I’m not interested in “pranks” where someone is victimised, harmed, or upset.
Tell me the funniest harmless pranks where everyone involved can laugh and nobody feels bad.
A recent favourite was the most simple. Someone in my office photocopied a paper clip, then put the copy back in the paper feed. My desk was beside the copier, so I got to watch them look everywhere in that machine for the paper clip.
I love when identical twins pull a prank where someone “sees the same person again”.
I once worked with a guy who did the opposite of this. He just randomly mentioned that he had a twin brother one day, which no-one believed given how long we had all known him. But he persisted by casually talking about him in regular conversation. Nothing overly noticeable, just enough to plant the idea in people’s mind that he did indeed have a twin brother. Around the same time he started growing his beard out and really made it his personality for several months to be the guy with a beard. It all came together one day, he finished his shift around lunch time and left like usual with his glorious beard. Unbeknownst all but a select few of us, he hadn’t actually left. He left the store and drove his car around the corner to the other car park then used the sink in a nearby public toilet to completely shave his beard off and changed his clothes. Then he just walked in through the front door, introduced himself as the name he had been using for his fake twin brother and asked if his brother was there. He always had a reputation as a joker, but I don’t think any of us truly believed anything he said after that. Not that he cared. It still cracked him up years later when folks were telling the tale to the newbies.
As a twin, some of our best stories are when these things happen unintentionally. Like, we’re just acting perfectly normal and other people get their neurons in a twist over it because to them it’s like some Matrix deja vu shit. 🤷😁
I can’t help it, whenever I see twins I say “Oh, Deja voux” out loud
For Christmas I bought a box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, carefully unwrapped each one, replaced them with brussel sprouts, and wrapped them back up. My wife’s reaction was priceless as she went from pure joy at the gift to absolute horror. Of course after we had a laugh I got out the container of chocolates and gave them to her (they’re her favourite).
Selling jars ‘full’ of dehydrated water.
Hey, good jars can be really annoying to find.
I used to work at Geek Squad, and pranks are sorta ingrained into the culture. As a bit of background, our job title was “CIA”, for Counter Intelligence Agent (as in, the “front counter” of the store). Definitely ran by nerds.
Anyway, when you get your CIA badge (literal medal badge, dubbed a “shield”), there’s typically a ceremony, it gets presented, it’s like a badge of honor, no pun intended. So when someone got theirs, I put it in orange jello. This guy had regularly yoinked other people’s badges and would take random photos with them, it was good fun and harmless.
If you’re walking across a pedestrian crossing, and a car is pulled up and stopped at the edge, you pretend there is something knee-height right in front of the car by pantomiming climbing/stepping over it.
More harmless if there is no other vehicle behind them, so they can back up to look for it.
Walk, stop, look down, look shocked and/or disgusted and walk “around” it. That’s easier to simulate than trying to “climb over”.
You can get a bag of hundreds of tiny plastic babies on Amazon. I got a couple hundred of them and hid them everywhere in our office over the weekend when nobody was there (including in my own office).
It’s been a couple years, people are still finding them, and nobody knows where they came from. A few people blamed one of the HR ladies and a co-worker who’s addicted to buying tchotchkes on Temu. Hopefully none of my co-workers are on Lemmy, because I hope to refresh the baby population soon.
At my previous job I tied strings to a couple packages’ worth of Dove individual chocolates and hung them from the ceiling of a co-worker’s office when she was on holiday. She is short and loves chocolate, so they were tantalisingly out of reach. She liked how they looked and kept them there for a while, but eventually started pulling them down as she had chocolate cravings.
I got away with so many things like this at my previous job because nobody dreamed I would do it so never, ever was I suspected (older white lady and in a comedy routine I would be the straight person). Accounting often works late though. So I’d move a tyrannosaur toy around, change the after hours sign to say things like “after 5 please dance”, put funny things on the printer glass. Others were always suspected. I never even blinked and they never knew who.
haha this is too cool
It’s great being the one nobody suspects! A few people thought I might have done the baby thing but I was also “finding” babies in my work area and was decent enough faking confusion and offering up more plausible co-workers as suspects. I like your idea of getting creative with the hours sign!
