere else where
people wear leotards, wait for someone to do a split, and tear the windowshade
briskly, making a very loud ripping sound ...
Go to any gag store and get a fake plastic vomit. Put it in a drinking
fountain. Wet it is amazingly realistic ...
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Back around 1969 at another university, we had just gotten time sharing
facilities and because of the unrest (this was about Kent State) we had
armed guards protecting the computer and the few terminals. It being around
midnight, I got the guards playing an interactive monopoly game. The next
evening i was confronted by a VERY upset computer operator. Apparently
at about 4:00AM one guard landed on Boardwalk and the game ended when
he didn't have enough money to pay the rent. The guards DEMANDED the operator
restart the game and bcame more and more upset when he couldn't.
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Recipe for LARGE quantities of soapsuds:
Fill a large bucket with hot water.
Empty contents of one bottle of dishwashing detergent into bucket (Ivory,
Joy, Dawn, or equivalent).
Drop in a few pounds of dry ice that has been crushed to small pieces.
STAND BACK!
Recipe will fill a phone booth, or a small room (or even a big one). A
friend and I once did this in the bed of his truck. While stopped at traffic
signals the whole bed would fill up to the rim with suds. Then, as we
would accelerate away from the light, large "chunks" would break
loose and waft lazily through the air, causing much consternation to the
traffic behind. On the freeway the result was much smaller pieces of suds
billowing out of the back of the truck. It looked like a snowstorm! It's
funnier to see than the description sounds. We were hysterical.
Also, the soap can be omitted from the above to obtain fog. A phone booth
that is opaque with dense fog looks pretty strange too.
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Okay, this is something me and my best friend did to our Comp. Sci. teacher
senior year of high school.
We started this joke by getting into heated arguments for a week before
the actual event and of course everything was building up a big head of
steam. By this time the other kids knew something was up and we let them
in on the joke, so now we have about 30 people helping in our cause. Anyway,
on the day of the crime we went to the school's dressing room and, since
we were both active in the drama club, no one asked what we were there
for. So, I get ready for the fun by making myself a nice layer of plasti-skin
and filled it with stage blood. Danny, my friend, obtained the services
of a prop knife, you know one of the ones that retract and we tested the
depth of the cut with the thickness of the skin, it was right, so now
we are set. We walk into class seperated by about a minute and we start
right where we had left off, teh name calling, the pushing and all the
other aspects of high schoolers that don't like each other. So Danny pulls
the knife out of his pocket and yells, "That's it Ray, you're dead."
So he swings at my neck and the knife cuts the plasti-skin and the stage
blood goes everywhere, I crumple in a gurgling heap and lay prone under
the table of trash80's. Mr. Waddington comes up and sees Danny standing
over me with a blood covered knife and sees me apparently dead starts
to roll me over. I flop over like any good corpse and he dabs at the blood
now covering my neck and says the line I was waiting for, "My God
you killed him!" At that moment, I opened my eyes and asked him what
he was doing. I have heard of peoples faces going white and now I saw
it. After he relised what we had done, he congradulated us on a job well
done.
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Where I used to work, one of the group leaders used to have a Playboy
calender. One of the young ladies who objected to the posting did a mastectomy
& placed the paper in the phone between the pickup and the connection.
The phone seemed to be complete, but did not work.
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One prank I haven't seen listed yet is the one I used to do at summer
camp and the college dorm. Take the top off the toilet tank. Inside, there
is usually a vertical plastic pipe about 1 inch in diameter. Going into
the top of this pipe is a little plastic tube. Turn the tube outward and,
if it is long enough, then put it toward the toilet bowl with the end
just sticking out. Replace the tank cover, making sure that the little
plastic tube is just sticking out. When someone flushes, the tube will
squirt water.
One time in Colorado I did this at 3:00am. The guy that got caught must
have flushed with his elbow while still seated. His back was sprayed with
ice cold water. His language was abominable, and made funnier since this
was a Christian camp. Oh well, we're all human.
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These are computer-related april fools pranks played by an old acquaintence
years ago at a nameless university in Northern California. He wisened
up and stopped playing them when the various administrations of the computer
centers found out who it was. Sometimes I simply could not believe that
he would do things like this.
The first one was probably the worst. The undergraduate computer center
was being connected to a large terminal lab across campus via a long line
across campus. This had taken the technical folks who worked at the computer
center months of planning, pulling cables, attaching lines, reconfiguring
the system, and so forth.
It was at about this time that Jack (not his real name), wrote a program
called "GARB" (short for "Garbage") This program sat
in the background running at low priority. It would choose a random interval,
sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes, sleep for that interval, and then
wakeup. At that point, it would choose a random ASCII character and then
choose a random terminal on that computer and send the character to the
terminal. Then it would loop back into its sleep mode until the next time
it woke up.
The administration and technical people spent weeks wondering why their
attempts at connecting cross-campus cables were causing spurious data
across existing lines, as well as the lines that had been connected. They
had people out there with the elaborate technical equipment trying to
trace down the source of the "noise" that was polluting the
terminal lines with stray characters.
Quite a while later, they did indeed discover the problem and confronted
Jack. I'm not sure what happened after that.
Another thing Jack did, before that, was write a program called "GOD".
It would patch the running monitor and actually insert a jump into the
code that performed the logout-job function within the monitor. The jump
simply took control of the monitor to a patch-area elsewhere within memory
where a simple comparison took place to see if the logout being requested
was of any jobs belonging to Jack. If so, it simply did a no-op, with
an appropriate return-condition indicating success (so that the calling
program which initiated the system call would not know the job had not
been logged out). This program, "GOD" most came in handy to
Jack during the wee morning hours when few people used the system but
the proverbial "wheel wars" occurred, in which enabled superusers
with privileges attempted to conquer each other in various ways.
Needless to say, none of the above behavior is tolerated by the administration
any more, with good reason.
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Propose to the victim a co-ordination test, and tell him that it has
been taken by the brightest people around you (quote some scores!). You
sit in front of the victim and put your palms about twelve inches apart.
The victims task is very simple. With eyes closed, his palms clasped together,
he should cautiously take his palms between your palms, remove them, and
repeat the process. Of course he must not touch your palms otherwise he
"looses". Each cycle counts as one point and "any average
person can get 100 points". As I said, tell him the scores of some
other people you know.
Let him paractice a little with his eyes open. Then blindfold him (to
avoid the "natural" temptation of cheating) and say START. After
a while leave. it is a hilarious sight to see a person rock his clasped
palms back annd forth for no obvious reason.
Be sure to invite many of your friends to witness this sight. You will
find that this co-ordination test really sounds sincere, and many innocent
people who listen to you explaining to the chosen victim, actually volunteer
to take the test before the victim. This gives you a choice of victims
to choose from.
OK, OK... I insisted on taking this test too and made a fool of myself
!!
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This one happened impromptu. A group of us were novice UNIX hacks working
for our department of computer science, all on similar terminals. I had
written a small program that would transmit a single character at a time
to another terminal. (No big deal, but no one else had tried it.) One
guy was typing away, and I was making his cursor "wiggle" by
pressing the forward and reverse arrow keys. He exclaimed that something
was wrong with his cursor. Another guy picked up on this, and explained
that the cursor beam must be loose. He gave the right side of the first
guy's (John's) terminal a good hard whack, I transmitted a carriage return.
John laughed, but actually sat there typing in (some text), and whacking
the side of the terminal every time he needed a carriage return, FOR SEVERAL
MINUTES. Needless to say, we were hysterical.
