The Best Prank Ever: Make All the Phones in Your Office Ring Simultaneously

Posted 03/17/2008 at 10:49am | by Will Smith

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The Rick Roll

Grab some popular sound clips from the web, and make a quickie sound board using the Emotion Sounds feature of the Pamela (www.pamela-systems.com) plugin for Skype. You’ll need to chop your sound bites into small WAV or MP3 files, then open Pamela and configure the Mega Emotion Sounds Player. You can open it up by starting Pamela, right-clicking on the Pamela icon in the system tray, and selecting Show emotion sounds player. Add your sound files by clicking on the plus sign in the top right of the window. With a little Googling, you should be able to track down soundboards that include the relevant clips from pretty much any popular movie. Hell, you could even simultaneously Rick Roll two dozen people by phone. Now that's ground breaking!

The "Phone Glitch"

Setup two conference calls on two different machines. With one, call everyone’s desk phones. Act surprised, but suggest that it may just be a glitch in the building's phone system. After the hubbub has started to die down, but before everyone else is back to work, hit the button to ring everyone’s cell phones. With a little acting on your part, you can have your co-workers calling for Mulder and Scully in a matter of minutes, but be sure to let them off the hook fairly quickly. This variant isn’t as much funny as it is terrifying. I’d only do this if I didn’t like my coworkers.

The Patsy

Our third variant requires a little more setup, but the potential for hilarity is high. You’ll need either an innocent patsy, or an accomplice who can keep his act together for the length of the call. What you need to do is call everyone in your office, plus the accomplice/pawn at the same time. If you use the pawn, we recommend against bothering actual real people or businesses, but instead calling some sort of funny automated hotline, or even just the central switchboard for your office. If you choose to go the accomplice route, have him ham it up with some personalized info, such as, “Hello, I’m calling from the public health department for Bob Jones. It’s regarding his rash. Please call us back at your earliest convenience at 415-555-1284.” Or something similar.

That’s it for this installment of The Best Prank Ever. We’ll be back later this week with more new and glorious pranks, perfect for your April Fools Day shenanigans. If you liked our Skype prank, let us know how it went by posting a comment below! And, if you really liked the story, we'd love it if you'd give us a Digg!