I've helped with one workplace prank, which involved re-decorating someone's office with Barney party decorations. I carefully placed napkins with Barney's face on them inside CD cases. Every couple of months, someone would sneak back into the person's office, and put more Barney napkins in more CD cases. It went on for over two years.

This sort of thing happens every time someone in my office takes a vacation. If it's pulled off well, people end up finding tic-tacs in odd places for months.

At the same office as the "you're car's gone" prank, the upper management thought it would be funny to tell a long-time employee she was fired, complete with solemn interview and exit paperwork. The sobbing hysterics let them know they'd gone too far

Those kind of pranks are mean mean mean. I like pranks, but not mean ones.

Back when I had a real on-site manager, we developed a habit of pranking the cubicle of an absent team member. But what else are you going to do when the decorations in the cubicle area include a rubber skeleton in a rope hammock and the world's oldest bowl of popcorn but move them into appropriate configurations when someone's gone for a week?

At the same office as the "you're car's gone" prank, the upper management thought it would be funny to tell a long-time employee she was fired, complete with solemn interview and exit paperwork.

Yeah, I've heard of that shit -- another variation is screaming "(your latest major project) is totally unacceptable! You need to redo it all by Monday morning!"

NSM with the "joke".

At the same office as the "you're car's gone" prank, the upper management thought it would be funny to tell a long-time employee she was fired, complete with solemn interview and exit paperwork.

Had they just rented The Office?

Had they just rented The Office?

This was back in the mid-80s.

plus, they believed in cutting pay if you didn't meet production goals, and a big pay increase was a dime. Still, it was a press clipping agency and I got to wallow in as much information as I could ever want. I haven't been so well-informed since.

Had they just rented The Office?

I was just about to say....

(I was going to say something like "Hey, it was funny when David Brent did it," except it wasn't, really. I mean, it was, but not because it was a funny thing for him to do. Which is true of most of the show.)

(and yes, my hair does look basically like that right now):

Purrrrrrrrrrr

I've pranked many people over the years. Emmett comes by his mischief naturally. But I didn't go for cruel pranks that made anybody anxious. Okay, except for that one time I sent my college roommate a letter from the Academic Committee accusing him of plagiarism. But I made sure I was with him when he got the letter and made sure the whole thing didn't last more than 15 minutes. His girlfriend was watching from her dorm room across the street and laughed hysterically when she saw us come out of the P.O. and my roommate stopped dead in his tracks, then race off to confront his professor. Mostly I opted for slightly surreal pranking in the Cacophony Society mode. Or occasionally enjoyed duping Emmett's godmother as she's very smart, but very credulous and easy to play.

I'm sorry man, the look on her face when we lured her into a card game with no rules where everybody figured out it was a prank within seconds except her and had her playing along for half an hour was priceless. She'd oh-so-tentatively play a card, and three of us would slam down our cards and yell "CREEP!" and she'd look utterly perplexed.