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April 1st, A Day For Practical Jokes

April 1st is a day for practical jokes in many countries around the world. In honor of this, I have decided to list a few of the pranks I carried out at work.

One day I super glued a quarter to the floor in front of the coffee machine in the lunch room. My buddies and I then sat down at a table and watched. People would notice it and looked around to see if anyone was watching them. They would then try to pick it up. One guy even tried to kick it with his heel. They knew they had been had when they would hear us all laughing. This was good for a full day of laughs for only a quarter.

Another time I caught a bull frog on my way home. The following day I brought it to work in an old lunch box. At dinner time the plant nurse was fixing her meal in the lunch room. Right next to her was a microwave oven. I took the lunch box to the counter and purchased a large buttered roll from a vending machine. I then opened the roll and slapped the frog inside.

The frog wasn’t very pleased about this and was kicking like mad. I turned to the nurse and asked if she knew how to operate the microwave and she said she did. I said great and pulled out the roll with the frog in it and asked her what you did with the legs. I don’t think she ate dinner that night.

Speaking of legs, another prank we pulled involved a false pair of legs that I built, complete with pants and shoes. We would put this sticking out from under a pallet and watch people’s expression as they came around the corner and saw them. The results were hilarious. This pair of legs would disappear and reappear periodically.

I don’t know who was doing this but I suspect multiple people. One of the next times “the legs” appeared was during a health department inspection. They were stashed behind a shelving unit in my shop when the health inspector and the plant manager spotted them. The manager yelled at the legs, kicked them and finally grabbed them and pulled them out. We were called to the office the next day and we all denied any knowledge of the legs.

The legs were confiscated but they were easy to duplicate and I made another pair that week. We placed them in various places until one day, the bottom of a flour silo fell open. It dumped the entire contents on the floor, something like 50,000 pounds of flour. A buddy of mine took the legs and buried them deep in the pile of flour.

Several days later while they were shoveling up the mess the legs popped out. The person doing the shoveling took one look, walked out the door and went home without even punching out.

I had the ability to lock the men’s room door that had a barrel inside bolt from the outside using a bit of string. People would smoke in the men’s room at the time. A man was leaning on the window sill enjoying a cigarette when I locked the door. We then ran upstairs and got a piece of conduit to tap on the window above his head.

This is where the story went south. My buddy, Jerry, hit the glass too hard punching two small holes in it. The smoker hit the ground and crawled over to the door only to find it locked. Quite some time later he told us he was fooling around with a married woman and he thought her husband had locked the door and was shooting at him.

When I was fabricating my tool cart, I got a call that a packaging machine was malfunctioning. My buddy, Joe, picked up his tool pouch, got into my cart and I locked the doors. I wheeled it over to the broken down machine and listened to the operator explain the problem. At that point I unlocked my tool cart and let Joe out. He then repaired the problem. When he was done, he climbed back into my cart and I closed and locked the door. Then I proceeded to wheel him back into the shop.

I think the best prank I perpetrated though was on my last day working there. Over the 10+ years working there I managed to figure out how to get into every room and office in the place including all the front offices, locked or not. I also knew the security guard’s routine and where he would be at any given moment. This allowed me to avoid the guard.

They just installed this new phone system and I managed to get ahold of an operating manual. This system had the capability of forwarding calls from one phone to another by punching in a three digit code.

I programmed all the phones in the plant to forward every call to the plant manager’s office. I never heard anything about this but I can imagine the havoc this caused because they all had to be reprogrammed. I can’t remember all the practical jokes I pulled while I was there, this is just a few of them.

As they say, idle hands are the Devil’s playground. I had too much time on my hands.

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