Pranks come in all shapes and sizes—and results may vary. From harmless jokes to cruel tricks, bullies getting what they deserve to innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire, these Redditors share their most successful, creative, hilarious, and sometimes-regretful stories about pranks they have pulled or fallen victim to. Sometimes, it’s the prankster themselves who ultimately learns a lesson.
1. Meteorological Machination
My late husband was a weather nerd and loved inclement weather. One time, I was home alone and a huge storm was imminent, so I taped the weather warnings. A few days later, it was a beautiful sunny day—not a cloud in the sky. We were watching TV, and as soon as he walked into the kitchen to grab a beer, I started playing the recorded warnings.
It was so funny! He kept running outside to check the sky. I laughed so hard (and so did he when I confessed)!
2. Cans, Incognito
Back in university, my housemate used to live off of tinned food. He would have a massive variety of canned soups, curries, and veggies in his cupboards at all times. I’m talking dozens of tins, filling up the whole cupboard. One day, I carefully removed the label off of a tin of chicken soup and stuck it onto a tin of value cat food I had bought expressly for that purpose.
That evening I somehow persuaded him to eat chicken soup and he didn’t suspect anything. He picked up a tin of soup, opened it, and it was—chicken soup. "Oh well," I thought, "another time." Two weeks passed, and I’d sort of forgotten about the disguised can. Then, one night when he was in the kitchen making dinner, it finally happened. We heard him say in an alarmed voice, “Hey guys...what do you think of this soup? Looks a bit funny to me! Tastes funny, too.”
At that point, I couldn’t breathe due to laughing so hard.
3. Playing With Fire
I managed to convince my sister's 9th-grade science teacher that my sister was an amateur arsonist. I had a study hall with Mr. D the semester before she started, and one day as he wandered by, he said, "I have your sister in my class next semester, anything I should know?" I think he was just trying to make conversation.
I don't know where it came from, but I jokingly told him, "Look, whatever you heard, it was completely blown out of proportion, no charges were ever filed, there haven't been any incidents in a couple of months, and besides some smoke damage, there's been no loss of property. Maybe just don't sit her near the wastepaper, just to be safe." He laughed and continued walking.
I forgot about that exchange until the parent-teacher night the next semester, when my mother came home and asked me what I had told my sister's science teacher. Apparently I played the defensive older brother act a little too well, as he spent the first three weeks of that semester with my sister under close scrutiny, and he even asked my mom about the validity of my claims.
I found out this past holiday that my sister had inadvertently helped the joke along that first week that she was in science! They had been lighting Bunsen burners, and Mr. D had asked if anyone knew how to use matches. Given that we grew up with wood heat and camping, my sister's hand naturally shot up.
4. Christmas in July
One summer when my cousin was staying with us, he and I had a small “prank war.” After pranking each other got boring, we decided to put our talents together and try to prank everyone else. We put small piles of flour on each blade of the ceiling fan in the living room, just enough to not be seen from the ground. A few weeks went by and nothing happened, we largely forgot about it.
But then, the day finally came. My mom had company over. I was in the kitchen, and I heard all kinds of shouting and screaming coming from the living room. My cousin ran up to me grinning and simply said, “It’s happening.” The living room looked like it had just snowed inside. Everything was coated in a fine dusting of flour. My mother was screaming, her guests were staring in confusion, and the dogs were running around in circles. It was so amazing—until we had to clean it all up.
5. Uncle Narwhal Wants YOU!
I set up a fake email address for the "Narwhal Appreciation Society" and sent a co-worker an email from the address saying, "We at the Narwhal Appreciation Society have been informed that you, too, have an affinity for this majestic creature and we wanted to see if you would like to join our society." He responded with, "Thanks for the email—not sure who referred me, but I don't have any interest in joining your society. Good luck!" Don't worry—I was just getting started.
A couple of weeks later, I emailed him again and listed off the membership dues for the society, and upcoming events. He responded with, "Once again, please note that I am not interested. Please take me off your distribution list." A few weeks later, I emailed him a note that his membership dues were in arrears, commenting that the faithful Narwhal would most assuredly pay its bills if it used currency.
