The Coffee Place's Joke Stack
Collection of Practical Jokes
Originally From: DAVE COBLE:
It is common for draftsmen to sprinkle SCUMEX (powdered rubber eraser) on tracings prior to doing any drawing on it. This reduces smearing of the pencil marks and such and results in a cleaner tracing.
At a former employers we had replaced the Scumex at one draftsmans desk with dried parmesian cheese. It looked about the same. It was extremely interesting watching him draw for a while and then begin to smell the paper. Took the poor dude almost 10 minutes to guess that he had been gigged!
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I just pulled one on somebody -- I slipped some of those anti-shoplifting strips into the lining of the victim's favorite jacket. I was set to pull another one, but didn't get the chance - to cut out a silhouette of a gun from metal and hide it in a piece of carry-on luggage.
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Two teachers at my high school started a practical joke war that culminated in a junk mail war of huge proportions. They finally called a truce and got it cleared up and the mail stopped, EXCEPT for the military mail that one had signed the other one up for. He wrote (honestly) that he had graduated from a fine college and was interested in the Marines, Air Force, etc. etc. When I left, about two years after this, he was still getting PHONE CALLS from 2-4 times a month.... they were VERY persistant even over he (loud) objections that he was 45 and not interested in a career change...
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New secretary (second day on the job) answers telephone as is told in official tones: "This is the phone company. We are testing a new circuit wiring scheme in your offices. Please keep everyone off the phones for the next 10 minutes. We will be verifying the correct wiring of your system by passing HOT STEAM through the wires. Instruct your employees to place their phones on the floor, or, better yet, wrap them in towels to avoid scalding themselves. We will advise you when the tests are complete *click*" After momentary panic, the secretary begins a frenzied "Paul Revere" routine, running from desk to desk while glancing frequently at her watch. Just as the 10 minutes are about up, she bursts into her boss's office (while he is in the midst of an important long-distance call) and, screaming, grabs the receiver from his hand and flings the whole phone under his desk...
Originally From: JOE BLAKE
A variation on this one is to call, and identify yourself as from the phone company, and explain how you are testing the lines, etc. etc. Tell whomever answers that you are testing/adjusting the voltage that controls the ringer, and after they hang up, the phone will ring, but it is VERY IMPORTANT that they not answer it, as it could cause serious injury or even death to the telephone company employee. mmediately afterwards, call back and let the phone ring. . . ring. . . ring. . . ring. . . (This part sometimes takes a while). As soon as they pick it up and meekly say "Hello?" let out the most agonizing scream that you possibly can, and hang up.
There was a stunt we used to enjoy at the dining hall in my undergrad days. The food service used opaque plastic salt and pepper shakers with pop-off tops that could be pried off with a knife blade if you were persistent enough.
PREPARATION (in a restroom nearby): (1) Empty salt ( or pepper) from a previously 'acquired' container and fill about 1/3 full with concentrated lemon juice. (2) Place a thin tissue across the opening, poke it down a bit to form a depression, and fill the depression with about a teaspoon of baking soda. (3) Cover (from the inside) the holes of the top with tape of the appropriate color. (4) Replace top on container and trim visible tissue from around the top.
Carry the device to dining hall (upright and as stable as is possible... for your own sake).
After discretely placing the shaker on your table (only place it near to you... see caveat #1 below), observe the next person to use the salt (pepper). (S)He will shake lightly at first, then harder as nothing comes out. Due to the breakdown of the tissue and the pressure resulting from the classic acid/base reaction, the top will pop off (quite spectacularly) amidst a shower of foam. Your victim (as will as everyone around) should have quite a reaction, since one does not usually observe this type of behavior in a salt (pepper) shaker!
CAVEATS: 1. The top will come off with some force. If the holes are sealed well, this will happen on about the second or third shake. Once, though, due to poor sealing, it took about 5 seconds, during which time our victim started looking at the shaker to examine the "foamy stuff coming out" of the holes... we quickly grabbed the shaker from her to direct the top towards the ceiling before it went off. So,
watch carefully!