I forgot - I also did a squished spider prank. I drew a “crushed” spider in a random spot on a sheet of copy paper - two sloppy body segments and broken stick legs in the general squished spider arrangement. I used just a black felt-tipped pen and even added a tiny drop of water to the body to bleed the ink and make it look juicy. Once it dried, I slipped the paper face-down in the paper feed tray (so the print would be on the spider side) under two clean sheets of paper.
When my supervisor printed a spreadsheet, there it was on page 3. Sadly, she didn’t have a huge reaction to that one, but I was still proud of myself.
I had a wireless plug with remote that you could plug any electric device into and toggle the power on and off. One day, I took it into work and plugged my boss’ monitor into it. Every so often, I’d turn her monitor off for just a second or two and then turn it back on. Maybe once or twice a day to start, but then I’d do it a little more.
This went on for weeks to when she finally reached out to IT to get a new monitor. Well, I was ready for that and had the IT guys already in on it. They told her they were out of working monitors and that the ones the company wanted them to use were backlogged. By now, most of the floor was aware of what was happening. She’d slap the monitor, curse, it was hard to keep a straight face.
After a couple weeks of this, I had my friends in the mail room make up a dummy package from one of her clients and deliver it to her desk. Inside was just the remote. She opened it all confused, pressed the button and her monitor went off and we all lost it. She was so red in the face but took it really well and couldn’t believe she never thought to look under her desk lol.
That doesn’t sound harmless
You wouldn’t believe how harmful it really was. She’s still in the hospital to this day with her own 24/7 support staff and therapist, a decade later, over the amount of harm this caused. It’s insane.
Or she’s still my friend and mentor, one of those two, I’m not sure.
Whenever my colleague at the neighbouring desk left her laptop unlocked, I would go in, and create a new Word document saying ALWAYS LOCK YOUR LAPTOP in huge red font. She vowed she would eventually get back at me.
I once took a screenshot of some random text in a Word document with “CONFIDENTIAL” as the background watermark and then I used that screenshot as my lock screen wallpaper. When I locked my laptop and left my desk, she clocked the content of my screen and thought it was finally her moment to get back at me, but… it wasn’t.
hahahah the bait
At my last job, there was this one conservative dude I really disliked. He was friendly but his views were not very friendly.
After I left the job, I got a call from him asking if I could be a reference on a job, and I said sure. Said company called saying they were offering him a position in a different state so I gave him a raging review. He called me afterwards saying he got the job and would be moving to a different state far, far away from me. Success.
Not really a prank I guess, but there were ulterior motives at least
Haha that reminds me of the time I helped my upstairs neighbors move. They were super annoying, always shouting over each other and leaving trash bags in the hot sun on their balcony, where the stink could waft into my open window.
I was very excited when I saw them packing their furniture, so I offed to help and we managed to finish it all in only one day. They didn’t catch on and just thought I was being nice! They even tried to pay me but I refused - being rid of them was payment enough
Whoopee cushion is a classic harmless prank
I used to offer customers invisible change when they paid in full but no tip
I just don’t like pranks at all. So I never see them as harmless.
There’s a cantankerous old git we drink with in my local and I have the PIN to his phone. Once I installed Grindr on it (didn’t create an account), so now all I have to do is let him “catch” me with his phone unlocked and he can spend days trying to figure out what I did, but as I did nothing he never finds it.
His wife and daughter annoy him as they live with him, and he gets irate at WhatsApp group chats that are too chatty. So I got his phone and created a WhatsApp group for his family, then posted “I love you” to it. He didn’t discover it until the next day and was fuming.
Secretly pumping up someone’s bike tires
