For April Fool's Day, I made permanent looking slipcovers for my boss' desk chair and his guest chairs. The fabric was a delightful tiger print with a fake fur element... I sewed for weeks and went in at 3AM to pull it off. There was also a portable alarm clock CD player cued up to play Eye of the Tiger at 9:30AM.

He was livid, but then he learned that I did it, as a single shooter, and bought me lunch. I was legend to my employees.

One of my office workers was very nervous around computers. She was always afraid that she would break the computer and would always come to me for help. One day my practical joker side got the best of me. I was in work early so I fired up her computer. First I saved all the desktop settings under her name as a theme. Then I created the worlds most neon psychodelic desktop them that you've ever seen. About a half hour later she turned her computer on and I heard her panic. She came running to me saying "I finally did it... I broke my computer." I went back to her computer with her, took 5 seconds to choose her original theme and worked a miracle in her eyes... After a quick laugh I fessed up and told her it was all me. Luckily our friendship actually became even better as the years went on.

Now, I did not participate but it isn't something "I just heard on the web" though there are these stories out there.

A classic, tin foil everything in sight. A bunch of guys tin foiled everything in the VP of IT's office, and I do mean everything. He went out of the country for like 4 days on business so they all took a bit of time doing it but pulled out individual pencils to wrap them, even the paperclips! coffee mug, chair, coat rack, filling cabinet (not the files) even that pad thing you put all your papers on so that you aren't indenting the desk when you write on paper.

The guy that did most of it was the CEO's kid but the boss was a pretty well humored guy, I was just an intern and would have no part in it. (yes he was a VP but it was also a very small company)

A buddy and I pranked a guy in our office who is a rabid college football fan. He had a banner with his favorite team's colors and logo hanging in his office, and one day I went out and bought an identical one from a campus shop.

I took that banner home that evening and basically desecrated it, I torched parts of it with a lighter, sliced big gashes in it with a knife, ripped parts of it and duct-taped them back together.

When our pal left for lunch, we secretly replaced his unblemished banner with the destroyed one, we put it on the wall opposite the door so it'd be the first thing he saw when he came back in, and then shut the door. We also set up a video camera to catch his response, and I did get video if it, it was hilarious.

I'm hesitant to post the video... but basically he opens the door, walks in, scrunches his face, then yells "WHAT THE HELL???!?!" He's a large fellow, incidentally, and you wouldn't believe how fast he stormed over to grab the desecrated banner and hold it over his shoulder like some wounded buddy on the battlefield.

I was several offices away and heard his cry of distress, shortly thereafter my buddy and I ran in and allayed his fears, showing him the intact banner. The $20 that went into the destroyed one was well worth it, and fortunately no disciplinary action was taken... whew. ;-D

I don't work in an office, so I will use a highschool computer class for my example.
Me and a friend were in class one day, while everyone else was at field trip, and the substitute had left. We replaced the desktops of every computer with screen shots of the desktop, then unchecked the "show desktop icons" option and hid the taskbar.
All the desktops looked the same, but the shortcuts and start menu were unclickable. My teacher ended up calling one of the IT guys to come "fix" them all the day after.He quickly discovered the problem, but it was fun while it lasted.

I use to work in a place that was very much like the horrible office in the movie OFFICE SPACE (1999 comedy), with Rob Livingston, Jennifer Aniston & Gary Cole.

We had bosses that acted and SOUNDED like the creeps in the movie -- including the character Lumbergh (the know-nothing, do-nothing boss in the movie, played by Gary Cole). Our bosses would yell and scream at people, behave poorly and unprofessionally. And our supervisors were prone to asking people at the last minute to come in to work the weekends. There are a SEVERAL scenes in the movie that are similar to my old real life office.

[Office Space Spoilers]
I once even worked w/ a guy who was fired, but because of an admin slip up, didn't know it. So he shows up that Monday to work, and all the bosses are terrified he came back to shoot the place up. Instead, they figured out he didn't know he was fired, and since a new job came in that day, they decided to put him on the job because we were short staffed. He was un-fired -- almost just like what happened in the movie.

When our (real) Boss had a birthday, the admin staff got him a cake, and staff VERY reluctantly sang Happy B day, without any enthusiasm or caring -- just like in the movie. I think people really wanted to curse the boss out.

Here's the prank....
So one thursday evening, I took the soundtrack in the movie where the boss asks a guy to come into work on saturday, and used it to leave a voice mail message for one of my co-workers. The next day, (Friday) when my co-worker plays his voice mail messages, it sounds just like the boss had called him directly, asking him to work overtime on saturday.

At this real-life horrible office, the boss use to also accuse people of stealing pens and office supplies. So we also bought a stapler and painted it red (--- like the one in the movie ) and gave it to the guy we left the voicemail message for.

My co-worker thought he had to come into work saturday, until he realized it was a sound clip from the movie.
You had to be there. It was really funny.
Red stapler and all...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfY2qIsFxio

This is about a great modern art hoax that was never detected. Years ago, I worked as a video game developer at a very large game company in Massachusetts. The company was adding a large new wing for us which included a series of 20 abstract paintings put up across the long back wall of the development area. Each painting was large (3x5 ft) and consisted of large white and red zigzag lines that ended on the edge at a position that had to be matched with the next painting in sequence to form a long contiguous pattern across the whole wall.

The paintings were commissioned at around $30k by the wife of the company president, who had very bad taste in art and we were going to be forced to look at this junk every day. So we decided to get even.

The morning of the day the paintings were being hung, the wife came in and gave the workmen her pencil drawing of where each painting was to be hung with its corresponding pattern. When the workmen went to lunch, all the un-hung paintings were still stacked on the floor. We looked at the leftover stack and devised a new series that would cause a few of the leftovers in the stack to not match. Then we found the pencil drawing and changed it, and then sat back to watch the confusion develop.

When the workmen came back, they finally ran into the problem, scratched their heads and then disappeared. Apparently the artist had made a stash of "extras", because they finally came back after some time with a new batch of paintings and proceeded to put up "our" series. When the wife came back to inspect the results, she never noticed the change.

Every day afterward, when we came to work we would look at the back wall and laugh. To this day, the ruse was never noticed.