2. The "foam shower" (lemon juice & soda) may ruin you victim meal... be prepared to pop for another one.
3. Don't do this if your victim or anyone near ground zero is dressed up (this joke will flop at board meetings and the like).
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In my younger days, while employed at a warehouse, I was the butt of the usual practical jokes directed at newcomers.(Fetch me a light-bulb repair kit, son;etc) As days passed, I noticed that one of my antagonists was actually afraid of his terminal. This was at the time when the press was full of accounts of the dangers of X-rays from color TV's, and this guy was deathly afraid of the noise made by the high-voltage section of the CRT as it warmed up. Each morning he sat in his swivel chair, coffee in his left hand, and with the chair as far as possible away from the terminal, used his right hand to quickly flick the ON switch, and then jerked it away from THE CERTAIN DEATH THAT AWAITED. After the racket settled down, he would wheel up to the terminal and commence operations. This situation was too good for yours truly to pass up. I went upstairs and pulled out a stock item, a stadium buzzer, used by high schools on the football fields to announce the end of a quarter. I came in early the next morning and installed it in one of his file boxes, near the terminal. I ran the wires out to the next office via a pass-thru, and alerted all of the staff (but him) of what was about to transpire.
He entered the room, coffee in hand, and sat in his chair. All others were heads-down in work. He adjusted his chair to the proper distance, reached way out for the switch, and as soon as he pulled, I plugged in the cord. As the buzzer sounded, he assumed the facial expressions of one who has seen death reaching it's skeltal fingers to snatch him from the land of the living. Coffee flew to the ceiling, and for a few brief seconds before hitting the opposite wall, a new world land speed record for backward swivel-chair operation was established!
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This joke has been done 50 (yes, 50) years ago by my father-in-law.
First, a little background:
He lived in a small village, north-west of Quebec City along the St-Laurent river. In those days, toilets were located outside the house in what we call in good ol' french canadian 'becosse', from 'back house' I think.These are a little wood shack with no floor over a hole in the ground where you ... You can guess.
Now, for the joke:
He and a friend were thrown out of a party by the doorman.
When it was really dark,, the doorman went to investigate what was knocking at the window. They had suspended a rock to the window frame so it hung right it the middle and tied another string to the rock and hid behind the 'becosse' where they pulled that second string to make the rock knock in the window. That's an old trick. The doorman wouldn't fall for that one. So he followed the second string in the dark and soon concluded that they were hidding behind the 'becosse'.
He ran toward the merely visible wood structure...
But my father-in-law and his friend had taken care of moving the shack six feet ... Boy he fell in the sh*t !!
This reminds me of a story that a former roommate related to me. In college he and a group of friends got revenge on complete strangers. ....Well, let me set up the situation.
Y'know how sometimes you gotta park real far away from your destination because certain types of people like to take up two parking spaces...? Well, he and his friends got a little ticked about this, especially during weekends at the school. One day, they decided to get even with every "#@@#$#@$&&*" that took up "their" space. They turned the car sideways. As he said, "He wanted that space so bad, now he can have it for a loooong time!"
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In a similar vein, tell your victim that you have a test of coordination you would like him to try with you. Find a door with a fairly large crack between the door and the wall when the door is open. (You know, ver by the hinges; across the width of the door from the doorknob...) You need an egg (NOT hard-boiled), and a wood floor (you don't want the egg cracking on carpeting, do you??). Now, have your victim get on the opposite side of the door from you, and put 2 fingers through the door. Hand him the egg, in those two fingers. Working with him, trade the egg back and forth a couple of times, moving UP the door frame. After you have his confidence, leave. He will be trapped there, holding this egg by two fingers through the door. If he lets go and nobody takes the egg, it will crash to the floor. Best to do in the person's own room.