The second guy, (Tim), says "John, watch this!" and put his
hand under John's desk and gave the underside of the desk another whack:
I transmitted a "HOME" character, moving the cursor to the top
of the screen, again as if the whack had moved the cursor. John continues
typing, whacking the bottom and side of the terminal whenever he needs
cursor motion. Tim smacks the top of the terminal and I transmit a CLEAR
key: it looked as if the characters have been "knocked off"
the screen. John is just about the get the lab manager when we clue him
in.
I once had a job as a COBOL programmer. A particular program was to input
no more than 20 items from an operator, and them produce the appropriate
report from them. I asked my boss what the program should do if the operator
wanted more than 20 items to appear in the report. He said, oh, that will
never happen. But what if it does, I asked. Gruffly, he said, have it
notify the operator.
This particular machine had a seriously loud bell (control G) that sounded
like a real bell, plus it was fairly easy to make the screen flash off
and on. I coded it to flash and ring the alarm for a minute. I tried it
once and it was truly alarming. I never heard if anybody tried to enter
more than twenty items, but it is something I think about from time to
time ...
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on the subject of april fools pranks on the computer, i pulled the following
one. when i was in college at new mexico tech (located in socorro, which
is spanish for help!), i was a programmer for several departments. as
a result, i was setting up some user interfaces. the machine was a dec
20 (with tops) and there was a central terminal room with about thirty
adm 3s (now, there is a terminal) in it. anyway, when this 20 went down
in a controled manner it would send out a warning "dec 20 going down",
then three dots at one second intervals, then a "p", then go
down. when it came up, it would send out a message "dec 20 coming
up", then three dots at one second intervals, then a "p",
then the login header. anyway, the victum sat down to use a statistical
package (it is so much fun to play with people whose use canned stat packages).
after he had been on for ten minutes, he received the dec 20 going down
sequence and then his terminal went dead. so he waited (about five minutes).
however, all during this time, everyone around him was typing away merrily.
finally he asked if the system had gone down. everyone said no. then he
asked the operator. again no. then the system manager. he finally brought
back the user servant (someone paid to answer user's questions) back to
the terminal. they played with the switches, then the user servant scratched
his head and said "beats me". about this time, the message "dec
system 20 reengaged" appeared on his terminal, then the three dots,
then the "p", then the message "automatic login in effect,
status at crash resumed" and he was right where he left off! the
program that caused this then deleted (and expunged) itself. to this day,
i don't think he knows what happened to him.
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Another practical joke under the guise of a co-ordination test is the
following. Ask your victim to take a quarter and place it on a piece of
paper. Then ask him to take a pencil, and without removing his finger
off the quarter, to draw a circle around the quarter. Have him repeat
the same exercise with each of his fingers pressing on top of the quarter.
Afterwards, have him pick up the quarter and rub it along the bridge of
his nose. It'll then be really funny to watch him walk around with a black
line on his face.
I also have heard of a practical joke that can be done to a person while
he/she is sleeping. If the person's hand is dipped in warm water, this
causes a subconscious relaxation of the bladder and causes the person
to wet his/her bed. I have never tried this, nor have I seen it tried,
but I've heard it from quite a few people. Has anyone out there ever tried
it?
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This is true. It seems that a colleague and myself are scheduled to present
a paper next month at an AI conference. We've never heard of the conference
nor did we write a paper.
Also, just today I got a letter that begins "Thank you for agreeing
to serve as chairperson of the following session at ICASSP-87 in Dallas,
texas." I've never met nor spoke to the person sending the letter
nor did I agree to be a chairperson. Either someone is setting me (us)
up or this is a sneaky way to get volunteers.
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A computer related practical joke a played in my younger days (2 years
ago...) was to write an unstoppable program (disabled break, ^C, etc...)
that would imitate the login procedure. I would leave it running on a
public terminal and whenever somebody tried to logon, it would always
print the message 'User validation error' (Or whatever message corresponding
to the operating system [that was VAX/VMS.] login error) and loop back.
Meanwhile, the user ID and the password were written in a file in my
directory...
The only way to get out of the program was to turn off the gandalf box.
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Back in the good old college days, when pulling all-nighters (sure, you
must have done some of those before!), at about 2 or 3am, try calling
someone to "remind" them to go to the bathroom (or do something).
Wait for half-an-hour or so, call again just to make sure s/he did what
you asked them to do earlier!
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When I was out at Union College in Schenectady N.Y, we had a great college
radio station that would give away pizzas, movie passes, clothes, etc.
for answering trivia questions throughout the day. One day, my friend
and I recorded a trivia question on our tape deck and kept the tape in
the deck. A little later one of our good friends came over to visit and
we were all listening to the campus station. As soon as one of the songs
ended, we turned on the tape with out our friend noticeing and the D.J
asked a trivia question for a large pizza. Our friend knew the answer
and since he was closed to the phone, he immediatly picked it up and dialed
the station. He was really excited that he got through and started yelling
the answer at the mystified D.J. He was incredibly embarrased, we were
trying so hard not to laugh it hurt.
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DEC 20 april fools pranks were rampant at an undergraduate computer center
I once frequented. One practical joker, call him Jack (yes, the same Jack
mentioned in an earlier message on this list), wrote a program that was
really rather nasty.
This program maintained two tables or arrays of strings. The strings
would be things like:
[FROM TTY NN: HI SWEETIE, JUST CAUGHT YOU LOOKING AT ME] or [FROM TTY
NN: HEY YOU GORGEOUS HUNK, COME OVER AND MEET ME]
The program would cycle through the system sending out these messages
occasionally to a random terminal, insuring that the terminal mentioned
in the terminal messages above would have an actual logged-in job. The
person who received the message would either be a) annoyed b) flattered
and want to meet their admirer or c) angry.
I heard that many meetings of users resulted from this program.
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Some friends of mine in high school used to turn in assignments from
the old IBM /370 with start of execution at 07:58:00 Dec 7 1941 (apologies
about the time if in error, but history is not my forte).
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The hardest to do/forget practical joke that I know is a variation on
the theme of dismantling something large and then reassembling it in someone's
office/apartment/dorm room.
Locally there was a VP who was a Volkswagen Beetle Fan, so for his birthday,
some of the people who work for him stuck one in his office. It made the
newspaper when the refused to take it apart.
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Allow me to be the first to recommend an excellent book of *really* nasty
revenge getters. It's called "Getting Even: the complete book of
Dirty Tricks" (in 2 volumes, I believe) Unfortunately, I don't have
my copy here, so I can't give the author's name, but I think it (they?)
was published by Paladin Press.
It contains real gems for all occasions. (mad at the landlord that evicted
you? seal the apartment after introducing 10-15 cats and plenty of food/water)
Warning: most of these dirty tricks are
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really* nasty, don't use these on people you might have to deal with in
the future.
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In 1972 I was working at a very boring job in an aerospace factory. There
were three guys my age (early 20's) in the department and we werw always
playing what we saw as a joke on some poor unsuspecting soul. I was also
in the Navy Reserve at the time and had to take two weeks off during the
Summer to due my training. When I returned >from two weeks off, not
yet bored enough yet to begin playing more jokes, the other three guys
went off their heads pulling any kind of trivial, dangerous or otherwise
obnoxious stunt they could think of. At the end of the second day the
supervisor called me into the office and said:
"Jones, I don't know what's the matter with you but you better knock
it off. I've had two weeks of peace and quiet while you were gone and
now that you're back all hell's breaking loose. You go on back out there
and stop bothering people."
