Kick Me! notes and other practical jokes

[GadgetMaster]

{Edited}

Kick Me!.....ever seen this note stuck on someones back?

Or have you been the unfortunate victim of an interesting practical joke or maybe you were the cunning perpetrator of one .

If so please share your stories with us, they'll surely be interesting :-D

I'll start,

I once fell for it when a work colleague rang me from the other room faking an accent and pretending to be a customer . I really didn't recognise his voice. He got me a little frustrated when he kept asking stupid support questions and I was really stretching myself to 'be nice to the customer'. It only clicked when some other workmates couldn't contain their laughter and started cracking up. :lol:

I did get my revenge though and he fell for the exact same trick only because I left it until quite late when my incident was all but forgotten. It is one of those things that can make a boring job more bearable. :-P

On another occasion I pulled a prank when this new girl started her job at our workplace. I made a change to the Windows 98 end screen where it says "It is now safe to shut down your PC". The new message said "Warning! It is NOT safe to shut down your PC". She freaked out thinking she had broken a system on her first day. Poor girl ! She was too scared to switch the thing off. I felt sorry enough to eventually tell her before leaving for the day. Somehow I don't quite think she trusted me after that :lol:

[Star69]

There was something like that going around my work a while back.  It was a small program which displayed a dialog box saying something along the lines of "Format of drive c:\ commencing in 30 seconds"

which was sent to any new starts - guaranteed to make them s#!t bricks, breaking their computer on their first day...

[Cyberus]

Not really an imaginative practical joke, but when I was an undergraduate, we in the physics dept had our own computer rooms. Unreal tournament became very popular, and so you'd be sitting in the computer room working or whatever after lectures , with a few people around you playing it online, getting quite into it.

One of the things that I used to do was net send their machine/username with a message, like 'unreal is pants' - it would switch screens and give them a dos requester, while they were getting shot in the game :-D

The people who were less computer savvy (and physicists on the whole are very good with computers) were completely dumbfounded by it - those who did know were damn annoyed. As I recall, you can change your network user name for the session, and so some people would do this to stop people net  sending them. So you'd just think up a pointless question to ask so you could walk over to their machine, since their machine id was stencilled on the case :-)

Mwahahahaha!

[GadgetMaster]

What! :huh: only two replies. Come on now!

Do I have to contact iamaboringperson to make you all some badges or something?

There must be some more stories and anecdotes out there. Please don't be shy. Its confession time.:-D

I won't beleive even for a minute that you guys have never experienced a practical joke or two. Or has being an Amigan exhausted your sense of humour because the whole Amiga saga seems like a really evil practical joke. :lol:



[CU_AmiGA conspiracy mode ON]

I know what it is! You are all ganging up on me. that's it. You want to give me the silent treatment hoping that 'this nutter will go away'. Hah! I sussed you. You will have to do better than that.

Telling two people to post here so it doesn't look too obvious eh?. Sorry but it's not going to work.

If I catch you conspirators I'll ...I'll ..well I'll do something really really nasty to you so you had better watch out. I'm on to you!

I might even be tempted to use your nickname on an obscure forum or something. :evil:

[/CU_AmiGA conspiracy mode OFF]  :crazy:     :-D

[Karlos]

A few yeast back, I can remember some idiot semi-chavs back in my home town who used to throw airbomb fireworks from their car at passers by. They'd achieved some sort of noteriety in the locality having scared a few people half to death.

In a blinding bit of poetic justice, one of the retards in the  back tried to throw one at a bus stop where myself and a group of other people were waiting for the bus.

However, and I confess I'm at a loss of how he quite managed this, he managed to rebound it off the edge of the window and back into the car where it must have rolled under the front passenger seat or something.

I can remember seeing some frantic activity in the back for a few moments, then the car screeched to a halt as they were about to abandon it.

The firework detonated before they got the doors open, an ear splitting boom with an equally impressive thud that you felt in your chest. Every window was blown out and the occupants struggled out in a shell shocked stupor.

They were subsequently arrested at the scene :lol:

Life is so sweet sometimes!

[GadgetMaster]

@Karlos


Haha! What an own goal ! :lol:

[Karlos]

Yeah, it's only a pity they weren't seriously hurt. I'm also quite surprised - these things were pretty powerful (as anybody who has endured the chav shock and awe around bonfire night can confirm).

However, their cockiness and pride had taken a fatal blow.

[adz]

I've carried out a few practical jokes in my time, anything from filling someones car with "Fart Bombs", hiding someones car and making out it had been towed, calling up work and asking about some obscure piece of hardware and then firing up upon being told they didn't know what it was to wrapping a brick and giving it as a present. Nothing spectacular, but I had a good laugh. Although, the fart bomb incident left me with a nasty scar on my arm, but hey, it was worth it.