I emailed him roughly two to three times per year for three to four years. For the first year, when we still worked together, I'd see him open the email, shake his head and say aloud, "Not these guys again!" However, he never attempted to block the email address. He responded to some (becoming increasingly agitated) and ignored others. In one response, he attached pictures of dead narwhals that had been killed by Inuit hunters and said, "This is what I think of your stupid Narwhal. I hate them. I wish them all dead!"
I eventually stopped and never mentioned to him that it had been me. Years later, a few ex-coworkers were out for pints and one guy said to me, "Whatever happened with that Narwhal stuff you were doing?" My pranked coworker’s eyes bugged out of his head, then he slammed down his pint and screamed, "THAT WAS YOU?!"
6. Spider-Dan
When Dan was young he decided to prank his mom when she got home from work. After some contemplation, Dan chose to climb up a tree in the front yard and jump down near his mom when she arrived home. So she got home, parked the car, and walked up the front sidewalk. As soon as she was near Dan's tree, he jumped down right in front of her.
She screamed and whacked him pretty hard with her purse before realizing who it was! She is still scared of walking under that tree.
7. Polite Pranksters
For our high school senior prank at my boarding school, we snuck out in the middle of the night and stole the athletic director's prized golf cart. We pushed it up a hill to the school. One of our friends was able to get keys from a custodian and let us in a back door. We got the golf cart into the building, and then into a science classroom, and lifted it up onto the big lab tables. We decorated it with nonsense, left it there, and locked everything up.
In the morning, everyone not in on it was completely confused about how the heck we had pulled it off. We didn't even damage anything! Even the chain that we had had to cut to get the golf cart free was replaced, with a note, on our athletic director's doorstep. The custodial staff wasn't even mad at having to take the cart out because it was so ridiculous.
I can only imagine the double-take that the science teacher must have done when he entered his classroom that day!
8. Wake-Up Call
When I was 13, I told my mom that my alarm had stopped working and asked her to wake me up in the morning. I stayed up until she went to bed and then snuck downstairs to the bathroom to retrieve a jar of Vaseline. I brought it back upstairs, put some Vaseline on my doorknob, and then went to sleep. The next morning, my mom woke me up like she promised—by screaming “WHAT THE...WHO DOES SOMETHING LIKE THAT!?”
9. Ghost Technology
In 1998, I was in fourth grade and got my hands on a universal remote watch. At the time, it was very high-tech and almost nobody had even heard of such a thing. I would sneakily turn the classroom TV on every five minutes. The teacher (who I despised) was convinced that ghosts were in the room. She unplugged it after the third or fourth time and refused to use it thereafter. I never told her it was me.
10. Friendly Fire
I saw a friend walking ahead of me, so did the old tap-on-the-shoulder-but-run-past-on-the-other-side maneuver. However, while concentrating on him, I didn't see the park bench, ran into it at full speed, and collapsed behind it in pain. Through the gaps in the seat, I could see my friend looking left and right, almost freaking out, wondering who had tapped him on the shoulder.
The tears from the pain in my leg and my amusement made me give myself away in about 20 seconds.
11. What’s He Hiding?
During the mid-90s, I once cleared out a co-worker's cubicle while he was on vacation and sealed it off with yellow crime scene tape. When he came back, I called him into our manager’s office and told him a fairly elaborate, extremely believable story about how the FBI had raided the office, and how everything from his cubicle had been taken into evidence, because he was apparently a person of interest.
It freaked him out so badly that we had to come clean with him almost immediately!
12. Backfire!
When my friend James was a little kid, he screamed one night about a monster under his bed. His Mom and Dad came running in. They checked under the bed, in the closet, and behind the door. Of course, there was nothing there. The next night, James decided to prank his parents and screamed again. His parents rushed in and checked again. Again, nothing there.
James repeated screaming night after night until one night, he couldn't help himself. He finally admitted to his parents that he was playing a prank, and that there really wasn’t any monster. Rather than let it go, his parents came up with a devious plan to teach him a lesson he'd never forget. They told him that they would always come running to check because they hadn't believed his poor older brother about the monster in his room.
