12 Awesome Office Prank Videos

As long as there have been offices, there have been office pranks. There is just something about spending 8 hours behind a desk or inside a cubicle that awakens the prankster inside us all. And whether it's filling cars with golf balls, turning a cubicle into a miniature house, or making people fall out of their chairs, office pranks are some of the best pranks around! Here are 12 of the funniest office pranks you're likely to see (in no particular order).

1) Cubicle converted into a home

In what may go down as the most epic and flawlessly executed office prank ever, these co-workers turned someone's cubicle into a full-fledged house. The pranksters had plenty of time while their co-worker enjoyed a month long vacation. When he finally returned, he found that his regular old, run-of-the-mill cubicle had been transformed into a shed, complete with windows, shingles, paint, trim, flowers, a lamp and a mailbox.

2) Car full of golf balls

We all look forward to the end of the workday when we can head to our car and cruise home in the peace and quiet we worked all day to enjoy. What one man wasn't counting on, however, was the fact that a couple of his office buddies filled his SUV to the brim with golf balls during the day. The pranksters catch everything on camera from high above in their office building, from the man walking to his car to the torrential flood of golf balls that hits him when he opens the door. Classic!



3) Cubicle foiled

This man returned to work to find his cubicle and computer completely covered in tinfoil! You should be picking up on a common theme by now: leave your cubicle for extended times at your own risk!



4) 1000 balloons

These office clowns blew up 1,000 (that's right, one thousand) balloons by hand and put them all in their boss's office. It would've been pretty tough to pull that off during business hours, so these guys waited until the dead of night to come in at 12:20 in the morning and hatch their scheme.



5) 55lb bag of resin

One man came back from vacation to find 55lbs of nylon resin sitting open in his overhead cabinet. As the YouTube caption warns, "this is what happens when you fill an office with engineers!"



6) Mooning the photocopier - and breaking it!

One of the classic office pranks is sitting on the photocopier to get a picture of your rear end. It's funny, but not so much when you're so heavy that you actually fall through the glass when you sit on the photocopier! We can't be sure, but it must have been an interesting afternoon when it came time for this man's quarterly performance review!



7) Rigged desk

Everybody has days when they can't seem to get anything done, but it's especially difficult when someone glues your phone together and rigs your desk drawer to an air horn that blows every time you try to open it! The hard work and preparation pays off when the owner of the desk sits down and the rest of the office erupts in laughter.



8) Operation "Care Bare Stare"

In another chapter of the "you'd better watch your cubicle" saga, this man had his turned into a Care Bears shrine, complete with balloons, new wall tiling, and rainbow decorations.



9) Snakes in the Pringles

Everyone loves the old "snakes in the can" trick. These office clowns opted to stash their springing snakes into a female co-worker's Pringles can. The video is helpfully narrated, with arrows pointing to the victim and the Pringles can before the prank actually happens.



10) Computer scare

We've all been a victim of "that e-mail prank" where we stare at the screen for 2 minutes only to have a horrific, screaming face burst out of nowhere and scare the hell out of us. Most of us are surprised, but the woman in this video screams and falls completely out of her chair as her pranksters laugh in delight.



11) Rewired office

The pranksters in this video are in close competition with the prank number 1 for effort. They actually took the effort to rewire their technology-illiterate boss's entire office, making the light switch turn on the radio, the computer turn on the fan, the fan make loud rap music play, and so forth. The prank ends with the boss getting stuck inside a dark elevator while his pranksters watch him freaking out on the security camera. Priceless!



12) Rat in the donuts

These pranksters put a fake but moving and extremely lifelike rat inside a Dunkin' Donuts box and set it on the table. Watch the video and you'll see employee after employee walk by, open the box, and recoil in instinctive terror!

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There Is No Gas Shortage

"They see speculation in the market, I see decline in global inventories. I don't think this is a big surprise, that we've had a jump in price when there has been a decrease in crude inventories."— Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, Bloomberg News, Mar. 5, 2008

"It should be obvious to you all that the [gasoline] demand is outstripping supply, which causes prices to go up." — President George W. Bush, Associated Press, Mar. 5, 2008

One wonders if verifiable facts ever get in the way of this administration's statements on issues that are critical to the average American's wellbeing. After all, last time I checked, when politicians are elected to public office, or appointed, as is Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman, they must take an oath to the American people before assuming their new positions. How can they forget a sacred oath so quickly? Were they daydreaming when they took it, so it never meant anything to begin with? Maybe it's just another promise you have to make to get into office: When you're securely incumbent you can ignore even solemn oaths you took.