I knew that I hadn't done anything but I didn't bother to protest. I
could recognize a well executed joke when I saw one.
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A great trick I have gotten away with many a time requires a little preparation,
simply to go to the grocery and get a few packages of Kool-Aid. Then while
your 'prey' is away, simply spread it nice and liberally into his bed,
best if done in stripes, to leave his body in different colors. This works
best in a warm room where he is sure to sweat during the night to the
utmost.
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If you have access to a two(or more) line phone, this is a great one,
dial the first six numbers of your prey's phone number, and put that line
on hold, then dial the other number; a pizza place, or his girlfriend
is good for starters, then escalate to college offices, activist terrorist
organizations and the CIA are good from then on. After you dial the second
number, quickly put the second number on hold, then dial the last number
of the first number and push BOTH buttons down at the same time to activate
both calls at once, then listen, but don't laugh, or they might hear you
and do worse in return.
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Try taping a drunk to his bed. Get a large roll of masking tape and when
he passes out wind it around him and the bed.
Another good one to do with a drunk is to put one of those fake bald
heads over his hair. Then when he wakes up ask him if he knows what he
did last night.
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I am far too Nice a person to ever have done these, but a friend of mine...:
Leave old trash paperbacks around launderettes and other public places.
Write inside the front cover: Property of *Victim*. I need this book for
my thesis. If found, please return to *address* for $100 reward.
Post ads around town for a garage sale (or open house) at Victim's house
starting at 7:00 AM next Sunday.
Call lots of people and identify yourself as the victim, and say "I
was walking throught the neighborhood recently and just realized I dropped
my wallet. Could you please check the sidewalk in front of your house
and let me know if you find it? Thanks *so* much. My phone number is...
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How about some chocolate Ex-lax in brownies.
Or maybe some ambesol in the mouthwash.
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The best practical joke I know of is from MASH. However, you need a reputation
as an incorrigable joker for it to work. Just let the person know you
are going to play a big one on him within 5 days. (Pick your time frame.)
And that he will be powerless to stop you. If you do it right, he'll worry
himself to pieces and make a fool of himself. Then DO NOTHING.
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Go to one of those miniature golf courses that has a windmill hole. Replace
the motor with one that can spin the windmill at about 1000 RPM. Then
illuminate it with a strobe light so it looks like its moving at about
the same speed as before.
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How `bout those relatives that seem to stay longer than expected....
If you had someone staying at your house, especially if they're traveling
with small children, help them pack up the car. Slip some limburger (sp?)
cheese into their car somewhere where it'll slowly get warm. You can imagine
the consternation when they pull to a rest stop to change junior's diapers
and find nothing there. Or the line, "Did you hit a skunk or ...?"
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Get a piece of plastic as long as the victims bed and a little over twice
as wide. Remove his mattress from his bed frame and line the frame with
the plastic. Tape the plastic to the bed if necessary. Fill with water
(a hose connected to the tub is helpful). Fold the rest of the plastic
over the water, and make the bed. (Done to my roommate by mutual friend.)
If your victim has a roommate, switch all their possesions. Or, turn
all the posters upside down and hang the furniture from the ceiling. (Both
done to me.)
If your victim _is_ your roommate, switch the material in your waste
baskets and pull his bed away from the wall a quarter of an inch every
day.
Wait till your victim is away for a weekend. Dip everything plastic (pens,
phones, etc.) in liquid nitrogen, break it, and stick it together again.
Everything plastic will break when he picks it up.
Polish the floor and stick teflon to the legs of select items of furniture.
(The polished floor is a bit of a giveaway, but teflon isn't dramatically
slick if there's much grime.)
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Maybe a bit on the "im"-practical side but if REVENGE is what
you want...
I s'pose the keyword (superglue) says it all. The places I've like to
hit are the person's car - namely the dust caps on the tire valve stems,
the gas cap, and the windshield wipers. Pretty nasty, ain't I?
Then there's always putting a paper bag of sh_t on the person's front
step, setting it on fire, knocking on the door, and running like h_ll.
The victim will come to the door, see the fire, and will usually try to
stomp it out with his foot.
I'll be the first that these are rather terrible and childish but...
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This was done to me when I was in college and living in a fraternity
house; Take someone's door and hide it for a while. You would really be
surprised how often you want to close the dang thing and it's not there
to do it!
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A recent favourite in our residence has involved the kidnapping of some
small beloved object (teddy bear, harp seal, stuffed banana, etc.). Once
this object has disappeared and before its owner has noticed it's gone,
suspend it from a window in the dining hall, tv lounge, physics building,...
If small animals don't work for you, perhaps mens undergarments stolen
from the laundry might?
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I think I have one of these books. It is by George Heyduke (Hayduke?).
When I read it, I was practically overcome with mirth. Some of the things
he sug- gests are hilarious! It says right in the book that it is written
for enter- tainment purposes only, and not to try any of the ideas, so
I guess he has his behind covered. Some of the better ideas that I remember
are:
"Time bombs." This is the phrase he uses to describe chicken
parts. Easily gotten at any supermarket, they are innocent little items
that can be carried almost anywhere (in a baggie, if neccessary). But
when stashed in an out-of-the-way place, like under furniture cushions
in the house or under car seats or in the trunk in a car, and given a
little time, YOW! Watch out for the smell! Gotten ripped off by a used-car
dealer? Wait awhile, then take some test drives in some other cars. With
a few strategically placed "bombs" in a car with the windows
closed in the hot sun.... use your imagination. Getting evicted? Remove
some outlet covers or switch covers and stuff some of these babies down
inside the wall. They'll be impossible to find, and won't start to smell
until after you're long gone.
Parties. Parties are great fun to plan, especially if you plan them for
someone else to host (as a surprise). Print up a few flyers for a party
at your victim's house and distribute them where undesirables will be
sure to see them. For example, you might put up flyers around biker bars
advertising "all the beer you can drink", and "crowning
of Miss Biker", or something equivalent. Even if the reluctant host
doesn't let them in his house when the horde shows up, he will still wind
up with a party on his lawn. Of course, if you're his neighbor this gives
you a good reason to complain to the cops or to his landlord, etc.
Set your victim against a third party, or against another victim. Let
other people do your dirty work for you. Here's an example: Call up the
electric or gas company and impersonate your victim. Request that service
be terminated for a week or two (going on vacation, or whatever). As soon
as that happens, call your victim. Impersonate an officer of the gas/electric
company, and be very nasty and abusive, saying that service has been discontinued
because of non-payment of bills. This should rile up your victim, asasuming
that he HAS paid his bill and knows it. At any rate, tell him he must
come down to the office immediately to discuss the problem or you will
send the police to his house to collect, or something like that. Then,
once you have him mad, and know he is going to the gas/electric company,
call up that company. Impersonate your victim. Be very nasty, and try
to get into an argument with a supervisor. Wind up the conver- sation
by saying that you are coming down there right now with a gun, and you
are going to kill somebody. Then hang up.
Or, if you call enough times so that people associate your voice with
his name, you could call back some time after the argument and make a
bomb threat. They would recognize the voice as being 'him', and knowing
that he was disgruntled would make him a prime suspect.
Buy a cheap toy gun. Plant it in your victim's car. Then call the police
and anonomously report that you saw a suspicious armed person in the area,
and give the vehicle's description and location. A variation of this would
be to plant baggies full of phony drugs. He probably won't be arrested,
but he will probably be stopped and harrassed.