They left the room pretending to be crying and upset, leaving James terrified and confused in his bed. James was an only child and had never heard about an older brother. He did not sleep well that night.
13. Directing Misdirection
One day, my class was cooking at school. Different parts of the menu were to be prepared by different people. The girl tasked with the fruit salad was halving grapes when I passed her, so I made a comment about how wasn't peeling them as well. She looked at me, shocked, and asked, "Were we supposed to do that?" I answered, "Of course, didn't you listen? Ask the teacher!"
A long time later, I had already forgotten the matter, not expecting to be taken seriously—until I heard our teacher yell, "Anita, what are you doing?!?" Poor girl was almost done peeling a pound of grapes!
14. Tinfoil Tomfoolery
My friends and I rearranged my college roommate’s room and covered absolutely everything in tinfoil while he was away. He is overly dramatic and thus, a great victim. He had just returned from a trip and rolled into his room with his suitcase. We were watching TV when he went to his room and I heard, “Ohhhh my God.”
He huffed back out and said the most "Dad" comment ever: “Why would you do this? If this isn’t cleaned up by the time I get back from work...” He went to work. We tinfoiled his suitcase.
15. It’s Backward Day!
My buddy and I were roommates in college. We were both out of town for a holiday, and when we came back, our room had been completely swapped. His bedsheets had been moved to my bed, and mine were on his. Our desks were perfectly swapped with every drawer exactly as it was, mirror image. The closets were also switched perfectly.
We decided to just switch sides rather than put everything back. Still don’t know who did it!
16. Packing Peanut Pandemonium
One of my friends once got a small item shipped to him in a giant box. The box was probably 2 feet by 2 feet by 3 feet, and about three-quarters of it was packing peanuts. Instead of just throwing them all out, we decided to play a prank. We put them in our friend's jacket, laptop case, backpack, drawers, and in his pillowcase.
The best part was that they were all hidden; the entire room looked like nobody had touched it, except for the single packing peanut we had left on his keyboard. He walked in and thought nothing of it...until he opened a drawer and found it full of packing peanuts! "Haha, that's a pretty dumb prank," he said. Then he went to grab his jacket—and packing peanuts flowed out of his closet. "Okay, really?"
After a bit of frustration, he rushed off to class—unaware that his backpack and water bottle were full of packing peanuts. Then the realization started to hit. He got rid of most them within a day or two, because he searched thoroughly through his stuff to find them all. It still took him almost two months before he stopped finding more though.
At that point, we decided to restock his stuff with the rest of the peanuts we had left over. He acted angry, but I knew he thought it was funny as heck!
Public Domain Pictures
17. That’s Out Of Order!
In sixth grade on April Fools Day, my friend and I pulled the best prank ever. We went into the bathroom, opened the janitor’s closet, and grabbed the "caution" and "out of order" signs. We threw water on the floor to make it seem like something had broken, locked all the stalls, and then put the "out of order" sign up.
This bathroom was the only bathroom on the sixth and seventh-grade side of the school, and my school was BIG. It meant that everyone had to walk to the other side of the school and wait in the lines at that bathroom instead. It caused complete chaos and happiness for the kids, because it was a five-minute walk there, a few minutes waiting in line and doing their business, and five minutes back.
Everyone likes 15 minutes out of class! No teacher ever caught us, but we were legends among some of the kids.
18. Feigning Fecal Matter
When I was in the army, I decided to play a prank on my Lieutenant. When it was my turn to clean the toilets, I prepared some chocolate pudding. I scrubbed the toilet seats exceptionally clean, and then left a thin but clearly visible brown line of the pudding on one of the seats. During inspection, the Lieutenant saw it and yelled for the person responsible for the bathroom that day. I raised my hand and followed him into the stall with the "dirty" seat.
“What's this?” he said. I dipped my finger in the pudding, smelled it, and then slowly licked my finger. I replied, "It's poop, but I don't know who's." The Lieutenant was a hilarious guy, and after a few intense seconds, he cracked up and started laughing, then simply told me to clean it in case his commanding officer dropped by.
