Dear Cody,

I work in an office and I’m frequently the butt of practical jokes from everyone else in the office. Like one time, I came in to work to find my entire work station shrink wrapped. Another time, my entire work station was upside down: the computer monitors, my pictures, pen holders… Everything! And another time my jacket went missing. A deliveryman showed up at work with a package sent COD (cash on delivery) and I come to find out it was my jacket in the package! I couldn’t get it back til I paid the UPS man! I’m not very good at practical jokes, can you give me some ideas for payback?

Sincerely,

Butt of the Joke

Dear Butt of the Joke,

Office hijinks can be fun as long as you know how to fight back. Hardly a day goes by over here at Sonic without some sort of prank. Check these out:

Android Keyboard1. The Autopro MWKB

We had a lot of fun with this seemingly inconspicuous Bluetooth keyboard. You use the tiny little USB Bluetooth dongle to pair the keyboard to whatever the dongle is plugged into. So, take the USB dongle and plug it into a coworkers computer tower when they’re at lunch or something, the software installs pretty quick. When they come back, wait until they have important web pages up and CTRL + W the heck out of them. Minimize all their windows when they’re working on something and typo up whatever they’re working on. Loads of fun.

RC Helicopters2. RC Helicopters

These things exploded in popularity a couple years ago because they’re just so darn fun to amuse yourself with. And like many other things that amuse you, they annoy the heck out of everyone else. Whip out your RC copter and “show it off” to your coworkers. While you show off your latest toy, repeatedly crash it “mistakenly” into their cubicles and knock their stuff all over the place. Just apologize to whoever sits at the cubicle you just bombarded—And then do it again.

Piezo Siren
Small package, big punch

3. The Piezo Siren

If you haven’t heard a piezo siren I highly encourage you to try it out. They ‘re absolutely ear splittingingly painful to listen to. Imagine a young child throwing a tantrum and screaming bloody murder, and amplify those shrieking screams by like 10. That’s what a piezo sounds like. They were designed to hook up to a car alarm and mount on the inside of the vehicle. That way, if a thief breaks in, this piercing siren goes off and the thief’s ears are in too much pain for him/her to sit in your vehicle for more than a couple seconds.

With that being said…

Here’s how this works: You need a small 12 V battery like an A23 battery a little bit of electrical tape and some earplugs. Tape the black wire to the negative side of the battery and leave the positive red wire not attached. Keep the siren in a big pocket of yours and make sure the red wire does not touch the positive terminal on the battery. When whoever it is you want to annoy starts talking, connect the red wire to the positive terminal and interrupt them and everyone else in the vicinity with an ear shattering siren. In case it wasn’t obvious, make sure you’ve got your ear plugs in before you do this.

4. Voice Recorders

Have you ever had a boss who tells you to do one thing, you do that thing, then they tell you that they didn’t tell you to do the thing you already did because they told you to do it, and that you should have instead done this completely other thing? (confusing right?) Well that’s what a voice recorder is for. This is not so much a practical joke as it is practical (and funny.) Anytime your boss tells you to do something, record it! That way, when you’re getting yelled at for doing the wrong thing you can casually pull out your recording and say something along the lines of, “Well actually, ahem, quite the contrary ol’ chap, you in fact told me to do this, which I did. Because you told me so.” Granted, whether or not you keep your job after that is a different story entirely, but it’ll definitely annoy your boss.

Tone Generator5. The Tone Generator

For this one you’ll need the TLPTG2 tone generator and a coupler to turn a male RCA into a female 1/8″ jack. Your victim needs to have a set of external computer speakers with an On/Off switch for this to work. Connect the coupler to the RCA end of the tone generator and connect their speakers to it while they’re in the “Off” position. Turn on the tone generator and turn the frequency up all the way to the 13,000 kHz range, and make sure the generator is well hidden. Then, turn the volume on the speakers and computer all the way up. And from here, we wait. As soon as your victim turns their speakers on to enjoy some peaceful and pleasing music, they’ll be greeted will a high pitched obnoxious tone and won’t be able to figure out what’s wrong while also annoying the entire office. You may blow their speakers out and have to replace them, but hey, we gotta make sacrifices.

And these, Butt of the Joke, are the top 5 ways to annoy your coworkers! Have fun! And if anyone else can think of other funny pranks, please share them!