Enter subscriptions in his name to the most filthy homo/bondage/snuff
magazines you can find, and change his address by one so his NEIGHBOR
receives them. His neighbors will not only be disgusted by his perver-
sions, they will also be irritated by the fact that he is too dumb to
even get his address right on a subscription.
If you can get one of his credit cards, or even a charge receipt or carbon
copy of one, use the account to order gifts through the mail. Order gifts
for REAL friends and relatives of the victim, and have them delivered
directly to the recipient. It puts him in an embarras- sing position to
have to explain to his family and friends how his gift to them must be
returned. Also, can you imagine the guy trying to convince the bank that
HE did not make the purchases? Don't use his charge accounts for your
own benefit, or you will very likely be caught.
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Another joke which one can easily perpetrate goes like this:
Fill a plastic, or rubber, tube with water. Hold the tube vertically
up into the air and with the thumb of one hand plug up the bottom hole
of the tube and place it next to your ear (hide the fact that you are
plugging the hole).
Next, call a friend, or victim, and tell him that you are hearing something
really strange through the tube and he should come over and listen in
on it. When he gets close enough to your ear to listen turn the tube towards
his ear and release your thumb.
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My favorite was to place a singles' advertisment for the victim. I'll
leave it to you to think of what to say, but my favorite was (for a heterosexual
person) to place an ad looking for someone of the same sex.
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I believe this is from "The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks."
First, go to the library and find some phone books for large cities.
In one of the phone books you should be able to find a person who has
the same name as the target. Then go down to the post office and file
a change of address for the target, forwarding his mail to himself in
a far away city.
If I remember correctly the book states that this is very illegal and
is only included for amusement.
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> Enter subscriptions in his name to the most filthy homo/bondage/snuff
> magazines you can find, and change his address by one so his NEIGHBOR
> receives them. His neighbors will not only be disgusted by his perver-
> sions, they will also be irritated by the fact that he is too dumb
to > even get his address right on a subscription.
An ex-brother-in-law of mine did something like this for revenge on a
downstairs neighbor. He put a very kinky ad in the Berkeley Barb, which
included said neighbor's phone number -- "call any time".
Another person I know told me he once ordered some phony business stationary,
and used it to place an order for a 70,000 pound steel coil to be delivered
to this person's (a high school teacher) address. The coil showed up and
got dumped on the front lawn.
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One of the best ones I heard, was to do the following:
During winter time in any part of the country where it gets really cold,
take your victims mattress, soak in water until it has reached it's saturation
level, then hang it outside until it freezes solid. Once solid, replace
on the victim's bed and make the bed up to look like normal. Boy will
they be surprised when they go to bed.
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Next time when you are having dinner, keep an empty jug of water on the
table. When somebody asks you to pass the jug, pretend while picking it
up that it is full of water and heavy. Keep the jug on the table near
the victim. The victim will apply what he/she considers is appropriate
strength needed to pick up the jug. This will cause the jug to jerk up
to a significant height. The sight is very funny and so is the victim's
face.
Must try to believe. Even the most prude of your aunts will not mind
being a victim of this joke.
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AH yes.. ye ole highschool days.... (seems everyone knows of or has done
a VW bug stunt already). We also had a rather unliked teacher, whose VW
was carried up onto the gymnasium stage on the last day of school. Needless
to say, every year after that he arrived on the last day of school driving
the cab of his brother's semi.
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This is more of a practical joke WITH a Beetle . . . . MIT has some very
wide, very long corridors that turn out to be VW-accessible. One night
a guy I knew started cruising the corridors. The practical joke came when
the campus police started chasing him. He whipped around a corner, into
a freight elevator, and away. They never found him.
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My favourite practical joke involves on of those long line-ups for tickets
to a concert or something. First you go to the front of the line and then
walk the entire length, looking over everyone as if you were trying to
find a friend. When you get to the back you walk back to the front doing
the same thing, but this time even slower. Then when you reach the front
you turn and quickly run to the back again, machine-gunning everybody
as you go. Then you go up to the ticket office and say "Get it?"
This is a classic joke and as you can see it is also quite practical,
since it gets you to the front of the line very fast.
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If you live in a dorm with tiles on the bathroom door, pour rubbing alcohol
in the cracks, wait for your victim to go into the bathroom and seat himself,
and light the alcohol.
If you can get into your victim's house, staple the sides of many paper
cups together so that they are in a ring or matrix configuration (anything
too large to drag out the door), and fill them all with water.
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A friend who lived in Durham sent a postcard to his girlfriend in Milwaukee
that said "Here is a check for the twenty dollars I owe you."
and had a blank spot and a piece of tape on it.
Six letters came to him from Milwaukee, some with photos, none from people
he knew, and all expressing interest in a personal to which they alluded.
One was from a male. He assumed that his girlfriend had placed a personal
with his address in the paper there; she had just enlisted help in letter-
writing.
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One good practical joke that I've seen done to somebody:
Take an old record album cover.
Fill the insides with shaving cream.
Place it halfway under a locked door to the victim's office, home, room,
etc. with the open end inside the room.
Jump on it.
Another, if you can get access to the victim's key chain is to switch
all his keys for keys that look exactly the same, but don't fit the locks
he's trying to open. If you can be around for this one, it's much more
fun to watch the person go crazy as he cannot open anything he owns.
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This reminds me of something a friend of mine did to get even with a
landlord that evicted him. There was a hole in one of his walls so he
put a couple of dead fish in in the hole. He then plastered over the hole
and repainted the wall. Can you imagine the smell after a month of summer
heat? Nobody could tell where the odor would be coming from until the
bottom of the wall would start to rot. He did some other things to the
house but this was by far the most subtle and undetectable until some
time later.
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One of my favorite april fools pranks is to get a somewhat long spool of
rope, and when walking down the street ( acting official..), get someone
to assist you in measuring a distance. Pick a spot near a corner , go
around, and find another person to hold the other end of the rope. Go
across the street and just wait...
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Ask somebody what time it is when he/she is holding a glass of fluid
in the hand attached to the wrist where he/she wears a watch. You'll be
surprised how many people pour fluid onto themselves trying to be helpful
to you.
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Buy a BIG pile of magazines of every conceivable sort, and clip every
coupon for a catalog, trial product, free brochure, etc. Specialty magazines
have the most, such as hobbies or sports (or computers). Your victim should
be deluged with junk mail (and since most such lists get sold to other
lists, the response will be a geometric function of the number of clips
you send).
A friend of mine and I once almost started a junkmail war, but formed
a truce before, because we knew it would follow us around for years...
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It should be noted by people wishing to play april fools pranks, that some
people take them dead seriously. Such people tend to escalate the level
of jokes by a couple of magnitudes. My three favorite stories are from
different colleges.
One joker sprinkled finely ground powdered milk underneath his victim's
sheets. It acts like powdered sugar in the sense that, as you sweat in
your sleep, it dissolves and comes up through the sheets onto your body
and into your pores. But your sweat makes it sour, and when it gets into
your pores, it stays there. You smell very strongly of sour milk for about
a week (4 days if you shower and sauna every day). The next weekend, when
the joker was walking back from a party, three guys jumped him. They were
dressed in ski masks and painter's suits (those light paper/cloth jumpsuits
that people wear to paint autobodies). They stripped, tied, blindfolded
and gagged the joker, and spraypainted him blue. No one was ever caught.