Obviously, the two quotes that led this article came from discussions concerning the current high price for oil on the futures market. Bodman appears to be protecting the speculators in oil, as opposed to looking after the interests of all Americans. President Bush, apparently, has never talked to the Energy Dept.'s Energy Information Agency to see whether gasoline demand is actually up. More troubling, the writer of that particular Associated Press article obviously didn't look up the EIA's numbers to verify the President's assertions. They weren't accurate.

1. There Is No Shortage

Gasoline reserves on hand are at the highest levels since the early 1990s, which is remarkable considering the nation's refineries have been cutting back on the production of gasoline because their margins have declined. In fact, average gasoline reserves on hand have risen since this past October, while oil reserves in this country have gone up virtually every week this year—and only fog in the Houston Ship Channel that kept oil tankers from unloading their crude one week kept it from being every week.

In the same Bloomberg article that quotes from Bodman's CNBC appearance on Mar. 4, he also said that it was thanks to ethanol that the gasoline problem isn't even worse. He then added that the fact that making ethanol is forcing up prices of other farm commodities, including hog and chicken feed, is "nowhere near as important as trying to relieve pressure on [gasoline] supplies."

Of course, there is no pressure on gasoline supplies in this country as of today, but Bodman's statement must have made eyes roll among the executives at Pilgrim's Pride PPC; the Pittsburg, (Tex.) poultry producer announced 1,100 layoffs on Mar. 13, closing one processing plant and 6 of their 13 distribution centers because their company's outlay for chicken feed went up $600 million last fiscal year and was on track to increase by another $700 million this year.

Here's the scorecard, in case you missed it. There's no shortage of gasoline or oil in the U.S. today, and we have near-record reserves on hand. Meanwhile the Congressional mandate for ethanol has jacked up the price of chicken feed for Pilgrim's Pride, which is the U.S.'s largest processor of chickens and turkeys—by $1.3 billion. And that's for just one company processing chicken. This is what passes for acceptable to our Energy Secretary?

2. Demand Is DOWN, Yet Prices Are UP

Just so we can all get on the same page, here are the verifiable facts on oil supplies, production, and gasoline demand.

In January of this year, the U.S. used 4% less petroleum than we did a year ago. (Oil demand was down 3.2% in February.) Furthermore, demand has been falling slowly since July of last year. Ronald Bailey of Reason Online has pointed out that worldwide production of oil has risen 2.5% in the first quarter, while worldwide demand has grown by only 2%.

Production is expected to increase by 3.3% in the second quarter, and by as much as 4.1% by the third quarter. The net result is that the U.S. daily buffer for oil production against demand, which was a paltry 1.5 million barrels as recently as 2005, is now up to 3 million barrels in excess capacity today.

So what is going on here? Why would our Energy Secretary say there's a supply and demand problem when none exists? Why would he say that speculators have little or nothing to do with the incredibly high price of oil and gasoline, when it's clear they do? President Bush—a former oilman—gives the ever-growing demand for gasoline as the primary reason prices are so high, yet that notion can be dispelled with one minute of research. That's the problem with rhetoric; it rarely matches the facts.

3. Speculation is Up, and the Dollar Is Down

On the same day the President and our Energy Secretary made those foolish comments, no less an authority than ExxonMobil (XOM) Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson was quoted by Marketwatch as saying, "The record run in oil prices is related more to speculation and a weakening dollar than supply and demand in the market." He added, "In terms of fundamentals, fear of supply reliability is overblown."

As for the speculators, in 2000 approximately $9 billion was invested in oil futures, while today that number has gone up to $250 billion. Now, if any publicly traded company had an additional $241 billion put into its stock in the same period, its stock would rise out of sight too—even if the company was not worth anywhere near that amount of market capitalization.

Moving on to the weak U.S. dollar as a primary cause for skyrocketing oil prices—there is "some" truth in that statement. But consider this: The dollar has depreciated 30% against the world's currencies since 2002, while the price of oil has gone up 500%. So is it the weak dollar that has caused a 500% increase in the price of oil, or is it the extra $241 billion worth of speculation? You can make the call on that one.

Possibly just to ensure oil prices don't respond to real-world market conditions, Goldman Sachs (GS) forecast on Mar. 7 that turbulence in the oil market could cause oil to spike as high as $200 a barrel. This flies in the face of all known information—but then again, Goldman Sachs is the world's biggest trader of energy derivatives, and its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index is a widely watched barometer of energy and commodities prices.

What Is Washington Thinking?

