Awesome.

We replaced a coworker's photos of her kids and husband with carefully selected stock photos of other people in roughly the same poses. It took her a day or two to figure out that wasn't her family.

We also did run-of-the-mill stuff like fill their cabinets with styrofoam peanuts, cover everything in plastic wrap, change their desktop wallpaper, etc.

I heard about encasing various office implements in jello, but we never got around to it as we didn't have a stove available.

Nowhere near as fun or as original as Specklet's, but we got our boss recently - she had gone away for a couple of days on an extended weekend and had worked super hard to clear her desk before she went away. The bane of her working life are the reports that we dump on her desk when our teams finish them and she has to read them all and sign that she supports the recommendations for her boss to approve. They have usually 20 - 50 pages of report, with a green sheet on the front with the recommendations.

We got a couple of reams of paper, some green paper and a stack of clips and sticky tags, created about 50 fake reports and sat them in her in-tray with a couple of real ones on top. She came into the office on Monday morning, all refreshed after a long weekend away and happy in the knowledge that she didn't have to face a backlog of work. She nearly cried when she saw the pile and she just sat there for almost an hour before she could face starting in on the pile.

There was a also thing going a while ago where everyone was trying to put "tails" made from a paper clip and a strip of paper on people, by hanging them on their clothes and seeing how long it would stay there before they noticed. Some red faces ensued when people went to meetings outside the office, still wearing their tail.

A couple of the things I did to this pompous architect:

It was early in the cellphone era. He had one of those brick phones. He was walking out to his car and tossed it in his gym bag, which went into the trunk. Just then, I dialed the number, and he screeches to a halt right outside the driveway. I say in a falsetto voice, "help help, I'm trapped in this guy's trunk, save me." He looks up into my window, tosses the phone back in the trunk, and drives off without further reaction.

Same guy. . .we used to have this organizational marketboard, back in the lynx days. He had advertised as wanting an espresso machine. I used an email address that was shared by a lot of people (in those days, you had to be SOMEONE to have your own address, like they cost something) and I responded to this ad by posting YOU YUPPIE SCUM!. He never ever figured that one out.

I most recently worked in a small office with a very young staff left mostly unsupervised. We had plenty of office hijinx, including calling fake meetings, coming up with bogus excuses to have office parties with booze and cake ("it's arbor day!"), abusing the 'page' feature on the phones to play each other snippets of songs, or most memorably the entire 16 parts of R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet."

The oldies are the goodies.

Sending someone to a different office for a "long weight" or a "left handed screwdriver" or a "glass hammer"

We once sent a girl off to dust the Auriculas.

Also. back when I worked in a garden centre, the one I remember is where you would send the unsuspecting noob over to Somebody to ask about his father's piano playing. The Somebody was onto the joke, and would then either break down or threaten violence after telling the noob that his father couldn't play the piano any more after the accident.

The good thing about this was that even after the noob realised that it was a prank, they were still left with the feeling that they'd been tricked into really upsetting Somebody over his Father. i.e. there were two levels of prank.

I had one played on me a few years ago, when a colleague overheard me snarling and cursing and banging my head against the wall on account of how I'd completely forgotten to mail in my state tax return and it was now, like, JULY and I was freaked out about going to jail or having all my assets seized or something. He looked very sympathetic and said consoling things, and then a couple of days later I got a phone call from a very official sounding guy representing himself as an agent of the state department of revenue who had noticed my failure to file a state tax return, and I swear to god it was at least two or three minutes of bullet-sweating excuse-babbling HELL on my part before he lost it and started giggling madly.

And usually I hate pranks and pranksters, but this guy is such a ginormous loveable dork that I forgave him ... fairly soon. (Also, I got to see him sweat in return when I got promoted a year later and ended up doing his annual performance review. Heh.)

I worked with a guy who was fairly obnoxious and was inviting prankdom.

We took his phone and taped down the off-hook switch, replaced the receiver and relocated into the ceiling. Then we call forwarded every phone in the department to his.

We stole his mouse ball.

He had a little rubber duck that he had named. Another guy found the duck's clones in a toy store and bought a box. He took a clone and pounded a big rusty nail into the clone's head then swapped it with the original. After the guy flipped, he tore out of his office to go scream at someone, which was our cue to put the original back and remove the clone. When he came back with someone to bitch about his damaged duck, it was suddenly healed. Hmmm....how did that happen and keep happening...