In another case, a yuppy practical joker taped a guy's car closed with
strapping and duct tape (the thing apparently looked like a ball of tape
when he got through). For those of you that don't know, the adhesive on
such tapes ruins a car's paint job, and can, if you try to remove it en
masse, even take off chips of paint and door guards (especially in winter).
Two days later, the yuppie's BMW was found with all four of its racing
radials slashed to ribbons. The yuppy of course, called the police on
the guy who's car he taped. The guy did not admit to slashing the tires,
as opposed to the yuppie, who told the police why he thought the other
guy was responsible (ie: he admitted to the police that he taped the other
car). Charges were never pressed about the BMW (lack of evidence), and
charges were pressed about the car taping. Did the guy actually slash
the BMW wheels? He always claimed that he didn't (of course the last time
I knew, the statute of limitations wasn't up yet).
Then of course there's the people who take the direct route to revenge.
Some guy thought he would make a very large, easy going, farm boy feel
more at home. So he got some fresh pig manure and dumped it in the farm
boy's room. The very large farm boy, apparently lacking a cultured sense
of humor, beat the living shit out of the joker. Then he told the joker
that if it happened again, the joker would eat the pigshit. Nobody doubted
him.
So be very careful who you decide to pull a practical joke on, because
they may not think it's as funny as you do.
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Call a mortuary and report the victim dead. Arrange to have his body
picked up at his house sometime when he is at home.
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One of my favorites is to put a couple of ping pong balls in someones
gas tank. The car will start just fine and will run for a couple of blocks.
Then the balls will get sucked into the gas feed and cause the car to
die. The balls will now float back to the top of the tank and he will
be able to restart the car. This will be very frustrating to the car owner,
espiality if he works on his own car. First he will replace the fuel filter
then maybe the fuel pump. From there on out he will be pulling his hair
out to figure out what to do next.
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Another door-related practical joke, good in dorm-life scenarios:
Locate undesirable LP record w/ jacket. I recommend "Mystic Moods".
Fetch cardboard jacket-- should be in good condition, no split sides or
the such. (Save disc for frisbee-- they shatter in fine fashion when hurled
in a room. But I digress.)
Fetch can of shaving cream, e.g. Gillette Foamy or the like. Fill album
cover with shaving cream.
With accomplice, go to room of victim. Their door should be closed.
Fit open edge of cream-filled album cover under bottom of door.
Accomplice braces album cover.
Jump on album cover, ejecting shaving cream into dorm room.
Run like hell.
Note that if the intended victim's door fits the frame very tightly, leaving
little or no room for the escape of the shaving cream, step number 7 will
instead result in a shaving cream explosion in the faces of the would-be
jokers. This suggests an obvious alternate "patsy" scenario...
This was funny when tried. Of course, most things are funny at 4 AM.
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My favourite was one I heard that someone at Boston University did to
his roomate, who he hated. Late one night, while the roomate, a very sound
sleeper, was asleep, this chap superglued his...er...male organ...to the
inside of his leg.
The roomate must have been a sound sleeper.
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I guess I am too restrained to perpetrade anything that might get the
victim shot by the cops, or committ credit card fraud in the process.
But... My favorite was always the Saran wrap on toilet bowl one. Second
prize goes to the chubby girl eons ago in high school. A single teacher
had made out of line remarks *during class* about her size. She got him
a paid subscription to a raunchy skin-mag
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delivered to the school*. He got called on the carpet but good, and the
Superintendent would not believe his protests of innocence..
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Okay!! Here's one I haven't seen: Get a list on the free classified throwaways
in town and print the following: RED 86 Vette: Won on game show, must
sell, leaving country. Steal!! First reasonable offer takes... Call after
1 am (I work nights) and let it ring. Desperate, please hurry...
This should bring the desired results for at least a week...
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We once pulled the reverse trick. The victim's room had a door whose
latch was of the pattern: handle each side; latch mechanism in middle;
square rod passes through latch mechanism and seats in handles (invisible
from outside). We removed the outer handle, took away the rod, and replaced
the handle. In the morning, he couldn't get out of his room. Took the
maintenance person TWO HOURS to figure out what we had done; by which
time the victim rather badly wanted a trip down the corridor!
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To be done in warmer climates: break apart oreo cookies so that white,
creamy filling sticks to 1/2 of cookie (the way most kids eat them). Discard
or eat other 1/2 of cookie without filling. Place cookies (filling side
down) on victim's car -- this should take several bags of cookies. When
the warm sun hits the victim's car, the cookies ooooooooozzzzzzzzzzzzzzeee
down the car, leaving opaque stripes. Really quite a sight! Really!
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We did something like this, the night before a friend got married. To
keep him from waking up, we covered his face with a rag soaked in ether
or chloroform (I'm not sure). We proceeded to shave off
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half* his mustache.
His intended was slightly disturbed when she heard the news the next morning,
so she decided to get us back. While we were in the ceremony, she had
someone sew up the pants legs to our clothes.
We got the last laugh though. As the newlyweds were getting into the
car, we pulled up in a truck, kidnapped the groom, and drove away. We
took him a few miles out of town, stripped him, and hand-cuffed him to
a road sign. Taught her.
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At one of the dorms here (Techwood) I remember when lots of april fools pranks were played on people. Of course there was the 'penny in the door
frame' to 'penny' them in (keep the door from opening). But i always liked
the more original versions. Cover the door with paper, just paper. Let
the mark open the door, find the paper, and break it all down... do this
as many times as you wish. The next time, paper the door and either place
a wall of bricks or cement blocks behind the door (by this time, he just
walks thru the paper) or even prop a trashcan full of water against the
door...
These and other jokes became quite popular, but, alas, a new class of
students seems to have moved in (they actually
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study**) and these jokes became out- lawed by the RA's (hall monitors)...
(RA's used to help... and were usually helpful with their pass key)...
But these jokes were called a fire hazard (i.e. would block people in,
in a fire...) "so it goes..."
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In the afore-quoted book, such a trick is suggested as a way of getting
even with your bank. Rent a safety-deposit box and fill it with fish.
I don't know how you can prevent them tracing it to you, though...
The oft-quoted "Volkswagen-in-the-bedroom" schtick is good.
A simpler variant avoids the hard labor involved here by subtituting a
self-propelled obstacle for the VW. In this case, one or more sheep.
While the animals themselves are easily removed from the abode, they
do leave behind "the gift that keeps on giving" !
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I remember a practical that failed -- or I guess you could say that it
succeeded too well. In Philadelphia, 10-15 years ago, a man decided to
play a practical joke on his best friend. He took out an add in the "help
wanted" section of the Bulletin, advertising job openings for demolishing
houses. Applicants were to meet in front of the site at 6:00 AM Saturday
morning. Naturally, the site was the friend's house. The perpetrator imagined
a couple of hundred men waking up his friend and asking to demolish his
house. Alas, the friend was not home. Another problem was that this was
during a recession, with high unemployment. About 2,000 men showed up.
It was apparent that only a small percentage would be hired, so a few
decided that if they could present the employer with an accomplished deed,
they would be the ones to get the jobs. Everybody joined in. A few minutes
later, they sat down to await the coming of the employer.
I can't remember what happened after that, if I ever knew. I imagine
it got pretty unpleasant. It made the evening news.
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This is a very simple trick, but you'd be surprised just how effective
it is. When the victim is sleeping, make a shallow paper tray and scotch
tape it to his door AND to the door frame near the knob. Fill it with
unpopped popcorn. When he opens the door (from the inside, obviously)
he'll have popcorn flung all over the place. Not only does it pack quite
a little surprise, it also takes forever to find all of the popcorn afterwards.
