Back in the late 1990's, I used PCAnywhere for remote access on the office curmudgeon's computer. Two finger typist on a good day. A smart guy, a good friend, but still struggled with the user interfaces of the era.

The mouse cursor would never quite land on the box. And random characters would be inserted in to the message requiring a re-type - one finger at a time.

Of course the rest of us in the shared office were on to the gag. We played it out for a few weeks before fessing up. Earned me the reputation of the office Hacker - this was the height of the "Free Kevin" campaign. But it simply was commercial off-the-shelf software, installed over lunch when the PC was not locked.

Tech was simpler then. And mischievous pranks did not end with summary dismissal. Cheers to fond memories!

"... did not end with summary dismissal."

We need no more reminders of The Ashes please!

as i type this, you have 5 up votes and 0 down votes.

five nil ?

I spent some time working with an engineer who would regularly be found dashing in just before 10:00 to join his morning daily meeting, almost always conducted online. On occasion this would also involve him rushing into the test labs looking for his laptop to join the , which he would have abandoned almost at random around the room prior to heading home.

After a few weeks of this morning whirlwind said engineer came in to find some utter bastard had wrapped his abandoned laptop up nice and neatly in about ten layers of gaffer tape. Cue further panic as he runs around trying to find a way to cut it open and not miss the meeting. He started coming in a touch earlier after that.

Put his mouse in jelly ala The Office

Or just remove the ball (presuming it was the days before optical mice)

Ah, yes, that was a good one as well: modified a mouse (ball mouse with optical pickup) by removing every second of the spokes from one wheel. Which made the mouse move at half its horizontal speed on the vertical axis. That really messes with your brain.

In the late 90's that there was the reason the school I did tech for was one of the early adaptors of optical mice; About 3x the cost of ball mice, but the only way to stop the balls being stolen was to epoxy the bottom shut, which meant full dismantle for ball cleaning - they paid for themselves in time and hassle.

just remove the ball

I recall replacing the ball with one, presumably smaller, from another mouse made for a seriously misbehaving desk rodent.

Not a prank, but all this does remind me of when I worked in IT Support back around 1998, long before optical mice were a common thing. We used to get numerous complaints about mice not working due to the build up of crap on the rollers and balls. I used to remove all the balls and take them to the nearest "gents" and give them a good soak in a basin of warm, soapy water. Other staff entering the loo would ask, "What are you doing?"

"Washing my balls," I'd reply.

Reminds me of the time I still went to school. We glued a teachers car to the pavement, carefully filling each tread of the tyres with a syringe. Took us an entire afternoon of visiting DIY stores to find a fitting extension hose for the syringes to completely fill the tread.

Car stayed there for quite a while, and the damage to the parking lot when they finally cut the tyres was a constant reminder to us to never, ever get caught. That would have been pocket money for a decade...

Way back in the days of MS-DOS, I had a good friend in the office who was of Mexican descent.

I wrote a little TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program which I installed in her autoexec.bat - it hooked the keyboard interrupt and monitored the keys being pressed. Whenever she typed her name at the end of a document, the computer would cheerily play the 'Mexican Hat Dance' song through the PC speaker :-)

Eventually she discovered that pressing backspace part way through typing her name would avoid triggering the tune.

Ah, happy days!

[Beer because there's no tequila icon]

Mouse stuck to the desk would be onehellova fault. I wonder what he thought had happened.

I'll start with suggesting catastrophic meltdown of the electronics, adhering the melted plastic of the case to the desk

Any other suggestions?

Well, given that most epoxys provide a rather obvious olfactory clue as to what happened ... I guess it depends on how clueless he really was.

There was a weekend in-between, but I agree that the smell would be a bit of a give-away, especially for folks like you or I who know what the smell was.

But melted plastic and burned electronics have a smell as well, as do a lot of cleaning products used to clean offices (at least when they used to clean offices rather than just run a vacuum around the desks and chairs). Who knows what the experience level of this person was!

I still remember coming in to the office in a morning, and being greeted by the strong smell of polish, back when desks were wood (or at least wood veneer), floors were mopped and polished, and cleaners actually cleaned and took pride in their spaces.

Ah. pass me my rose tinted spectacles.

