Three great pranks to play at the office
1. Fool Your Coworkers With the Refrigerator Handle Switch
On most fridges (certainly the ones in most offices), you can flip the hinges from one side to the other, allowing you, for example, to open the door on either side for corner placement. Typically, one switches the handle as well, but if you don’t, the refrigerator becomes a nearly unsolvable puzzle as victims pull and pull on the handle. If no one’s watching, some will even dig in their foot against a nearby counter and pull in vain directly against the hinges.
Make the switch to your office fridge right before the lunch rush, and settle in with a sandwich to watch the fun. The beauty of this prank is that once someone knows the trick, they can’t wait to see someone else fall for it.
2. Lock Your Buddy’s Shopping Cart at Lunch
Shopping carts are often protected against theft by a wheel-locking mechanism that’s triggered when the vehicle leaves a store’s premises. A yellow line is painted around the perimeter of say, the local market where you and a colleague might eat lunch tomorrow, and buried underneath it is a cable that emits a changing magnetic field signaling the carts to lock.
Build your own backpack-size, battery-powered yellow line to lock and unlock carts within the store, playing “red light/green light” with unwitting shoppers. That may sound a bit cruel, but the creator of this project on our site said most locked-out victims were laughing and talking to each other when stalled—and choosing a Saturday morning instead of a Monday afternoon seems to make a big difference in morale.
This is an advanced project utilizing high-current micro-controllers and signal processing, but the payoff in geek credibility is huge—and you can’t even come close to buying this at a prank shop. What’s more, once you’ve locked a friend’s cart and decided you can’t actually bring yourself to lock a stranger’s, you’ll still have a beefy H-bridge capable of controlling around a 50-volt, 30-amp-plus motor for your next build.
3. Germinate Your Cubicle Mate’s Keyboard
Got an environmentally conscious colleague whose Spring Break coincides with April Fools’ Day? Sprout some seeds to turn their keyboard green! Seeds will start growing almost anywhere where there’s a bit of water, so build a quick greenhouse on your own: Cover the keyboard with some wet paper towels or toilet paper, then throw it all in a large plastic bag Don’t worry, people have had success dishwashing their keyboards before, so some moist paper probably won’t cause any permanent damage.
This is a great prank because it’s obvious that at least a week of planning went into it. Worse comes to worst? Plead innocent: “I thought you were trying to be more green!” Not enough time to germinate seeds? Try hot gluing on 1 sq. ft. of real grass turf.