It works! Someone tried this on me when I was in first-year of my undergrad
days.
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My favorite practical joke was performed back in high school on the director
of our Audio Visual Dept. Upon purchasing a brand new, expensive video
camera, he set it up in the AV lounge so he could watch us hoodlums on
a monitor in his office. While he wasn't looking we taped a clear piece
of plastic over the lens of the camera. Then the designated provacateur
made sure that he was watching while another went up to the lens with
a squeeze bottle of highly caustic liquid, and crusty, grime laden rag,
to "clean the lens". Fred jumped over his desk and knocked over
a couple of onlookers before realizing what was going on.
( All the standard things happened to this guy too! remove all the screws
>from his chair, disconnect ( or reverse ) key components of his phone,
placed packing material in his fan. )
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When I was living in the dorms on campus, frequently someone with a car
would offer to drive into town on a rainy day, to save a wet bike ride.
There were always takers. I have a car, so I took many friends to the
store, post office, or Bank. If someone banked at the same place as I
did and I knew they were going to make a deposit, sometimes I would get
a few bucks together and also make a deposit. BUT, as I was standing at
the little table (you know with the little chained pens) I would take
a deposit slip and write THIS IS A STICK-UP GIVE ME ALL THE MONEY IN YOUR
DRAWER on the back. Then I would casually slide it over to my friend and
hand it to him, face up. After making my deposit I would leave the bank.
The friend would step up and hand the teller the deposit slip. They always
check both sides to see if any additional checks are listed. Sitting across
the street was a good place to see the cops pull up. Usually things took
about 20 minutes before he convinced them he was not a bank robber. You
have to pick a friend with integrity and a quick mind though. If he panics
and gives your name, you are history. I only tried it twice.
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Practical Joke 1: After making sure that the victim is out or sound asleep
(if the victim is in make sure he can't get out), put a line of baby powder
along the bottom crack of the door (or on a piece of paper and slide it
under the door -- hold onto one end). Then use the blow-dryer to spray
the powder into a fine mist that will cover everything in the room.
Practical Joke 2: Make a small, off-center hole in a can of shaving cream
and then heave the can into the victims open door. As the pressure spews
the cream out, it will spin the can and create a real mess all over the
place.
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A simple yet effective joke for all seasons...
Fill the sugar bowl with salt...
Mmmmm...sure makes them wheaties/coffee/etc taste good !
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Do it the Caltech way. Dump water on the victim's bed until it's soaked,
and pour liquid nitrogen on the bed until the water freezes. You're right
that it's heavy -- so heavy that the victim must wait for it to melt before
he can get rid of it.
PS - It destroys the mattress covering, so be prepared to replace the
mattress.
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Back in the OLD days while in college, a "friend" of mine one
day used the pointed end of his umbrella to knock on our dorm room door.
He poked so hard that the point went all the way through the door (cheap
door). A couple of days later, a janitor noticed the "bullet"
hole and called the police. My room mate and I decided just to play it
dumb; "Gee officer, we didn't notice a hole there", "We
never heard a shot", etc. The police never did find the bullet nor
where it hit the wall on the other side.
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For a more light-hearted collection of jokes, see the section on Hugh
Troy in _Merry_Gentlemen_and_One_Lady_, by J. Bryan, III. Troy's jokes
did not get people in trouble or stink up innocent people's apartments;
they did cause utter bewilderment worthy of talk.bizarre.
I think Bryan also tells of the time Robert Benchley and a fellow Harvard
undergraduate, dressed in work clothes, went to the door of a house on
a veddy nice square in Boston and said to the maid, "We're here for
the sofa." "Which one?" she said. This was a dangerous
moment, but Benchley saw a sofa in the corner of the living room and said,
"That one." They then walked, carrying the sofa, to another
house on the same square, rang the bell, and told a second maid, "We're
here with the sofa." "Um, I guess you can put it there,"
she said; and so they did.
Benchley heard, in a roundabout way, that the lady of the first house
visited the lady of the second one some six months later and recognized
her old sofa.
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Another good one that I've heard about is to put cherry Kool-aid in the
shower head.
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I had this joke played on me and it was quite effective.
A small box was filled with the punch-holes from paper tapes. The bottom
was removed and it was placed on my bookshelf at work, with no trace of
the punch-holes. Seeing the box, the first thing I did was pick it up.
Needless to say, the little things were everywhere for several days!
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I have never tried this, but a chemist friend of mine told me of a practical
joke. Get a hold of the victims coffee cup. Make sure its empty. Put one
drop of phenolthalien ( excuse the spelling, I'm refering to the acid/base
indicator) in the cup and fill it with water. Empty the cup and let it
dry. When the victim fills it, their is still residue of the phenolthalien
in the cup. The effect!, the victim will not be able to make it to the
bathroom in time.
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A nifty, if difficult, practical joke: This only really works with friends
(preferably the trusting type). Get the victim to your house, then talk
(or do whatever you normally do together) for a while. Then mention an
interesting effect you read about recently and wanted to show him/her.
Fill a glass (preferably a short, squat glass) with water, and have a
baseball bat or a similar long, cylindrical object handy. Stand on a chair
with the glass, and press the mouth of the glass against the ceiling.
Have your friend/victim press the bat/whatever against the bottom of the
glass hard enough so that the pressure will hold the glass to the ceiling.
The theory is that if you keep the glass against the ceiling long enough,
it will adhere to the ceiling without the bat holding it up. Then put
the chair back, and tell your friend that it'll take about five minutes
or so for the bond to form. Take turns holding the glass up with the bat
to avert suspicion. When the victim is "on duty" once again,
casually mention that you have a few things to do. Put your jacket on
and leave the house. (Of course, you're going to come back, aren't you?
You just wanted to see the look on his face, right?) If you can get this
to work (which you can, if you are convincing and the victim is gullible),
it's a marvelous joke. I pulled this on my roommate - but there was one
small problem - when I left our room, the door was locked and I had forgotten
my keys. My other roommate showed up in about ten minutes, but it was
not a happy scene...
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Yet another answer to that silly revenge problem: Tape down the little
white things that spring up when you lift the receiver. (another alternative
would be to open up the phone and remove two little spring things so that
the white things don't come up at all.) Of course all this should be done
in the victims absence. Now the fun begins... When he arrives, dial his
number from a nearby phone and don't hang up.
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Good for aracniphobics (check the spelling on that one.) Get approximately
20 pieces of 1 metre or yard long white string. Tie a knot at one end
and temporarily secure it to the centre of a closed door. Begin to tape
the ends to the door frame being careful not to close the door itself.
It should begin to resemble a large spider's web. Get the rest of the
string and start weaving spirarally just like Charlotte would. Complete
the masterpiece by purchasing plastic creepy crawlies and attaching them
also to the string (eye level,etc.). Unsecure the centre knot and instant
spider web. You might want to try it with fishing line and smaller creepies
if you're really mad.
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Instead, get a cannister of the foam insulation that is used in home
construction (IT EXPANDS TO SEVERAL HUNDRED TIMES ITS VOLUME IN THE CANNISTER).
Make sure victim is not in his/her office, bedroom, etc... Then fill room
into solid block of foam.
Baby powder inside someone's hair dryer, causing the CASPER THE FRIENDLY
GHOST look is also a cute one.
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A friend and I pulled a similar stunt on a co-worker some time back.
