sjennings
April Fool’s Day is upon us once more which means you need to spend the day watching your back and/or enacting revenge on your co-workers for last year’s cubicle filled with packing peanuts incident.
We’ve never passed up on the opportunity to participate in office shenanigans, so we thought we’d help you plan your biggest cubicle prank yet with 10 of our favorite office furniture-inspired gags:
1. Air Horn Office Chair
Use the pneumatic pistons (AKA the thingies that make your office chair go down when you sit on it) to trigger an ear-splitting air horn whenever your victim sits down. Check out instructions for how to pull it off here.
2. Office Foil
An office pranking classic, your job is to cover every last item in your victim’s office with aluminum foil. First you’re going to need some aluminum foil. A lot of aluminum foil. You’ll also need a bit of time, because to foil everything from your victim’s desk to her chair to her pencil cups and the pencils in it will take awhile. However, the look on her face when she walks into her new-and-improved fun-house cube will be well worth the investment. You can also do this with wrapping paper or newspaper, although with all the taping involved, it might be trickier.
3. Blind Folded Chair Race
This one could get a little rowdy, so if you work in a more civilized office you should probably move on. First, you’ll need to recruit a few trusted co-workers in on the prank. Challenge your victim to a chair race…blindfolded. Roll your chairs up to the starting line (blindfolds on!) and then have another co-worker duct tape your victim’s chair to the floor. Hilarity (and potential injury) ensues when the race starts and your victim ends up on the floor. Here’s the full how-to.
4. Chair Wrap
If you like the office foil, but don’t have the time (or the foil), try only wrapping your victim’s chair. The catch is to put a blown-up Whoopie cushion on the seat before wrapping it up. Your colleague will have a good chuckle at the wrapped chair and think that’s the whole joke until they sit down and let it rip.
5. Host a Barbecubicle
Transform your victim’s cubicle into a backyard cookout complete with faux picket fence and mini-charcoal grill (just, you know, don’t actually fire up the grill. No need to have anyone passing out from carbon monoxide poisoning). First cover the floor and desk with faux turf. Make a picket fence using poster board and attach that to the cubicle walls. Replace their office chair with a lawn chair and their coffee mug with a fancy red plastic cup. Set up the grill on the desk or floor, maybe hang up some wind chimes or a bird feeder…the possibilities are endless. Get more ideas here.
6. Keyboard Planter
Celebrate spring and bring in some more plant life to the office (hey, it’s supposed to be good for your health) with this clever prank. You’ll need a broken keyboard (no use getting in trouble with your office manager by using a functional one), some cotton and some grass or cress seed. Remove the keys from the keyboard, place cotton on the keyboard and sprinkle on some seed and water, then replace the kids. Spray with water a few times a day for several weeks and eventually the keyboard will sprout. Swap your victim’s keyboard with the greenboard and wait for the confusion.
7. Sneaky Sounds
You know how sometimes you think you hear a sound, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is or where it’s coming from and it’s driving you nuts? That feeling of lonely insanity is the goal with this simple, but effective, prank courtesy of SheKnows.com. Find an object that has an annoying and distinct sound like a smoke detector that’s low on batteries. You could also record a sound or download an app that makes sounds like white noise, sirens or heart beats. Make it so that the item is barely audible then hide it in your victim’s desk drawer or in a filing cabinet. The hard part will be acting like you have no idea what they’re talking about as they try to figure out where the noise is coming from.
8. Crime Scene
This prank is perfect for the “Law & Order” fans among your co-workers. Simply tape around a “victim” area on your co-workers desk chair and/or desk. Bonus points for wrapping yellow crime scene tape around their cube and for adding those little numbered evidence markers around their desk.
9. Office Ransacking
If you have the urge to channel your inner Viking (and who doesn’t get this feeling at work from time to time?), here’s the perfect prank. Simply wait for your victim to leave their cubicle for an extended period of time, then turn everything upside down or at least on its side: Chairs, computer, keyboard, mouse, desk lights, empty coffee mugs, books, binders, etc. Just don’t set anything on fire. Oh, and leave your sword at home.
10. The Disappearing-Reappearing Office
There are few variations of this trick. The simpler (but still tricky) version involves you removing your victim’s desk and chair leaving their computer equipment and other office supplies on the floor (if you feel sorry for your victim, you could bring in a beanbag chair for him to sit on). If you want to step it up a notch, you relocate your victim’s entire office (set up precisely as they had it before) somewhere else in the building. Popular choices include the bathroom or a supply closet. You could also try swapping desks with another victim or moving into a hallway, break room or conference room.
How will you be celebrating the funnest of holidays? From silly to hazardous, there’s a broad choice to fit any office atmosphere. Get creative, get revenge, but most of all be safe and have fun. Remember your colleagues can always retaliate next year.
