Post by @LovableSidekick@lemmy.world

2026-10-03 23:02 UTC

What's the best practical joke you played at work? TL;DR: I created a rumor that our company was being bought out, which by sheer coincidence had implications at the CEO level. Back in the mid-90s, the day before April Fools Day, I wrote a fake Wall Street Journal article about Toshiba buying up our company’s stock, i.e. a hostile takeover. As a clue that it was fake, I made the Toshiba spokesman’s name Igata Takashawa. I scribbled an illegible name on a printed copy and left it on a random manager’s desk. Within 2 hours my dept suddenly had an emergency all-hands mandatory meeting. The room was packed, and projected on the wall was my article. It was utter pandemonium in there, everyone talking at once. Because of April Fool’s it was also “funny hat day”. A few people had funny hats, but our manager had gone all out and was dressed like a pirate - black pants, big white shirt, red bandana and a giant gold plastic earring. He was British and strongly resembled actor Bob Hoskins - bulldog-like build, blustery attitude. When I walked in he was standing on a chair waving his arms trying to get everybody to shut up. It seemed upper management was very disturbed by the article, and wanted whoever created it to come forward. They promised no recriminations (yeah right) and only wanted to know the reason for it. I kept my mouth shut. A friend of mine, who worked near a bunch of managers and overheard their conversations, said their tone was like, “Why Toshiba?” and “Why now?” - as if the story might have a grain of truth. It came out months later that by sheer coincidence our company had been working jointly with Hitachi on a top secret military project - a portable, battlefield ultrasound machine to detect plastic sharpnel, which didn’t show up on x-rays. The engineers called it “the tricorder” because it resembled the one Spock used to carry. The boys at the top wondered if the article was a subtle message that the secret had leaked out, which could affect their ability to get future government contracts. Anyway, I left that job within a few months but my friend stayed for 7 or 8 years, and he said every April Fools Day the “Toshiba incident” still came up in conversation.

Replies (7)

@stopforgettingit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-10-04 03:28

The movie The Matrix just came out. This company had no software or any terms that could be confused with this movie name. I trasfered to IT from sales, I discovered that in our internal software I could trigger a pop up alert tied to user login. So I made a pop up linked to my old teammates login that said “If you proceed this will destroy The Matrix”. Then I gave it just an OK button. She called me in IT about 1.5 seconds after I deployed and was like “I don’t know what I did, I don’t want to break The Matrix”.

Open ##4981886
@Delphia@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 04:28

A coworker ignored me when I said something to him. So I went to the office gossip and said “Did you hear Jims put in his resignation and is going to work at Home Depot” Then went to two other departments and did the same thing including the head of transport because the drivers are insane gossips. 3 hours later someone came up to Jim to.ask him a legitimate work question and he screamed at them “I’M NOT GOING TO WORK AT FUCKING HOME DEPOT!” The bosses knew I was responsible but Jim was also an incorrigible shit stirrer and prankster himself so he got sent home with pay for the rest of the day and given a chat about “If your going to dish it out…”

Open ##4984334
@Whirlygirl9@kbin.earth 2026-10-04 04:33

i did a "print screen" of a person's desktop. set it as the background image. drug all working icons into a folder and placed it inconspicuously at the bottom of the screen. it was the only live file on the desktop. Went and told IT what I had done so it wouldn't waste their time.

Open ##4984542
@ch00f@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 02:20

I added a functional SWAG key to a coworker’s obnoxious mechanical keyboard. ch00ftech.com/…/xx_mlg_keyboard_xx-swag-yolo-420/

Open ##4985977
@Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 06:29

My favorite pranks were from back in school, where I wrote a very basic program I wrote that could bring a (single core) system to its knees by sending the system beep character faster than the system could actually beep, so it would just beep ever slower until you killed the power. I used to randomly swap out the old Firefox icon for that program when certain people in class annoyed me. The best part was I never got caught doing it, even after I snuck it into the ghost image the IT guy (who was technically my boss since I helped out in the computer lab) used across a bunch of systems. For actual work pranks, it was just the standard screenshot the desktop and hide everything sort of pranks, other than the time I got a couple annoy-a-trons into my dick manager’s drop ceiling, and it drove him nuts for months, and he didn’t find them until well after I left and the batteries in them died. I think that IT actually found it when running new Ethernet to his office.

Open ##4989220
@kmartburrito@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 00:57

Important note - many may not know this, but you can erase sharpie on a dry erase board with a dry erase marker - you just color over it and erase like normal. I drew a massive penis on a buddy’s desk white board (this was before Covid when we were in an IT office setting) in sharpie, and then finished the drawing by turning it into a cat with a similar black dry erase marker. At some point he erased the cat, only to be left with a big hog leg he couldn’t erase due to it being sharpie. He freaked out for a bit before I helped him erase it.

Open ##4989302
@nafzib@lemmy.world 2026-10-04 08:16

Around the time that the 2010s My Little Pony was getting super popular, my manager was really annoyed by it because his kid LOVED it and he had to watch it and be exposed to it constantly. He didn’t mind that his kid liked it, but just like one of those songs that gets played waaaaay too much on the radio, he was just super sick of MLP at this point. He had a little shelf on his desk with a bunch of little figurines for various nerdy things that most of us on his team were also fans of - Batman characters, horror movie characters, etc. One day while in Walmart, I passed by an end cap display that had bins full of blind bag, tiny MLP figures for a dollar each. I immediately bought 5. I slowly started adding them amidst his figurines on his shelf, about one per week. It took until after I placed the third one before he finally noticed and immediately came storming over with them in hand, stopped near my desk…and then turned to my coworker and just went, “Dammit Gary!!!” A few months later for Valentine’s Day I saw a bunch of small MLP valentines cards that were all connected accordion style, so I bought them and then taped them along the edge of his desk like a little table skirt. That time he knew it was me, obviously.

Open ##4993403