19. Blindsided
A friend of mine (Dan) was talking to his co-worker (John) about one of his "favorite" desserts. This dessert was a combination of chocolate pudding, corn, peanut butter, and mandarin oranges. This was not a real dessert; Dan just threw together ingredients that he thought would be disgusting. John was skeptical, so Dan promised to bring him some the next day.
Dan went home, and he and his wife concocted a mixture of those ingredients and a few more, and packed it up for John to have the next day. When Dan gave it to John he made a face, smelled it, and VERY hesitantly took a bite. He chewed and swallowed while Dan tried to hold in his laughter. Then John exclaimed, "Wow, this is good!" and proceeded to eat the entire container.
Dan did not see that coming.
20. Lost Keys
A long, long time ago, before the age of Windows, I wrote a TSR app that captured the keyboard input before it made it to the system. Basically, it kept track of all letters, numbers, and symbols typed. Then it would pick a random time somewhere between one day to one week. When that time expired, it would randomly pick a key from the list, capture its input, and not let it through.
The effect was that the key, although typed, would not show up in the system or on the screen. My app would then start the protocol again, removing an additional key each time. Over time, fewer and fewer keys became available. I installed it on my coworker’s machine and let it run. The first key to disappear was something like the “#” key.
He noticed it but ignored it. Then, a character like “Q” disappeared, one that he used, but not too often. The third character was one in his name. By then, weeks later, I was really enjoying it. Then something like the “e” disappeared and he lost it. He was ready to nuke his whole system, so I stopped him and let him know what it was.
I had installed a back door, so it was easy to restore the keyboard and remove the app. He took it well...and then wanted to install it on our boss’s computer.
21. Two-Bite Cat Poops
One day, when I was around 10, my Mom had just made brownies; the soft chewy kind. I was one of those kids who constantly played with my food so, naturally, I was squishing up the brownies into bite-sized balls. I noticed that these brownie balls looked strikingly like cat poop. So, I fashioned them into even more convincing cat poops and placed them in my sister’s room to gross her out.
She found them shortly after and started to freak out. I casually walked in and asked, "Whoa, what's going on?" and then proceeded to pick one up, eat it in front of her, and comment on the nutty taste. I have never seen her more horrified in my life, but I felt like a true mastermind that day.
22. Hindsight is 20/20
I once told my sister that orange soda tastes better the more you shake it before opening it. It was great until my mom made me clean up the inevitable orange sticky mess that resulted.
23. Unforeseen Casualty
We filled overhead cabinets with Styrofoam peanuts at my workplace several times during a spate of pranks. A fellow manager, who tolerated but wasn't actively engaged in our prank war, had his cabinets filled accidentally. He came in, opened up the cabinet door, and they poured out. To make it even better, he was standing there holding a cup of coffee with no lid, so the cup also got filled up with the rain of packing peanuts.
With a deadpan face, he made direct eye contact with me, lifted his cup up, and blew the peanuts out of it before taking a sip. I about died laughing.
24. Juicy Joke
Remember the Juicyfruit gum sticks? The ones with the wrappers? Well, I decided to carefully open the gum and save the wrapper. Then, I carved a piece of soap to look like the gum, re-wrapped it, and give it to my sister. The kicker was that after she first put the gum in her mouth and discovered it was soap, I laughed and then offered her a "real" stick of gum as an apology.
That second stick was also soap. She fell for it.
25. Disguised Desserts
Ever had chocolate-covered Oreos? I made some at college once and brought some home for my sister. She loved them. About a month later, I was home and made another batch, and left some at home for her when I went back to college. After making them, I replaced the majority with a chocolate-covered monstrosity: Ritz crackers with tuna salad sandwiched between them, covered in chocolate.
They looked just like the Oreos. She texted me angrily the next day. The first one she'd eaten was an Oreo, but the one after that was the chocolate-tuna-cracker. She hated me. It was great.