[gizz72]

Greetings,

Well, when I was back in grade school, this classmate of mine always stick spit balls at me! Correction fluid and blotted ink from a pen behind my pants, I was not aware of. He keeps on laughing out loud when ever I find out about what he did to me! I'm sooo upset! I just could not throw a punch cause I don't want to be suspended. I've tolerated him for the next 2 weeks. After that, I found out he was not coming to school anymore. His family move to another place and have to move out of the school as well. Made me wonder but nah how cares. My nightmares are over to my relief!

After a year, I found out he was expelled from the school I'd studied, from prolly personal problems. We met for the last time on the lobby and apologizes for the nasty joke he played to me. I accepted it, but the grudge I still hold, lingers.

We didn't talked much but he was nice to me in the end.

The second was a child and his mother. I was going home and so I decided I took the bus. When they came aboard later. The kid farted. Whoooooh! what a smell. The windows were shut and the stench lingers so long I puke!!!! It lasted for a while till the stench dissipates.The power of air difusion I'd say. :lol:

Regards,

Gizz

[KennyR]

Two chemist practical jokes spring to mind.

The first one involves the wonderful laxative properties of phenophalein, a common bench indicator. One drop is enough to affect someone for days.

The second one is a trick PHD students apparently used to play on undergraduates. The PHD guy would mix barium hydroxide and ammonium nitrate in a flask of water, the quickly give it to the undergraduate to hold. In about a minute the reaction kicks in and within a few seconds more the flask will hit -30 C, sticking itself to the victim's hand. Seems a bit dangerous to me, especially since the reaction gives out quite a lot of ammonia gas, and even more that you couldn't put that flask down even if you poured hot water on your hand.

[Karlos]

We used to fling liquid nitrogen (which was used for a lot of cold traps we had for low temperature volatiles) about in the lab. It's great stuff, instantly boils on contact with anything at room temperature.

Chucking a Dewar flask full into a bowl of warm water was a good way to scare the crap out of someone.

You can even fling it at each other and even juggle small quantities in your hands fairly safely (again it boils instantly, the resulting vapour layer insulates you from the cold, furthermore the heat capacity is not very great. Same theory as fire walkers) - lots of loverly contrails in the air where the moisture freezes out in the wake of a spray of liquid N2 droplets!

Of course, freezing someones chocolate bar (still in the wrapper) in a flask full until it became quiescent was also good fun. You then remove it and hammer it a little. The rock solid contents are as brittle as glass and shatter readily into granules which eventually soften back into a formless mush...

[GadgetMaster]

It looks like you chemist folk had a lot of fun whilst studying. :-D

[Karlos]

Hell, 99% of us only signed up to study it under the false impression we'd get to blow stuff up, make bad smells, funny crystals and pretty colours...

He's long since retired, but one of the lecturers, Dr. Salthouse used to perform a "flash bang" show each year. It didn't vary much but it was always a good laugh.

The reality of studying was rather less fun. Plenty of bad smells, but if you blew something up, you'd know you really messed up your poject ;-)

As for the colours and crystals, rarely saw those in my field later on. Virtually every non-trivial organic chemical reaction produces the same brown oily crud that requires multiple filtration and purification stages that may result in crystals but unless they contain chromophores, colourless :-/

Oh well...Thanks to the tedium of purification and analysis, you can see why alternative sources of amusement were needed.

Actually, one reaction was really cool. Had to do a "Birch Reduction", which uses metallic sodium dissolved in liquid ammonia as a reducing agent. The metal actually dissolves, without significant chemical reaction (not like chucking the stuff in water ;-)) to give a solvated electron species that is quite simply the most intense shade of blue imaginable.

I had a bit too much of the stuff so I left the excess in a beaker to evaporate (it was in a fume hood, of course) and watched it as it grew more concentrated. It got to an insane  indigo blue then abrubptly became a fully metallic golden liquid after some critical concentration. Gradually this dried up leaving a mixture of sodium and various amide salts.

[KennyR]

Speaking of good ol' natrium...

At high school we had a young teacher teaching us chemistry, and one day he was showing us the effect of alkali metals in water.

One happened to be sodium: he sliced a little sliver off with a scalpel and put it in some water, where it puffed into a little yellow flame and danced around the water. But with everyone goading him on to put a bigger piece in, he did.

The resulting explosion blew pieces of burning sodium around the room, burned the benches in several places, and ended up with a big hole in the ceiling where a piece of it had stuck and burned away.

Now you know why I specialised in chemistry as a career.

[Karlos]

@Kenny

Is there any secondary school / sixth form chemistry lab more than a few years old without such a scar? Alkali metal / water abuse is mandatory.

Our old A level teacher had a method of getting everybody's attention. He'd fill a plastic bottle (over a beehive shelf) with 7 parts oxygen and 1 part acetylene. Hed then don his earmuffs and goggles, put it atop a tripod and shove a prelit bunsen underneath.

You'd see where the dust had previously settled in any quantity whenever he did this as it fell from the blackboard, tops of cupboards etc., dislodged by the deafening bang :-)