Two small pranks. From workers with too much time and/or bad work morale. Not much IT.

For the benefit of younger readers, it's worth noting that this was an era when telephones did not fit in your pocket, but sat in a more or less fixed location on the desk, and you operated them using a handset that was attached with a length of coiled wire a meter or so long. Yes, it's all very primitive.

You've made me feel old!

My desk telephone is about 70 years old. It's a 1950s Western Electric Model 500, my Father's first telephone. It does everything I need a telephone in that location to do, except DTMF, which was easily rectified with a little circuitry and a couple switches and buttons. (My telco still supports pulse dialing, the DTMF option is handy for accessing voice-mail torture devices "helpfully" provided by third parties.)

A couple years ago I offered a teenager $50 if he could place a call on it.

He refused to touch it.

I made a call to show him it worked, and asked him to try again. He still refused.

My granddaughter discovered the phone when she was 5 years old. I gave her one of her own for her 6th birthday (with the same DTMF capability mine has). Almost a decade later, she's still using it. She thinks it's wonderful ... and her friends think she's weird, which she also thinks is wonderful. Mission accomplished. Thanks, Dad :-)

When the inevitable time comes and your telco drops pulse dialling support, you'll be glad to know that many SIP ATAs support it. The common SPA-112 certainly does (and they're cheap)

So your 70 year old phone could easily become a VoIP phone.

"When the inevitable time comes and your telco drops pulse dialling support"

That's why the built-in DTMF. It will never become a VoIP phone. Not on my watch, anyway.

What kind of idiot wants a house/desk phone that REQUIRES battery power in an emergency?

All phones (bar the two cans and a piece of string variety) need power. Not always a lot and, for POTS it's a battery at the local exchange (supported during power cuts, around here, anyway, by an emergency diesel powered generator).

I live in a rural area of Scotland and my router runs via a small UPS. Our mobile phones use wifi calling around the house as the mobile signal is patchy. It's not 100% resilient but, barring a county-wide shut-down, should see us through. We also have solar panels on the roof, and a 5kWh battery - but I don't factor that in as the biggest risk of power outage is when solar top-up is minimal (I could set the battery to stay topped up from the grid, but we've not reached the stage when, for us, loss of electricity for a few days would be life-threatening.

I mean, those of us that have "been around" for long enough remember the importance of running a tap from the power on an analogue phone for the combined purposes of being able to "force the line to stay open" when the other party tried to hang up, and to connect a small load (such as a lightbulb) to "force the line to hang up" when another party did the same to us.

Maybe that's a story/discussion for another day...

Same set up in geographically the middle of the UK as mobile coverage does not cover, despite the (multiple) operators protestations to the contrary.

Would sleeping with the mistress of your utter cockwomble of a boss count as a prank?

Especially if you told them about it on the day you quit?

Because... do I have a story for you.

An attempt at humour I suppose?

Have a few over the years.

My first place of work, I had a colleague - great bloke but a bit of a curmudgeon. He had a mug for his tea that no one was permitted to even look sideways at. It was one of those that had decades of staining.

In a moment of silliness (I really didn't think it through), when he left the workshop one day, I poured his tea into another mug, drilled a hole in the bottom of his and screwed it to the desk. I then refilled it. When he walked back in and tried to pick his mug up, the handle snapped clean off! Oops.

At college we found out that if you made an ioniser you could use it to charge things like leaves on plants, or the rim of a pint pot so when someone brushed against it, or drank from it, they'd get a jolt.

Also at college we had a couple of quite unpleasant lecturers. For one, he used to make a big thing about locking the door to the classroom despite it being empty other than a chalkboard, desks, chairs and bin.

One day the window was open so we sneaked in and stuck all the furniture onto the ceiling, exactly as it had been on the floor (inverted, obviously).

One of the guys there also used to trip the alarm in the library every single visit. Which could be painful as the turnstile was nut-height for him. Someone had taken a security strip out of a book and managed to feed it into the lining of his coat. Oh and as far as anti-theft went, they were easily defeated as I saw first hand by the student lobbing a couple of books out of a window in one far corner of the library to then go and collect.

At uni we blew flour under another students door and coated everything in there white. Another time we planted cress on the floor of a room and watered it. He was away at the time and came back to a cress lawn.

I am sure there were plenty of other silly things as well but these come to mind.

Don't know why you were down voted on this. For me, its gold.

Love the watercress - God, I wish I had thought of that when I was at college.

Don't know why you were down voted on this. For me, its gold.

One man's pranks are another man's bullying. Pranks are when people play tricks on each other - its a mutual thing. This guy with the special mug, did he prank Tony as well, or did Tony destroy mug guy's favourite possession so Tony could have a good laugh at him - we don't know. Tony certainly dealt out a lot of pranks, but where did he get pranked back?

My goodness.

Of course I got pranked back. In spades. In return for breaking his mug, he left a box of spiders - all neatly packed and quite professional looking from a label perspective (we did have a franking machine so not that difficult back then) on my desk to open, knowing full well I was very arachnophobic.

He also tried to get me to wash my hands "in the hottest water I could stand" when I first go toner on them, hoping it would bond.

Then there's the time he turned some small caps around on a piece of kit I was working on to make them go pop to make me jump.

Another place, another guy crept up behind me and smacked a steel ruler down just as I turned a piece of kit I'd repaired on. I almost shit bricks.

I fell for the old trick once of someone taking a snapshot of my desktop background and hiding my icons after setting the screenshot as the wallpaper - sadly it took much longer to cotton on to that than it should have, including a couple of reboots.

I will have to try and remember the others that I was a the recipient to.

It's probably also worth pointing out as well, that said pranks above happened over a span of around 10 years or more.

I dunno - some folks seem to want to get offended on the behalf of others without even taking the time for a little bit of critical thinking. I wasn't even always the instigator of some of the pranks, just recounting them (e.g. the security strip).

At no point can I recall anyone ever being genuinely/long term upset at any of the pranks we all played on one another. Get a grip.

My brother studied at an Agricultural College and pranks were on a larger and much more dangerous scale. This was 1980's.

Most students lived in a Halls of Residence. One night, after most had had a skin full and were very asleep, the upstairs corridor was filled with bales of straw (by the students in the rooms below) and so no students could get out of their room (except jumping from the first floor windows with an almighty hangover). Of course the Fire Alarm was set off by those getting up (on the ground floor) for milking at 04:00!

For another, (and I was partially to blame as the rigger). The Chief Mechanical Engineer had a habit of showing how easy it was to break into cars and rearranging the student carpark. His Mini was moved - to a flat roof 2 storeys from the ground. Being an Agricultural College they had the equipment on hand to get it down (just like a large Heston bale), but they never did find out how it was moved in the first place. That was the last prank played for many years as it was getting well out of hand.