26. Breaking the Laws of Physics
I work at a wastewater treatment plant. We employ cameras to monitor things in the field that we need eyes on at all times. One of these cameras is pointed at the bed of a tractor-trailer that is used to haul bio-solids to the landfill. The video feed is a constant stream of de-watered sludge falling into the trailer.
When one section is full, an operator has to go move the trailer so the solids don't spill out all over the place and make a mess. One year for April Fools, I used the old ctrl+alt+up arrow to turn the camera feed upside down about 10 minutes before my shift was over. The person taking over for me was much older and much less tech-savvy.
When he noticed the sludge falling UP instead of down, he lost his mind! The next day I got scolded by my boss because my co-worker had had a panic attack and then contacted the after-hours emergency tech-support line to fix the cameras.
27. Mercy Prank
I was sitting in the cafeteria in college, eating and studying, when a buddy of mine came and sat down. We made some small talk, and then he went to get food. He came back with nothing, explaining that he had forgotten his wallet at home. I offered him some money, but he wouldn't take it. I offered to share my food, and he declined, but jokingly touched the edge of the crust of one of the small slices. I told him he might as well eat it now because I couldn't.
I went on to explain that I couldn't eat food that I knew someone else had touched because I had a phobia about it. Fast forward over ten years later. He was not only married, but I also helped name his second daughter. She's about three now. He bought a house built in the 1850s, and we've practically rebuilt every aspect of it from the basement to the roof together.
Recently, I decided that I finally had to come clean about it, after over a decade of insisting no one could touch anything that I was going to eat. He was pretty moved when I explained that it was all because I didn't like the thought of him going hungry due to his pride. Of course, he did spend a couple of weeks touching just about everything I ate there after that.
28. Copy Cat Revenge
This was in about fifth grade. I was sitting by the door and saw that a kid sitting by the window was copying all my movements. I made sure he actually was copying me by making some weird movements, and sure enough, he was. That's when I got a terrible, amazing idea. I noticed that behind his head, close to his shoulder, was an open window.
I swung my head as hard and violently as I could to the side; of course he did the same, also with a lot of speed—except he slammed his head into the window super hard, while I hit nothing but air. He whimpered and went home early because he had a headache. I felt pretty bad about it, but now every time I remember, it puts a grin on my face. Sorry, Tom.
29. Just Say Starbucks
I work closing shifts at a particularly well-known coffee chain. At my location, it can get extremely slow in the evenings, so once we finish all the cleaning, it's difficult to find something to do. Our solution to this little predicament was to pull pranks on the opening crew and other coworkers; it has now evolved into a full-store prank war.
Highlights include: rigging the door with a mop head on a string that flies towards you when you open the door; carving a human silhouette out of a cardboard box and leaving it in frightening places like the bathroom or the walk-in fridge; taping pictures of someone's face to the drive-through camera so it's the first thing you see when you turn on the screen; replacing sharpies with crayons; putting leaves in people's pockets and bags during the fall; and gift wrapping people's stuff during December.
It may have gotten out of hand.
30. Clandestine Comrade
Close to the end of my senior year in high school, a buddy of mine took a clock off the wall to see if our teacher would notice. She didn't. This was the final class before lunch, so we decided to see if we could snag most of the clocks in our small school without being noticed. For the classes that were in session, each of my friends knew someone in the class, and one of our group was an office aide.
The aide would go in and get a student in the class to distract the teacher as we made off with the clock. Meanwhile, the rest of us raided the empty rooms. It took us all of 10 minutes to get them all. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, someone had stolen a janitor's key and shut down the bell system! The result was our lunch period becoming exceptionally long.
As teachers felt things were off, they looked to the walls—and found they had no clocks! Most of them had cell phones and PCs, but they didn't help. Chaos and confusion ensued. The police were called about the keys, and my group got blamed for it. None of us did it, so we held our ground and asked the school to check the security tapes. We were fine being punished for the clocks, but we didn't have anything to do with the bells.
Once the principal knew we didn't mess with the bells, he saw the humor of the situation. Our punishment was to clean the clocks and return them—which kept us out of class! Success.