I never have, because I don't believe the workplace should be "fun" or "funny" for anyone. If you are having a laugh at work on the clock, you are losing the company money and squandering minutes that the company pays you for. If you are having a laugh at work off the clock, then you are trespassing and I have already notified security so don't even think for a minute the boss won't be hearing about this. Capitalism is what we do here, people, and capitalism has no place for pranks or shenanigans. Now go back to your desks, I'll be disposing of this cake now.

cmonkey's a party pooper!

Perhaps you didn't see the sign on the door, deborah, which we spent a great deal of money on to have carved out of a block of marble imported from Turkey and hand-painted with 18 karot gold paint by a surprisingly skilled Ukrainian apprentice to make sure that employees, customers, contractors and beggars alike understand that this is an important place of business. This is not a fun house or a place where children can come and throw their parents' money away on juvenile gambling sprees like skee-ball, struggling vainly to get 400 tickets so they can get trade them for a mug with a picture of two very undernourished bears and a rather fat mouse leaving for a wholely dissatisfying camping trip. No, this is a place where business happens, where transactions are made, empires built, newspapers recycled and men and women expected to engage solely in the pursuit of commerce. Now that we're clear, please have your parties, and your pooping while you're at it, on your own time, not our esteemed employers.

Ha! *leaves e-steamer for employer on cmonkey's desk*

*installs Office Poltergeist on cmonkey's computer while he's off ranting about the excessive use of office stationery for personal use*

*sends e-mail to all staff except cmonkey*

*waits*

That does it, neither of you will be receiving your Holiday Bonus this December. You'll be disappointed to learn that this year we are giving our devoted employees a gift certificate for 10% off any $100 or greater purchase at the Lakeview Yacht Club, which, as a Member, I can assure you is worth every nickel, but you two just dropped the ball with these hijinks. If John Pierpont Morgan were here he would take a few moments to be deeply ashamed of you before going back to making money.

*sneaks into cmonkey's office while he is out doing inventory on mouse pads, sends x-rated love letter to cmonkey's boss*

Note: the above is why people in our office always lock their computer when they are away from their desk. Seriously.

Easy one you should all try:

Go to victim's computer with whatever software you normally use in use.

Take a screenshot of the software with the cursor off the edge.

Save screenshot as wallpaper.

Hide all icons.

Try to keep your cool while your cow-orker tries to figure out while the computer is only partially responsive.

I once mentioned to one of my contacts at a bank I deal with a website called yaromat which, when clicked on, appeared to erase Windows and replace it with a Mac OS, complete with utterly authentic-looking desktop. (You could only exit it by clicking on certain icons.) He asked me to send it to him (with the exit sequence) to prank a hopelessly computer-inept team-mate.

He sent it to said team-mate and when he came back from lunch the entire Head Office IT Team from Big Major UK Bank was gathered round the monitor trying to work out exactly what this guy had done to install a Mac OS on a Windows system, as the hapless victim stammered that he had no idea what he'd done.

My friend became a hero because he was able to 'fix' it.

There's no point sending the yaromat link because it doesn't work now what with pop-up stoppers and such.

If your office uses Dell Desktops, press Ctrl-Alt-Down to really screw with peoples heads. (Ctrl-Alt-Up to put it right)

Best one I ever did was to two game designers who sat next to eachother when I was at Mattel. I used to switch their phone line so they'd get eachother's calls. They'd think something was wrong with their phone but then I'd switch it back. This continued for weeks. Every time they'd complain about it, it would be working perfectly. Then they'd think it was fixed but it wasn't.

It was fun to watch their slow descent into dual insanity.

If you're going to mess with someone's 'puter, take a screenshot of what they have on now and set it as the background. Then set the desktop to hide all icons.

Mess with the resolutions and the colors until it's black text on black background. Or some hideous eye-burning combo, like hot pink and bright yellow.

Lock the computer, so that the "icons" show up again.

Then move the "this computer is locked" notification to the bottom of the screen so the victim can't see it.

I usually only have to do that once to convince people that they really need to lock their computers as per the security policy.

*gathers up all the "holes" from the office hole punches, sneaks into cmonkey's office and fills his desk drawers with confetti*