quote:

Originally posted by DaBigBR:
A very large percentage of responses are cops...I am not surprised...

Do you want to know some of the jokes from the Marine Corps side of the house?

quote:

Originally posted by CPD SIG:

quote:

Originally posted by DaBigBR:
A very large percentage of responses are cops...I am not surprised...

Do you want to know some of the jokes from the Marine Corps side of the house?

I never pass up new material.

When I was in the academy we had a little prank war start between a couple rooms. Before it got out of hand, our class president, who had played and eventually managed minor league baseball, stepped in and put a stop to it. He had a story that started with something pretty innocent and ended with somebody pissing in somebody's uniform bag right before it went on the bus.

Which sorta reminds me, before inspections when everybody was at breakfast, somebody in our class would sneak into random rooms, crap in the toilet, and (hopefully) take their used TP with them. You really needed to recheck before inspection. Several people fell victim to the phantom crapper.

I may or may not know someone who threw a lit pack of Black Cats into the central pit of a theater-in-the-round in Beverly Massachusetts at 0200 a.m., when the welders were trying to figure how to make a spiral staircase rise out of the center of the stage for a production that was due to open in three days.

Running for my life was an understatement.

As a lot of folks here know, I was a career Army person, with 16 years non-commissioned and almost another sixteen years commissioned service.

The only real 'prank' I was actually involved with in all that time took place in my second year, before I transferred into INT. Modern main battle tanks don't actually touch the ground, that is to say, no metal part of the track touches the hard-standing inside the storage and maintenance buildings. This is because modern tracks have rubber pads to serve a number of requirements, like being kind to driving on public roads, where our tanks do a lot of that kind of thing, transiting under their own power from barracks to range and so on. They are also a lot quieter than all-steel tracks, as used by the russians, for instance, who don't care either about noise or chewing up public roads. The other by-product of simply being there is that they effectively insulate the tank from the ground, electrically-speaking. So when working in them,a techie wears an earthing strop to ground himself when cranking his 'megger', an old-style mini-generator that induces electrical liveliness into a circuit of one kind or another, enabling it to be tested and fixed - hopefully. After a couple of hours cranking and fixing under the 'hood' of a Chieftain MBT, you can build up a considerable amount of personal static electricity. However much that might be, you'd never know, as you are earthed via your ground strop. That is to say, IF it is actually connected to to ground....
Cpl Smith was not a popular man, wont to dishing out crappy fix-it rosters to folks who had annoyed him. We usually all got on with the serious business of keeping the Queen's favourite tanks in good order, but instead of being rewarding, he seemed determined to make it a real chore.

So one day, after he had been checking out the inner workings of the squadron commander's own tank, from a position buried deep in the bowels of the turret, we disconnected his earthing strop...

He must have looked at his watch and decided to take a break, and advising his co-worker [two at a time in a tank], he eased himself out of the turret onto the rear deck, from which it was his pleasure to descend via a near-balletic leap to the floor of the shed. We watched as he performed this expected action, which was, on this occasion, enhanced quite a bit by what can only be described as a human 'son et lumiére'. A couple of sparks, easily a a foot and a half long and powerful enough to raise every hair on his head vertically, issued with a loud CRACK from the soles of his boots while he was in the air, 'twixt engine deck and floor, and he collapsed into an almost pretzel-like and twitching heap.

We almost collectively pee'd ourselves watching this, until it got time to get serious and rush, albeit slowly, to help him up. Remotely, of course, he was still as lively as one of Volta's famous frogs, and could well have lit up a small bulb if it had been stuck in his mouth...all our help was therefore delivered remotely, using insulated items like the shed furnace coke shovel and trolley-jack handles until he was deemed to be as electrically inert as the rest of the human race, and less like Robbie the Robot - star of 'The Forbidden Planet' for those who remember it.

Of course, nobody could be blamed for the detachment of an earthing clip - a large, if feeble crocodile clip device that could easily slip off if not secured by the hefty nut, which in this case, had not, it seemed, been threaded on.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: tacfoley,

Tac, that is epic. Military trollery at it's absolute finest.

I had to travel for work last week. One of my good-friend coworkers asked if I needed the house looked after and mail picked up while I was gone. He lives nearby, and I appreciated the offer.

I returned to find a pair of airplane bottles beside the basement door. I figured they were a simple "welcome back" gift.

As I ground through my usual return-home routine, I headed to the front porch for a moment... and it was covered with floating red and green spots. I'd been star showered. It's a running prank among a few of us at work... evidently I was the next recipient in line.

As I went down the front stairs to shut the thing off, I found three more airplane bottles on the steps. "Okay, this is fun."

Then I got back to the porch. Every chair on the porch had a bottle. My potted plants had bottles. "Oh, I see how this goes!" I went out to the back deck. Found two more. Texted my guys and thanked them for the gifts and for looking out for me.

Incoming text: "How many did you find?" I had a dozen or so. Next text: "There are 42. Good luck."

So far I've found 37. And three rubber duckies. And a big plastic flamingo in the uncut grass out back.

Who knows what else is floating around....

Tac’s story reminded me of something we did aboard ship. For the unknowing, all the ships phones are a closed circuit. There’s a handle and a grey box with a dial and numbers, along with a crank. You turn the phone to the number you are dialing and crank the handle. It’s a megger that generates electricity and rings the corresponding box..ie, bridge, engine room, galley, forward berthing etc….



One of the electricians ran a very thin and almost unseen wire to the chief’s chair (metal) from his staterooms ships phone. And waited…you know what happened, at some point they knew the Chief was in his stateroom working and someone rang him up…and kept on cranking the other end..

We would also wait till around 0300 and crank the phone while turning the dial to ring all the locations and then just listen quietly while it woke up the CO, XO, EO, Bridge, enginroom…etc..