31. Temporary Blindness
When I was in middle school, we had a teacher who we didn't like. So one day, when we were supposed to have class with her, we all went to an empty classroom with all of our belongings instead. Someone hid in the hallway to check on her. She went into the classroom, saw it was empty, and then went to the principal on the second floor.
We all ran back to the classroom and scrambled into our places. She walked in with the principal, explaining that the class was empty—and then froze when she saw us all in our seats. They asked where we had been, and we all said we were in the room the entire time and that she had been there a few minutes ago, looked around and left.
After that, she would always ask us if it was a prank, but we all insisted that everyone was in the classroom the whole time. By the end of the year, she was convinced that the room wasn't empty, but that for some reason, she had not seen us.
32. Phantom Pooch
My sister and I once unwound a wire coat hanger and attached it to a leash and collar so that it looked like we were walking an invisible dog. It actually looked pretty realistic, because the wire bobbed up and down when we walked. We had a crowd of neighborhood kids convinced that it was real, and we even named him Clifford. We were celebrities.
33. Fake-Estate Listings
My high school was a closed campus, and to make sure people didn’t leave, they had a woman in a golf cart stationed at the school’s entrance. Taking inspiration from a rival school, whose senior class had had the school property put on real estate listings as an end-of-year-prank, I put an ad in the local paper claiming that the golf cart was for sale.
I included the school’s main office number for the contact information, and they were inundated with calls and offers. They never found out who did it.
34. One Prank To Rule Them All
My friend and I used to send each other texts of long paragraphs that we copied and pasted from random internet sites, just to be annoying. It ultimately escalated to sending movie scripts over text, and eventually, the messages were so long, they would crash the application and we couldn’t even open messages anymore.
He did it once to my computer in the middle of a lecture, erasing my class notes in the process. So as revenge, I printed out the entire script to all three Lord of the Rings movies, snuck into his dorm room, and covered everything in the pages, including the door, while he was taking a final exam. Later that day, I got a text that just said, “you won.”
35. IKEA Squatters
A friend and I got banned from our local IKEA store in Malmö, Sweden, because of a prank—but it was so worth it. We got up early one Sunday in the middle of summer and ensured that we were some of the first visitors in the store. We were wearing shorts and t-shirts, but we had brought a bag of bathrobes and slippers. We then proceeded to the fake apartments in the showroom area, put on the robes and slippers, and sat down in one of the kitchens.
When other visitors arrived, we acted tired and hungover, but politely invited the other people in to see how we lived. "Oh, are you guys here already? Sorry, I'm not dressed yet, but do please come in. This is how we live." After about 20 minutes, the dreaded people in yellow shirts came and kicked us out. We weren't allowed back ever again and they demanded ID.
I replied that I had left my wallet in my other robe. They weren't amused.
36. Bloody Mary Exists
When I was about five or so, my brother, our babysitter at the time and I pranked this little neighbor-girl who was very mean and cruel. We invited her over, and the babysitter told the girl I was in trouble for something and in my mom's room. I laid in her bed fake-crying so the girl could see me and was sold on it. They took the girl to the living room and I snuck into the bathroom, put red food dye on my hands and hid underneath the bathroom cupboard, below the sink.
Then, they brought the girl in and dared her to say “Bloody Mary” three times into the mirror. On the third one, I grabbed the girl’s legs, leaving red handprints on her. She screamed and ran out of the room, crying. I washed my hands and went back to my Mom's room acting entirely oblivious to what had happened.
37. The Last Straw
Jay and I have been friends for over a decade. I once made a joke about filling his car with coffee straws; he said he didn’t believe that I would ever do it. So, on April 1st, I pulled up beside his car and dumped 20,000 coffee straws inside. There were two feet of straws across the driver’s and passenger’s seats.
I walked out to get lunch, and I saw Jay walk up to his car with some of his other friends. He opened the driver’s side door and froze as black coffee straws trickled out in a steady stream. He cursed my name at the top of his lungs and I folded over laughing. A few weeks later, while I was away, he filled my car with prophylactics as payback.