A friend of mine told me this one: A senior manager was being shitty to the technical people. So one of them changed the manager's email sig, indicating his sexual orientation tended toward gayness. Or so it has been reported to me :o.

This was recounted by someone I used to work with a long time ago.

In an open plan office with desks in groups of 4 desks with each person facing another, with a short partition in between, he connected a 2nd USB mouse to the PC of his colleague who sat opposite him, with the cable being routed to his desk from under the table, and kept hidden behind some books.

Every few days, he'd retrieve the mouse from it's hiding place for easy reach, and kept nudging the mouse, enough to cause bewilderment in his colleague who would see the mouse pointer moving in a random fashion. It was only done sparingly to cause mild annoyance. But was found out eventually when the colleague called support and they went to replace the mouse and found the 2nd mouse plugged in...

We had a manager for all us trainees, in a rather up-and-coming company of that time. He was also a test/trouble shooter engineer and spent much of the time skulking at a bench in the corner of the main open-plan factory. He had a favourite china pint mug - white with big blue spots on it - which was always prominently visible on the bench.

The first prank we played on him was to put about an inch of water in the bottom of the mug, then drop some white silicon rubber solution on top forming a thin film. Once this had set it was punctured and air syringed in forcing out the water, finally the holes were sealed with a couple more of drops of silicon rubber. At a glance this quite invisibly blended in to the shape and colour of the mug.

The tea lady comes round with the urn on a trolley, and fills the cup. Poor Brian then observes it slowly rising in the cup as the air heats up and tea eventually spills over, with a final mini-explosion as the silicon rubber breaks.

The second (and last) prank was when somebody accidentally knocked the mug off the bench and it broke on the concrete floor. The mug was then glued together with a water-soluble adhesive. We expected it to just fall apart a short while after it was filled with hot tea, but it actually worked out even better. It stayed together until Brian picked it up when he was left holding just a bit of the cup attached to the handle. However, we did present him with a new similar mug, but with blue rings rather than spots!

The reason this was the last prank is a story in itself but after all these years I think it's safe to mention it.

the factory had it's own very posh research and development offices, and one day a particularly arrogant guy rocks up and drops some paperwork on Brian's bench and says "Build this, now it's urgent" then disappears. Apparently it was a particularly complicated high frequency power transformer. Brian, as usual, checks the details, and then phones the research dept, to say there appears to be an error in the calculations. One of the other trainees was in earshot when said arrogant numpty verbally lays into Brian and demands he does what he's told.

The next thing we hear is that said transformer failed spectacularly and Brian disappears. We all thought he'd been thrown under a bus, but the whole story eventually filtered back to us. The big bosses had the transformer examined by a completely independent company, who took it apart, and was able to confirm that Brian had been right - there was a factor of ten error in some of the windings. Numpty was dismissed, and Brian not only exonerated, but also transferred to research with corresponding salary and benefits.

I don't know if he kept his mug there :)

Actually, if someone had grassed them up, I'm not sure if management wouldn't have taken a very dim view even back in the 90s. Our management didn't seem to be blessed with much of a sense of humour, at the time.

Anyway IT and the buying department at a medium sized UK retailer had a friendly rivalry going on. So when buying went to the pub for some kind of lunchtime event, our heroic IT crew leapt into swift action. When they logged in after lunch, all of their desktops now contained an image of a certain lady, who appeared to have mislaid her clothing. She was also standing legs wide apart and waist thrust forward in what David Keanrick called, "a heroic stance" - but that Blackadder described as, "here are my genitals, please take one." Macbeth!

They had of course locked down the PCs - making it impossible to change the background. I believe it required a day, and the provision of some beer, to get the situation resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

That was the days of emailing jokes. And my mates in IT were the source of all the jokes that I decided were better deleted than sent on.

... at a company I was consulting for in the early 80s had his office door lock picked open, taken apart, and the pins rearranged. The guy in Maintenance who was called in to fix the thing was one of the slowest pickers I've ever seen, but he got it open. Instead of simply rearranging the pins to fit the existing key, he laboriously made a new key to fit. It took about 6 blanks, and over two hours of hand-filing, before he got it right.

I pointed out that the "prank" had punished the wrong guy, and suggested they not do it again ...