Rounding out the list of experts discussing our oil and gasoline situation is Bill Klesse, head of San Antonio (Tex.) Valero Energy (VLO). He spoke in San Diego a week after those comments from Goldman Sachs, the President, and Secretary Bodman. Believe it or not, Klesse said poor margins may cause Valero to sell one-third of its refinery operations; he stated that poor margins in recent months had caused planned refinery expansions—which would have produced 500,000 more barrels per day—to be canceled. Moreover, according to a report from Reuters on Mar. 11, 2008, Klesse recently released the information that gasoline production has been curtailed in response to slowing demand.

Imagine that: Refiners cut gasoline production, yet gasoline reserves have grown to their largest since late 1992. So much for "surging demand."

Klesse also called for the government to start imposing a tariff on imported gasoline to protect U.S. refiners' profits. Protectionism? As famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith correctly said, "In America, the only respectable form of socialism is socialism for the rich."

Which takes us back to the original question: Why is Washington doing everything it can to convince us there is a shortage when there isn't one? After all, the only people they're protecting are those heavily invested in oil futures—and that's to the detriment of all other Americans.

We're Paying for What?

When it became undeniable that poor decision-making by company executives had put a respected 85-year-old U.S. institution in financial peril, why did the Federal Reserve rush in to save investment bank Bear Stearns (BSC)? Of course, we need to restore confidence in our financial institutions, but why protect the personal assets of those who were responsible for the mess? Both the corporation's officers and its board members should contribute their personal assets toward saving the bank they put in the ditch—the bank all of us are going to pay to bail out.

Instead, the Bush administration is protecting those responsible for creating yet another speculative bubble in oil futures, and is protecting investors in the ethanol industry—much to the detriment of food-processing companies such as Pilgrim's Pride. And the net result of all this is that the prices of crude and gasoline rise ever higher thanks to a "shortage" that does not exist, while food costs are soaring thanks in part to the ethanol mandate.

The Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, but the cost of mortgages goes up six weeks in a row—and last month Bank of America (BAC) credit-card holders started being charged more than 24% interest on new purchases.

This is what they call "Republican Prosperity?" Ronald Reagan was both right and wrong when he said, "Government is not the solution, government is the problem." And government is still the problem. Instead of a fair and open market they gave us a free-for-all marketplace with no regulations at all, which lately these "bubble boys" have sent south for all of us.

One would guess that Washington missed the obvious: Protect all U.S. consumers and you're also protecting business expansion.

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20% of companies pick up CEOs' taxes on perks

CEOs are just like the rest of us: They hate paying for things out of pocket if they can find someone else to foot the bill.

Fortunately for them, in many cases there is someone willing to pick up the bill for selected personal expenses: the shareholders.

A new study from The Corporate Library finds that the most common form of perk being granted to CEOs these days is something called a tax "gross-up." In plain English, it means that a company pays the taxes owed by the CEO on benefits granted by the company.

The Corporate Library, a shareholder watchdog group, found that 20% of major American companies, or 657 of nearly 3,300 examined, picked up the tab on at least one tax owed by the CEO.

"We are sure that many U.S. workers would be grateful if their employers also paid their income tax obligations," writes Paul Hodgson of The Corporate Library in the report.

Almost any perk granted to a CEO generates a tax bill, from an executive life insurance policy paid by the company to country club dues.

But one of the most common reasons cited by the report for tax "gross-ups" is use of the corporate jet. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, for security reasons, the boards of many companies have encouraged their CEOs to fly on private jets rather than commercial airlines when traveling on business. Public companies often allow the CEOs to use the corporate jet for personal travel as well.

Personal use of the company plane is a form of compensation to the executive, so it generates a tax liability. But rather than making the CEO pay tax on that benefit, dozens of companies in the Russell 3000 pick up the tax bill.

The Corporate Library report singles out Ryland Group (RYL), a home-building company, as the biggest provider of "gross-up" payments to its CEO. For 2007, Ryland provided CEO R. Chad Dreier with $4 million in gross-ups as part of a pay package that totaled $12 million. Ryland did not return calls for comment.

Revelations about corporate perks can create ill will among investors, says Ira Kay of the compensation consulting firm Watson Wyatt.

"We advise our clients to minimize perks as much as possible," he says. "It's an irritant to shareholders and a distraction from incentive plans that work well."

Alan Johnson of Johnson & Associates suggests that many companies maintain a corporate jet primarily to accommodate the CEO, or, if the company already has a corporate jet that's used for business, a CEO's needs can lead the company to lease another jet.

Some companies, such as General Mills (GIS), have canceled the personal-use-of-the-corporate-jet perk. It's a trend that's likely to grow, says Watson Wyatt's Kay.

Hodgson agrees. "There are more boards who are less happy paying for quite so many perks now that they've been exposed," he says. "I'm expecting a reduction in number and range of perks being paid."

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