38. Steve From Curves
When I was a junior in high school back in 2009, I was at a mall with a friend and I saw one of my senior classmates in the food court. I sent him a text telling him that I liked his white and black South O'Brien Wolverine shirt. He clearly hadn't saved my number from the previous texts I’d sent him, because he replied with, "Who's this?"
I decided to joke around. I wrote, "How can you not remember me after that beautiful night we shared!?" He had no idea what I was talking about and asked for my name. I told him, "Steve, from the gym!" He asked, "What gym?" I told him, "Curves." Then he stopped responding to me. For the next three months, I'd leave sticky notes in his locker, talking about the upcoming Friday football games, or asking him to homecoming.
I'd have friends leave notes in his gym locker, and on his desk in certain classes. Teachers even got involved. When someone finally spilled the beans, it was all people at the school could talk about due to the amount of people involved and the duration of the prank. The individual whom I pranked laughed about it when he found out, and he called me "Steve" until he graduated.
39. Long-Term Aspirations
During my senior year, my buddy and I snuck out one night, headed for the high school. The posted speed limit on school grounds was 10 km/h. We wiggled the signpost out of the ground, went to my friend’s barn, removed the 10 km/h sign from the post, and replaced it with a 50 km/h sign he had stolen previously. We went back to the school, put the post back in the ground, and hightailed it out of there. No one ever noticed.
About 10 years later, the 50 km/h sign was pretty faded, so it was replaced—with a brand new 50 km/h sign! 24 years after the stunt, the speed limit is still 50 km/h.
40. A Fishy Situation
Years ago, I shared an office suite with another teacher at a high school. For April Fool’s, I removed all the contents and dividers from her largest desk drawer, lined it with a cut plastic tarp, poured about 10 liters of water in there, and filled it up with aquarium rocks, live minnows and goldfish, those little fish castles, and fake plastic plants.
When she got to work that morning, I asked her for a folder she kept in that bottom drawer, and she proceeded to open the drawer and stick her hand into a full-fledged aquarium!
41. A Well-Travelled Snake
About 20 years ago, my mom bought me a wooden snake toy. It’s made of pieces of wood with spaces in between them secured to a ribbon in the middle, so that when you shake it, it rattles pretty convincingly. Well, one day, after having this thing for at least two years, my dad found it and a put it under my mom’s pillow before she went to bed one night.
She found it and freaked out, as it rattled as soon as she touched it. We got our laughs for a day and then forgot about it—we had no idea what we had just begun. Fast forward about three or four months. My dad was working away from home most of the week and came home every other weekend. One day, mom put the snake in his luggage, and he found it when he opened his stuff at the hotel.
He called us, swearing, and we laughed. Again, we forgot about the snake, until suddenly my brother started cussing one day, months later. BOOM! SNAKE UNDER THE BLANKET. Fast-forward another three or four months...BOOM! SNAKE IN MY SOCCER DUFFLE BAG! This has been going on for 20 years. It started in a small town in Pennsylvania, and now this wooden snake has been to California, Colorado, Texas, New York, Florida, Japan, and Syria.
I no longer live within easy traveling distance of my family, but I have current possession of the snake. It hungers, and is waiting for its next chance to strike.
42. Emergency Use Only
When my father was young, he attended a Catholic school. Suffice it to say, he really didn’t like it. There was one teacher who was known to be extra strict, but she always had a routine, and could therefore be avoided. She would walk from the staff room, up the main stairs, and back to her classroom at the same time every day after lunch.
My father and his friend decided to play a prank on her. They tied a fire hose to a chair at the top of the stairs, and as soon as they saw her, they turned it on and ran. It soaked her and flooded the entire wing of the school. When the class was asked later about what had happened, nobody would say anything, so my dad and his buddy were never punished!
43. I Can't, It's a Geo!
I was a lifeguard at a summer camp, and the cutest counselor there drove a little Geo Metro. So one night, with some help, we swam in the floating dock and pushed the car onto it. I set the emergency brake so that it wouldn’t roll off of the small platform, and then swam it back out into the lake and attached it to the buoys.