After a long series of joke-perpetrating back and forth, we procured a
rather large box and filled it with packing 'peanuts', then proceeded
to cut a large hole in the bottom and invert the box on the victim's desk.
We then took a short length of string and fed it into a tiny hole in the
top of the box, taping the other end to the side of the box. This 'red
herring' was easily mistaken for some type of trip-wire to be engaged
if the box was opened. When the victim saw the parcel, he immediately
knew the source and, wary of opening the box, followed his initial instincts
and quickly grabbed it to move it off his desk ... the rest is fairly
obvious ...
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I had a mischevious roommate in college. Fortunately, I was the object
of his machinations only once. It didn't take long to track down my furniture
>from the ten places on campus where he had distributed it over spring
break.
His masterpiece, however, was a concerted effort that involved everyone
on my hallway. The victim: our "sponsor" (at Pomona College,
an upper- classperson in charge of a gaggle of fledgling freshpeople).
This one takes some preparation. Wrap very thin filament wire (high resistance,
low flash point) around the fuse of an M80 firecracker. Imbed this assembly
in a box of cornflakes, leading the wires out of the box.
Next, wire several old-fashioned camera flashbulbs in parallel, and put
them in a circuit with the firecracker wire and a 12 V lantern battery.
Rig a solenoid to close the circuit (we used an old clothespin).
Now you're ready. When the victim is out of his/her room, hang the cornflake
box in the middle of the room. Arrange the flashbulbs near the door. Place
the solenoid so that opening the door will close the circuit. Lounge nearby
and watch the fun.
When the victim opens the door, s/he thinks that the room just exploded.
Bright light, loud noise, and the burnt cornflakes feel like a bomb-blast
concussion as they hit your body.
Boy howdy, that woman could run. Caught up with her somewhere around
North Campus. Being dutiful sponsees, we helped clean up the cornflake
mess later.
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This sounds suspiciously like one of David Brenner's "Best april fools pranks In The World". He claimed to do this and put the slip back,
three or four slips down. The lucky recipient was a kindly-looking little
old lady who had a habit of smiling vacantly and nodding. When the bank
teller read the back of the slip, and saw this little old lady smiling
and nodding, he tripped the silent alarm, the doors slammed shut, the
guards all pulled out their guns, and the only two customers in the bank
were the little old lady and David Brenner in the corner laughing his
ass off. Naturally he recommended that against trying this little stunt.
The other practical joke of his that I remember involved getting a friend
with a car to help you. Pick up about a dozen cheap brooms, and get on
a local (downtown) bus. Of course, the brooms will be impossible to manage
as the bus bounces and sways, and will annoy passangers and driver alike.
But, as you've paid your fair, the driver figures you'll be off the bus
soon enough and he'll be done with you. Get off at the last stop, hop
into your friend's waiting car, and zip back to the stop you got on at,
and get on THE SAME BUS. Much yucks.
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Back in my graduate days, I used to bring my lunch to school which consisted
of a sandwich and usually a hard boiled egg. I kept a small jar of salt
in my desk for the eggs. One day I dipped my egg in the salt only to discover
it was sugar. It was easy to spot the prankster(s); everyone in the room
was snickering!
I used to bring my lunches in plastic lined paper bags with bend-over
tabs on the top. The bags were very good and kept my sandwiches fresh.
I got them for free from the pockets of airline seats. One day as I was
opening my "lunch" bag in the lab, the same bunch of pranksters
from above gathered around my table and opened their own barf bag lunches
(they had just gotten back from an out-of-state conference). However,
the joke was turned around on one of them. He was spooning yogurt out
of his bag and eating it. After I told him what it looked like, he lost
his appetite.
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You take the top off the standard sugar dispenser found at restaraunts
around the country. You place a single layer of paper napkin over the
opening in the glass part, then put salt on top of that. Put the top back
on and tear off all the paper showing around the edges. The first victim
gets salt in his coffee, which I suppose is funny to some people. But
what is even funnier is this same guy, or the next, trying to get sugar
out of the thing. They think the sugar may be caked and bang the dispenser
on the table, shake it, hold it up to the light and squint at it, etc.
...
Many years ago, before all the young studs started taking their dates
to motels for, er, recreation, there were always Lover's Lanes around.
On a typical moonlit night there might be a dozen cars at one of these
places with the windows all steamed up from the activities within, and
occasional flashes of red as flailing feet inadvertantly hit brake pedals.
Some people I knew used to get their jollies chaining the bumpers or axles
of these cars to the nearest fence or tree ...
The most elaborate joke along these lines was played by three friends
of mine, whom we'll call Tom, Dick and Harry.
On a moonlit night as described above, Tom came running out of the woods
onto the Lover's Lane screaming, "No! NO! Oh, God, Please NO!"
When Tom had everybody's attention, Dick stepped out of the woods with
a shotgun, yelled "Now I'll get you, you bastard!" and fired
the gun over Tom's head.
Tom dropped to the ground and lay there writhing and screaming until
Dick came over and fired a blast into the ground near his head, then went
limp and quiet.
Then Harry came rushing over, yelling "Jesus, Jack, why'd you DO
it? He was our FRIEND!! Oh, my God! ..." and the like. Then both
Dick and Harry grabbed Tom by the heels and dragged him back to the woods.
When they were out of sight Tom got up and all three enjoyed the activity
back at the scene of the "crime", which needless to say had
changed considerably from a few minutes before.
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REMEMBER: THESE April Fools Pranks ARE JUST THAT -> JOKES : DO NOT
TRY ANY OF THESE AT HOME!!!
Something I have done before is wire someones bed to give them a nice
shock.
It was done as follows:
strip some stranded wire and use the wire to form a grid under the top
sheet. it works best to have this grid look like fingers that interlace
but don't touch.
this was then connected to the 110 V side of a texas instruments calculator
transformer. to the calculator side of the transformer add a 12 or 24
Volt DC supply (i can't remember which we used) connected through a normaly
open switch.
then press the button rapidly to cause a transient in the transformer.
It is funny as heck to watch someone wake up as they are getting the
shock. if you stop while they are still partially asleep they really have
trouble figuring out whats going on.
i'm sure you could automate the process so the person has just enough
time to fall a sleep before the next shock.
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When I was at Burroughs Corp., a couple of co-workers got into a get-even
contest with each others' toolboxes, including such niceties as:
Filling toolbox with punched-card chad.
Same as above, then pouring oil over everything! <>
Wiring toolbox to 110 VAC. (I'm not endorsing these activities; simply
including them for sake of completeness!!)
Supergluing handle to top of toolbox. (Thought that one up myself.)
Removing tools; bolting toolbox to floor; replacing tools. (Good one!!)
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Here is a simple, but fun, practical joke you can try.
You need a phone with a handset so that you can unscrew the mouth piece
and remove the pickup. It's real easy, they are just sitting in there
and not wired down. Replace the mouth piece and think up a good excuse
to get someone to use the phone. This joke was done to me when I was in
college. My roommate told me that this girl who I thought was cute had
called, and that she wanted me to call back. I felt pretty stupid yelling
into the phone trying to talk to her. And all I heard was her say 'Hello,
hello, is anyone there, hello?' After I realized what had happened, we
went out and tryed it on some other friends, with similar results. It's
a good joke because it is totally harmless, and even more fun after a
few drinks.
For a quick laugh, try:
zork | valspeak
If you don't have valspeak, I would suggest getting a copy. It's a great
way to hand in weekly reports to your boss.
