Category: Work Pranks

One of my co-workers in my department is obsessed with getting away from work as soon as possible.  He has a reputation for running over people between him and the back door.  He tries to get to work as early as possible to get a parking place as close to the employee entrance as possible.  On days when he had to park next to what he considers the best parking spot, I have seen him move his car during lunch over one spot just to get the better spot. One day some of the people in our department decided to slow him down.

Call forwarding is a nice feature that I rarely use for the right purposes at work.  It’s nice if you are relocating to someone else’s desk for an afternoon, especially if I’m expecting a lot of calls.  But I never remember to turn it on when it would help.  Of course, that doesn’t stop me from using it pull a prank every now and then.  A few years ago, I decided that it would be fun to set call forwarding on some of the conference room phones to a target person at work.  I would be in one of the conference rooms after a meeting, sitting next to a phone and I would engage the call forwarding to my favorite target before I left. I would do this at random times and in random conference rooms.  I never heard any feedback about how this prank when.  Except the last time I did it.

When I worked for a previous employer. I was going to be off work for about a week.  I wanted to check my email from home.  This was long before having email access on your phone or being able to remotely check email from another computer.  I saw that the email program that we used had “rules” that you could establish on new emails in your inbox.  For example, I could have emails from my boss go immediately into a folder for messages from him.  The feature that I wanted to play with would automatically forward emails to someone else.  I decided to use this feature to forward emails to my personal email address.  This would get me the information that I wanted while I was away from work. 

Names have been altered in this story.
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Years ago, I read an article in a business-related magazine that told how to use autocorrect to add your signature to Microsoft Office documents.  In addition of the autocorrect feature automatically correcting errors like changing “nad” to “and”, you can add words that aren’t already in their library. You can even have it replace a series of characters with a picture.  Their example was having it replace your initials with an image of your signature.  I considered adding this feature to my computer but was more interested in the possibilities of using this for a prank.  

At a previous employer, I worked with several other guys in a lab. Bob was one of our fellow employees that everyone disliked the most. He was lab worker who was most likely to disappear when things got busy.  He would go out on the plant floor to collect samples and be gone twice as long as anyone else in the lab.  He had been there longer than most of us.  Everyone in the lab seemed to get along with well except Bob. If anyone was going to be the target for a prank, Bob would be that target.