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A few years ago some members of the infamous Dartmouth Outing Club pushed an occupied one-seat outhouse off its foundations, onto its door. The victim tried in vain for a few minutes to roll the entire building onto a different side, but soon gave up, as it was too heavy. She then was forced to climb out through the seat, and over the pit near the bottom (now side) of the outhouse.
The followup to this episode was that some `friends' seized me in the middle of the night and tied my feet in a noose suspended in a tree. But that's another story.
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This practical joke is hearsay. A fellow student some years ago related the following. Apparently another student was a bit of a braggar. His favourite topic was his car, and one sub-topic was the terrific gas milage (pre-metric) it got.
So it began one evening. Fill up a one-gallon container of gas each night and pour it into the victim's gas tank. Wait for the story each day to get better and better. Repeat until it cannot be taken any more. I believe 2 weeks was sufficient.
Finally the moment (days) of truth. Each night for 2 weeks, the effect was reversed, and one gallon of gas was REMOVED from the victim's tank. It was amazingly effective at reducing some of the stories. I suspect the truth was never revealed to the victim.
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Another harmless practical joke to be played on people living in multiple story apartment buildings is as follows:
Knock on victim's door. Say, "I've got to use your window, someone's about to jump from an apartment above yours." Run to window and look outside, but don't let victim look.
At this point your accomplice dumps a rag-filled dummy either from the window above or from the roof. The dummy should be fully closed; for added realism put some plastic bags of fake blood inside the clothes.
On the sidewalk below, a third accomplice puts down a plastic sheet, then covers it with a sheet painted to resemble the sidewalk. After the body hits, let the victim see the gore, then convince him to run down and help while you stay and call the ambulance. As soon as the victim has left, signal your accomplice to remove the sheets and the dummy and head for some prearranged hiding place. Then you leave the apartment and disappear somewhere in the building; later, you make your way downstairs and leave.
The victim will race downstairs expecting to find a dead bloody body and will instead see only clean, empty pavement. Of course, it is best done late at night since the joke would be spoiled by a passer-by who informed the victim of the "body's" fate.
The fun comes imagining the victim trying to convince the police or anyone else of what happened!
Some of the least elaborate practical jokes are the most effective. Go with a couple of friends, stand near some busy street corner, and take a great interest in some point near the top of a tall building, or maybe just up in the sky. Watch the reactions of people around you.
Take an old windowshade, go to a gymnastics show or anywhere else where people wear leotards, wait for someone to do a split, and tear the windowshade briskly, making a very loud ripping sound ...
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Okay, this is something me and my best friend did to our Comp. Sci. teacher senior year of high school.
We started this joke by getting into heated arguments for a week before the actual event and of course everything was building up a big head of steam. By this time the other kids knew something was up and we let them in on the joke, so now we have about 30 people helping in our cause.
Anyway, on the day of the crime we went to the school's dressing room and, since we were both active in the drama club, no one asked what we were there for. So, I get ready for the fun by making myself a nice layer of plasti-skin and filled it with stage blood. Danny, my friend, obtained the services of a prop knife, you know one of the ones that retract and we tested the depth of the cut with the thickness of the skin, it was right, so now we are set.
We walk into class seperated by about a minute and we start right where we had left off, teh name calling, the pushing and all the other aspects of high schoolers that don't like each other. So Danny pulls the knife out of his pocket and yells, "That's it Ray, you're dead." So he swings at my neck and the knife cuts the plasti-skin and the stage blood goes everywhere, I crumple in a gurgling heap and lay prone under the table of trash80's. Mr. Waddington comes up and sees Danny standing over me with a blood covered knife and sees me apparently dead starts to roll me over. I flop over like any good corpse and he dabs at the blood now covering my neck and says the line I was waiting for, "My God you killed him!" At that moment, I opened my eyes and asked him what he was doing. I have heard of peoples faces going white and now I saw it. After he relised what we had done, he congradulated us on a job well done.
Originally From: DAVE COBLE
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Changes were last made on 11-20-2001
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