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In the good ol' days of punched cards, every keypunch machine had a container
into which the square "chips" fell. A favorite practical joke
at a certain famous Eastern Technological Institute, paralyzed around
science, was to dump a bag of these collected chips on someone taking
a shower and shampoo in the dormitory. It could take weeks to get rid
of all those wet chips ....
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Other types of phone fun...
While we were in the other room, listening through a modem (we were in
NY State), a friend of mine, using his impeccable british accent, would
call a random number in London England..... collect; stating that he was
Sir so-and-so from the British consulate or some other such agency. These
people would almost all accept. (It was about 2:00 AM for them, so I guess
that might be part of the reason...). He then proceeded to take an official
telephone survey:
"1) Do you believe Margret Thatcher's handling of the Falklands
crisis was a) Excellent b) fair to good c) fair etc... .....
At least at the time, it was hillarious... especially his ability to
sound and act authentically enough for these people to accept the collect
call in the first place.. form the USA... and then stay on long enough
to actually do the survay!
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Here is a classic which has been fading into a lost art. It works extremely
well someplace like a military academy or such, where everything must
always be in impeccable order, but can be used for good effect in a dorm
room, too:
It's the fine art of stringing up a room. The idea is to string the room
(trough makeshift pullies and levers, etc.) such that as the victim turns
his door knob and opens the door, his entire room is upset. One classic
example involved stringing the bunkbed so that it lifted itself up of
the floor and turned upside down, books would tumble off a shelf, in turn
moving a dresser across the room, emtying a wall locker, pulling the shoes
up into the light fixtures and otherwise creating serious havoc. What's
nice is that the destruction itself is done by the victim; all you did
was run a little string.... This, however, can lead to serious counter-pranks.
Don't say I didn't warn you!
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Now to add my $.02.. (This works best if you have several people to work
on it) One night when one person in my dorm was away at a party, but for
some unknown reason left his door unlocked (trusting sucker!), several
other people removed all his furniture and belongings. Most of the stuff
went to a garbage/storage room, but some of the stuff (the more valuable)
went to other rooms. When he got back (at 3:?? AM), good and tired, he
was met with a nice floor lamp in the middle of the room and a telephone
in the trash basket. Then for the next several weeks, anyone who left
their door unlocked was asking for it...
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Reminds me of when I was in first year at UVIC. At that time, punch-cards
were used for programming still (They added terminals the year after I
left). The rectangular cardboard confetti had many uses :-) That stuff
was hard to get off of clothes, out of your hair, etc. One friend of mine
decided to collect the stuff, so every day he would go around and empty
the confetti >from the punch machines. At a party he was going around
tossing the stuff at people and laughing as they tried to get it out of
their clothes (it sure itches if you get it in your clothes!). He had
collected a whole paper shopping bag full - one of the big ones. When
he got around to me I reached out and whacked the bag hard on the bottom
as he was reaching in to get another handfull. Well he was looking down
into the bag and had his mouth open. The confetti exploded upwards into
his face and mouth. We were practically rolling around on the floor watching
him trying to clean the stuff out of his mouth an off his tongue. A few
days later he got me back by collecting more and dumping it on my car,
into the ventilation inlets. To this day years after he did this, an occasional
rectangular cardboard piece of confetti will float up out of the ventilation
system every time you turn on the fan/heater.
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Here are two of my favorites (which I've never yet performed: maybe I'm
just not spiteful enough.)
Prickly pear cacti have two kinds of spines: large ones and tiny reddish
hairs that are incredibly irritating. Gather the tiny ones, and distribute
them into the clothing of someone you detest, perhaps the underwear. They
will probably be noticed too late. Caveat: this should make the clothes
permanently unusable.
Collect an engorged tick from a dog, and keep it until it produces an
egg mass. Hide the egg mass at a spot where the victim sits. Several hundred
tiny "seed ticks" will patiently wait their opportunity to swarm
over the first warm-blooded creature available. They are too small to
easily pick off, and just large enough to see. (This happened [by accident]
to me in Georgia this summer. I wasn't disturbed much, but then I study
ticks and mites for fun.)
Don't make an enemy of an imaginative biologist.
REMEMBER: THESE April Fools Pranks ARE JUST
THAT -> JOKES : DO NOT TRY ANY OF THESE AT HOME!!!
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Speaking of april fools pranks, my wife pulled one several years ago...
For my wife's birthday several years ago, some people at the law office
where she works hired a male belly dancer to entertain her. She swore
sweet revenge. Six months later, the instigator of the belly dancer incident
had her birthday. My wife arranged for the single brother of another secretary
to meet the instigator for lunch, etc. The instigator didn't know the
brother before this, so it looked like someone had hired an escort service
for her to help celebrate her birthday. The joke, however, backfired.
The secretary and the single brother are now married. At the wedding,
held at a large and famous Chicago hotel, a gorilla handed out bannanas
to the guests, courtesy of my spouse.
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This reminds me of something I saw at our residence a couple of terms
ago. Outside one of the houses was an entire bedroom suite! (bed, desk,
chair, the whole bit - even the bed was made!) I don't know exactly from
which dorm it came from or whodunnit but I imagine somebody was not too
happy!
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My favorites:
Dump a whole bottle of detergent into the toilet tank. This produces
great billowing suds out of the bowl on first flush. Especially great
if first flusher is sitting at the time.
Use a clip lead to connect the brake light switch to the horn relay on
the targets car. Every time they step on the brake the horn blows. It's
amazing how many people can't associate the horn blowing with using the
brake. They just report that the horn blows at random times. This is especially
useful joke to watch in parking lots when work lets out.
Carefully pick up sleeping targets bed and set it on four coke bottles.
When target rolls over or makes any significant move bed will crash 6
inches to the floor and there will be bottles rolling all over the place
but not a soul in sight.
Steal a banana from targets lunch. Use large sewing needle to pierce
skin at seam and move needle back and forth to "cut" banana
in half. Continue doing this along the seam and banana will be sliced
when peeled by target.
Saran wrap on reading glasses that have been left on desk is good. Trimming
at edge of lens is hard but effect is great. Not usually noticed when
first picked up but optical quality of saran is spectacularly bad.
I know of a variation of the fake workmen digging the street that worked
well. In the original (very risky) you masquerade as real workmen and
dig a hole in the street and leave. When this was first done in NY in
the fifties it was days before anybody realized something was wrong and
traffic was a disaster until the street department patched the hole. In
the variation, the jokers observed real workmen digging the street and
reported to the police that college students were again digging up the
street as a joke. The police thanked the tipster and headed for the dig.
In the meantime the jokers approached the workmen and toldthem that the
college had freshmen dressed up as cops as part of fraternity initiation
and that they would be around soon to give the workmen a hard time. The
workmen thought this was great and agreed to give the "cops"
a hard time back. It was a long time before this mess was sorted out.
(this was my all time favorite practical joke)
Another idea that I couldn't perfect might be of interest. I got one
of the air freshener gadgets that had a battery operated timer that causes
a brief push on a self-contained can of air freshener every 10 minutes.
I guess you leave this thing in the bathroom and get a brief pssssst of
freshener every ten minutes. Anyhow, I tried to change the can of air
freshener (which is indeed replacable) with a freon horn. Unfortunately
the freon horns sold for emergency use in boats etc. have a different
cap on top that I could not adapt to the freshener. If you could make
this work you could plant this thing in somebodies shrubs or cellar or
warehouse... or office.
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