Our dining hall sat on a hill with a beautiful view of the lake and swimming area. The typical morning mist covering the lake made it take a minute for the car to be spotted. As soon as it was, laughter and chaos erupted. I dated that girl the next summer.
44. Meta-Prank
In 2008, I decommissioned our old server at work, and that server has been sitting on a shelf in the storeroom ever since. Last week, I decided to finally throw it out, but I figured I had better remove the hard drives first. Apparently, my past-self had thought that it would be funny to glue a large plastic redback spider on the inside of the case so that when I opened the lid, I scared the heck out of myself and threw the case lid across the store. It took me 12 years just to prank myself.
45. Grandma’s Glass
My dad and I used to prank my grandmother every time she'd come to visit. She would use the same glass for water the entire week of the visit, every time. So, before she arrived one time, we drilled a tiny hole near the lip of the glass. It was just big enough for water to drip through, but small enough that you would never see it unless you were looking for it.
The best part was that it wouldn't drip every time she took a sip; she would have to have the glass at just the right angle for it to work. After a week of presumably dribbling water on herself, she finally lost it, thinking that she'd just randomly lost the ability to drink from a glass without spilling in on herself. That’s when we told her. High comedy.
46. Desktop Facade
I once took a screenshot of my buddy’s computer desktop, with all of his regular icons and shortcuts in place. I then set the screenshot as the background and removed all of the icons, so that if he clicked on one, nothing would happen. He panicked and raged at the computer—until he stumbled into photos and realized that the background was a screenshot. Then he raged at me.
47. Friends In High Places
My aunt and her husband Frank live in Florida. Uncle Frank is a real prankster, but this is his best. He had a young nephew, about 10 years old, who had started his own business picking up the dog poop from people's yards. He charged a quarter a poop. His little business was going pretty well, and Uncle Frank told his next-door neighbor, a Chihuahua owner, to call the kid up for service.
Uncle Frank also had a buddy who was a zookeeper. The nephew came to do his duty for Uncle Frank’s neighbor, walked out into the yard of the Chihuahua owner expecting to make an easy quarter—and came face to face with a massive, dried out elephant turd. He paused just a moment before yelling, "UNCLE FRANK!!!"
48. Initiate Interference
I worked with a guy who listened to Christian radio stations at full volume, all day, every day. There is nothing fun about listening to sermons at 100 decibels that frequently. One day, I'd finally had enough—so I came up with the perfect plan. I bought a satellite radio receiver that would rebroadcast over a standard radio frequency. When he turned on his radio, I would tune in a death metal station and rebroadcast right over the top of whatever sermon he was listening to.
This went on for several days, and every day, he thought he had figured out the problem, but then next day, it happened again. He never found out what was wrong with his radio and ended up listening to a portable device with earbuds. Everyone who knew what I had done thanked me.
49. When Pranks Are Too Effective
After seeing the movie Poltergeist as a kid, I thought it would be funny to put all the chairs up on the table and open all the cabinets in the middle of the night. I thought it would be harmless, and that my parents would get a laugh out of it. Nope. They believed, one thousand percent, that we had a ghost (or a poltergeist) in the house.
It didn't even matter that I told them the truth; they still chose to believe it had been a ghost. I'm not sure why, but I think they really wanted the house to be haunted or something.
50. Bewitched Box
My college roommate ate cereal really slowly, and would typically take a while to get through an entire box. Every time he ate a bowl, I started to refill the box to try to always keep it halfway full. This went on for months, and I probably poured 10 entire boxes into the original one during that time. Finally, one night, he came home drunk and went to get a bowl of cereal.
I heard him exclaim in shocked admiration, "HOW MUCH IS IN YOU?!" I ran out of my room only to see him pouring the entire contents onto the table and staring, completely dumbfounded, at the amount that was leftover after eating from it for the entire semester. He was speechlessly gesturing to the table, looking up at me in confusion.
I played it off so darn cool, then never did it again. It's been like six years, and I still haven't told him it was me. One of his favorite college stories is about the "magical" box of cereal that contained an infinite amount...until he broke it one day by dumping it out.
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