Are you scared? Well, you shouldn't be.

[constance]

Today one of my coworkers introduced me to the delights of Scare Tactics, a punk'd-style reality show where everyone is conspiring to scare the bejeezus out of you. She thought it was can't-catch-your-breath hi-larious, and I thought it was funny in places, but mostly I was thinking two things:

(1) Man, the acting in this show is lame. But I guess all horror is bad melodrama, right, until you're in the middle of it, and then you're freaked out enough that you don't notice that the blood doesn't look quite real or the crazy guy is acting crazy in a really weird and stilted way.

(2) There are almost no girls on the show. It seems to be mostly a guy thing, to set your bestest friends up to pee in their pants because they're thinking they're about to be shot by mobsters or dismembered by an angry gorilla.

I've played pranks on people, but they involved things like live crickets in lockers, or names spelled out in squished Oreos on the front walk. Things like that, not oh-my-god-am-I-about-to-die scenarios. And I can't help thinking, as I did when I watched David Fincher's The Game, that if someone I loved were ever to set me up in a life-or-death situation that was never really life-or-death at all, I would not only not love that person any more, I would also probably spend my days planning to kill them in the most elaborate and ghastly ways possible.

But that's just me, and I have arrived at my question du jour: do you play pranks on people? And if you do, how elaborate or infuriating were they?

Comments

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

I rarely play pranks. But a long time ago, a cow orker twitted me for reheating garlic soup in the office microwave and "stinking up the place." So when my housemate was making Christmas cookies a week or so later, I begged a little dough and decorated a few cookies with garlic.

At lunch the next day I ate my delicious cookies and offered said cow orker one. I handed him a garlic cookie and he stuck it in his mouth without looking. Then his eyes widened and he yelled, "GARLIC!?!" It was quite gratifying.

(And then our Chinese cow orker asked me if he could have one of the garlic ones, too. He quite liked them, he said!)

[tofty.livejournal.com]

Haha! There used to be a little fad, in NO if in nowhere else, for garlic restaurants. Everything on the menu had garlic in it -- even the desserts. Garlic messes with my system a little, dearly though I love it, so I never made it to any of the garlic restaurants in town, but I heard the garlic desserts were tasty!

By the way, does garlic smell like anything? O_o

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

Some of my pranks have been fairly elaborate, but I like to think they are good-natured. My favorite involved a workplace with two managers who were very competitive about showing how classy they were. One form this took was in recruiting competing art collections for display in the lobby and public areas. (We actually had some rather good pieces for a while.) When a coworker and I discovered that the local dime store had actual Velvet Elvis paintings from Tijuana, we knew what we had to do.

We dummied up a wall plaque for it in the style of the other art installations, and announced that we would be having a small presentation after the weekly staff meeting. Everybody trooped out to the lobby where we had hung the painting and covered it with a cloth. We worked up a good speech about how inspiring it was to work in a place with so much art and how we wanted to give something back to the team, and finally we unveiled the Velvet Elvis.

The hardest part was not giving it away to anybody else, but that got a really big reaction at the unveiling. The painting stayed there for several years, though eventually it ended up in the restroom.

Posted too soon, dash it!

[tofty.livejournal.com]

*dies from pasting in the letter v*

Ohhh, I like! And I like that the "victims" were good-natured enough that they left the painting up for so long!

And a restroom really is a fine, and apt, place for a velvet Elvis, if you stop to consider.

See, that's the difference between your prank and theirs, though -- yours is good-natured. I really think the ones on Scare Tactics are pretty mean-spirited. :/

[wishwords.livejournal.com]

Every once in a while I will play a prank. The latest one was with a coworker who is constantly playing pranks on everyone else. He has been wanting to be promoted to foreman for about a year now. While he was on R&R he would call every day to see how the shop was doing. I had one of the guys tell him that two foreman positions came open and we knew how badly he wanted one of them so we filled out the paperwork and forged his name to it since the position would close before he got back. Then we told him that the other guy who applied got the maintenance foreman position and he'd been given the cleaning crew foreman position. He hates the cleaning crew. It only took him a minute to figure out he was being pranked.

I don't do scarey pranks or things that make people angry.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

It's a good point that you kind of have to consider the victim, too. I mean, I think you have more leeway with someone who's always playing pranks himself, don't you?

It's all so complicated!

[laurelwood.livejournal.com]

I never play mean, embarrassing or scary pranks; I'm usually just trying to be funny or silly. My favorites to date:

1) When I was a teenager, I made a dummy of myself with a styrofoam wig head, a wig, and a stuffed sweatsuit. I positioned it facedown on the floor of the entry hall and put a sign next to it saying, "Life- who needs it?" along with an empty bottle of (stool softener) prescription drugs. It was pretty lifelike, and when my mom and her date came home, I heard mild chuckling and then, "Okay, Laurel, get up." Then, when the body didn't move, she nudged the dummy with her foot and the styrofoam head detached and rolled down the stairs.

2) I once removed this dickie thingie from a dress I'd worn to work and took my bra off (in the car) so that I had what was left with the dress and some serious plunging cleavage, then waltzed inside and fooled Dennis for a whole minute that I'd gone to work like that.

3) This one isn't mine, but a woman I worked with once convinced the whole deli department at the natural food store that the health department was on their way and that she hadn't had time to get them hairnets to satisfy a new regulation, so they had to quickly choose and put on some onion netting baggie thingies from the produce to wear as hairnets until the health department had done their inspection and left. The employees not only believed her, but some actually squabbled over who got purple, who got red, and so on. They were all wearing them when she announced over the intercom that she was just joking.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

Ahahahahaha, these are great! And fun -- as I was saying to Amelia, I think that's why the pranks on Scare Tactics bewildered me, that they just seemed so calculated to humiliate as well as terrify, and so weren't as much fun for me to watch as it would have been to witness yours and your friend's.