Best April Fool’s Pranks
Use these strategies to prank your colleagues

March 31, 2014

aprils fool

Use these strategies to prank your colleagues

MOUSEPLAY
Shift the pointer speed to extremely fast or extremely slow for some extreme entertainment. You can use a Post-It note with a snarky message under a mouse to derange a pointer’s movements. Also, in Control Panel, under the Mouse settings’ in the Pointer tab, you can change the default mouse pointer to the hourglass. Your colleague’s computer is now hard at work, forever.

KEY-BORED
There’s an alternate keyboard layout called Dvorak that nobody uses (because the keys don’t correspond to the letters). Visit the Regional and Language Settings under ControlPanel, in the Languages tab, click details, then Add and choose Dvorak. Goodbye normal typing.

SCREEN OF THE CRIME
Take a screen grab of their entire desktop and then open the image in full-screen mode, and watch them wonder why nothing’s clickable. On Mac, press Command/Shift/4, then click and drag to select entire screen. The image will be saved to the desktop as a “.png” file. In Windows XP, press the Print Screen key, and on Vista you can use the Snipping Tool under Programs.

TURN THEIR WORLDS UPSIDE DOWN
Simply reach over and hit Ctrl-Alt-Up or down to rotate their monitor orientation.

PRANK FOR THE MEMORIES
“There’s a very fine line between what is humorous and what isn’t,” says industrial psychologist Erna Nel. “When it comes to sexual harassment, it’s all about the perception of the person being harassed. Look at the context: what are the perceptions of the person who the prank is geared at?” If in doubt, the ones who dish it out can take it. “If somebody is a prankster, you’ll know what kind of prank you can pull.”