I had forgotten how much fun it was to screw with people.

USAF Prank:
I was assigned to a mobile patrol outside our weapons storage area. And I always got this lazy asshole who, as soon as he hit the truck seat, went to sleep and snored loudly. I put up with it for a while but finally sought to fix him up. One night I stopped at the entry control post to tinkle, leaving sleeping beauty snoozing in the truck. Coming back to the truck, I saw my buddy who was a K9 handler with a very bitey doggie. I asked him to put the dog in the truck. Once the dog was inside and on the seat beside sleeping beauty, I went around to the passenger side of the truck and knocked on the window. Sleeping beauty woke up and I asked him what he was doing in the truck with the bitey doggie. Sleeping beauty turned and saw all those teeth beside him. Panic set in and he scrambled to exit the truck. Bitey doggie took this opportunity to chew up sleeping beauty in accordance with his training. After the dog got tired of biting sleeping beauty, I had to take him to the ER for treatment.
Insult to injury: Sleeping beauty received an article 15 for sleeping on duty. The K9 handler skated on the whole thing.

quote:

Originally posted by policetruck:
Yes we do, plant worker here. We have one guy who is supper jumpy and screams and throws in the air whatever he is holding. Banging metal, small firecrackers, and air horns have been working wonders. I'm pretty sure one of the other guys has it all on TikTok. I'll see if I can find it.

I used to deliver to a company that made fuses for military bombs.
An employee blew up a paper bag and popped it. Fired on the spot,
walked to the door immediately.

I grew up doing it in the military. Fairly innocent and never damaging ones in the civilian world. Now that it's just me and the wife on the payroll in a private company, pranks are encouraged again. Key is to never pull a prank that'll damage relationship, and always be ready with chocolate.

Working with me is never dull...

I took a job with a small engineering firm back in the early 80’s. It was a small, tight knit group of guys and the pranking was savage and merciless.

The best one I was party to involved two other pranksters and one prankee.

The prankee had a company car, a relatively new Ford. The car had an inertia switch mounted in the trunk that would cut power to the electric fuel pump in the event of a collision. Duplicate trunk keys were made and one was assigned to each prankster. For the next year or so, every time the prankee’s car was spotted unattended, the inertia switch would receive a solid thump to trip it and disable the car. It happened in the company parking lot, in vendor’s lots, client’s lots and even restaurant lots at lunchtime. It drove the poor SOB nearly insane trying to figure out the cause until we finally came clean.

Ahh, good times.

I only do it to people I know well.

Simple things like putting a note on their car stating sorry I hit your car, then watch them walk around looking for damage.

I also photoshopped their online profile and changed their job title to something I know they did not agreed to, then texting him a screenshot on his day off saying they promoted him anyways.

Another area ripe for pranking in law enforcement: The Hot Mike.
This phenomenon occurs when someone inadvertently activates his portable or mobile radio mike at an embarrassing moment. I weaponized the hot mike.
Examples:
In the USAF, I had a buddy who had a terrible stutter. This guy, for reasons unknown, hated our duty officer, a goofy captain. I would drive up to my buddies post with the mobile radio mike hidden in my lap. When my buddy would be leaning into the drivers window I would activate the mike.
Me:"Hey, Joe! Have you seen the Duty Officer?
Joe: "Th...Th...Th... That... Son...Son.. Of a bitch!
Broadcast to the entire base security radio system. Including the Duty Officer. I actually managed to get Joe with this stunt twice.
More mike fun:
If the dispatcher pissed me off, I would turn on my siren and then hold the radio mike in front of the speaker, then activate the mike. This would scare the crap out of everyone, especially dispatch. It got me a severe ass chewing, but it was worth it.
I also used to sit by the train track and wait for the train to blow the air horn. I would then activate the mike. I was widely suspected of doing this, but never caught.
I had a duck pond on my beat and although it took me awhile (and a lot of stale bread) I trained the ducks to gather right below my open patrol car door for a snack. I would then hold the mike down to the ducks and broadcast the quacking for all to hear. Again, I was thought responsible for this, but never caught.
A co-worker of mine once did his girlfriend in the patrol car while she leaned on the mike button. Free porn before the internet.
I only pulled these stunts during slack times. I never tied up the net if anything was going on. Sadly, the new digital radios came into use that would ID the user, thus ending my radio shows.

I think we have all played pranks, let me mention what others have - when they go too far or go beyond what was planned. Yes, I am going to be that guy just to get you to think next time and don't let revenge turn into stupidity.
My uncle worked in a rock quarry and his co-workers decided to play a prank on him. They decided they would drop some pea gravel on him as a joke. So they did, only they dropped more than they intended. And it suffocated him and he died before they could dig him out. it started out as just a joke and ended in his death. Think about what you are doing before you do it. Some pranks are funny, some are not very smart. Keep them fun.

WTF??? ^^^^^

That’s a whole new level of stupid right there. I think that the moral of the story isn’t about pranks, it’s about not being a fucking idiot.

I was an innocent witness to this one.

A good ole' boy County Commissioner took a step up and got elected to the State House of Representatives. To celebrate, he came to the men's store where I worked and bought a new Stetson Open Road. I embossed his initials on the sweat band.

Some time later, his pool hall buddies came in and bought two identical Stetson Open Road hats and had the politician's initials embossed on the sweat band. One was a quarter size larger and one a quarter size smaller than the original.

They enlisted a co-conspirator at the State House who switched the hats around every couple of days.

I like this because no one got hurt, no one was unduly embarrassed, no work lost.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Those guys really know how to play hard ball.

Never anything beyond a wisecrack to make someone laugh out loud at an inconvenient time.

Nolo Contendere for anything I may have done as junior enlisted (and 19 years old).