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Best Engineering Related Pranks

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... reminds me of a rural news report in the '60s that was sponsored by the Farmer & Grazier newspaper which used the promo tag line "the official organ of the man on the land". On one occasion the announcer refused to read the line for fear he'd break up so one of the crew crept into the studio and dropped his own out of his pants at the time the line should have been read. The announcer collapsed in hysterical laughter.

The tag line was dropped from then on.
 
a cluster of stations i used to work for all used Omnia6 processors, but when we replaced the old 8100s the tallent pissed and moaned about the latency. So we installed an aphex 2020 in the studio to process the headphone jack. Thought it was the funniest thing when I overheard the night jock saying he had 'cranked up the bass'. Hmmm I'm sure I locked the O6!?
 
Back when I was working in Rochester about 25 years ago, I had some good, clean fun with our new Lexicon delay box.

I was working late in the prod studio, and as usual, the evening jock (who was quite the chatterbox) came over while her music carts were playing to talk about everything under the sun. I really wanted to concentrate on getting my project finished, so while she was back in the air studio, I patched the air monitor through the Lexicon, set it for a 1.3 second loop, then put it in bypass.

After the stopset, she was back in the prod studio talking again, so it was time for the joke. After making sure she could hear the air monitor in the background, I waited a few seconds then quietly reached under the console and hit the button to take the Lexicon out of bypass. As soon as she heard her cart "skipping", she panicked and went dashing back to the air studio, stared at the ITC triple-decker... then it dawned on her that carts don't skip!

If looks could kill...
 
I had a morning show that requested that the CD players be configured to a warning light, so that when there was 20 seconds remaining in a track playing on-air a warning light went off.

Much to our engineer's amusement, he grabbed the brightest stobe light he could get, and hooked it up to the cd players.

I had to keep the morning show from strangling our engineer.
 
I worked for a chief that liked to send greenhorns out to check dry pairs before basketball season. Instead of lugging all the standard gear out he gave them an army field phone and would send them on their way. Once they got there they were to use the pots line to call the engineer and get the info on what line to test. The chief would then give them the circuit number. They would lay down the pots line and connect the field phone. Meanwhile on the other end the the chief counted to 3 and started to furiously turn the crank on the field phone. You could hear clear across the room the yell let out by the jr. engineer on the other end as he made "contact".

Needless to say you never fell for this one twice.
 
I had the worst one done to me, and it was one of the simplest. We'd been working on a shared plant, and at one point, the feed from the radio to the combiner input seperated at a union while there was power on it, making a nice FLASHBANG and lighting up all the safties. I rather red facedly cleand the bullet up and put the thing back together and made sure it was properly anchored. And began walking things back up to power. It took about half an hour in that plant for the filters to come up to temperature enough to take full power without VSWR faulting, so those of us who were there got drinks from the QT and sat around babysitting the thing and running the power up in increments. When I got it to full boogie, I got a stool and got up to feel the union which had come loose, to make sure it wasn't getting hot. Jim Dougherty (I believe 'twas he, he's gone now) sneaked up behind me, and stomped his half gallon Coke cup on the concrete floor, with the perfect report of all time. I had to do without drawers for the remainder of the evening, and have grey in my hair sooner than I otherwise would.
 
Bubble wrap on the floor behind the racks.

"Reset" buttons that do nothing more than prevent calls at 2 am.

On the old multi-line Bell sets you remove the lockout links on the line buttons. Then, when a pesky listener calls (again!!!), call the competition then push the two lines in. Then listen to the fun!

Jocks: NEVER leave your briefcase (with only a towel, keys, and your headphones in it?!?) laying around. It may keep turning up in the ladies lavatory. Oh, and your car may now be found across and down the street from where you parked it.

Randomly turn on EVERY alarm and warning light in the studio at the same time.

The simple fun of turning off the lights and potting down the monitor in a studio while they're out smoking.
 
I assume you're in Boise... Is Kip Guth still kicking around there? When last I saw him, he'd sold his stations to Clear Channel. Did he buy them back in the recent selloff, or is he still At Liberty living on the interest?
 
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Oh some of these are classic. I especially love Watt's. I may have to document my prank experience in installments. Early on in the 90's when digital automation was in its infancy, we had an audio delivery computer that had a DOS menu on the front page. There were menu items like "record audio", "play audio" etc that took you to sub menu's. It was all a DOS routine. On one of the menu items, we titled it "Never select this item". Under that item, we placed a .bat file that had the massive 386 with 11 gigs of SCSI storage type the entire directory of everything in storage on screen....it took a long time for it all to whiz by on the screen. then it paused and displayed a message "Everything in this system will be erased select any key"...there was no choice, no exit, and the next key you struck simply made everything in the directories whiz by again.....

It only took a week or so before.....

The stammering and stuttering call from the busybody overnight FM jock, confessing he had erased all of the AM computer data and apologizing up and down was priceless.
 
About ten years ago we had a good natured, but problematic employee that liked to get in the way, to the point where they would walk in front of you while you were analyzing a problem and then while blocking your view offer some off the wall comment.

For example, the beam voltage on the UHF transmitter would not come up, due to the HV relay not pulling in, (control ladder problem). Said employee surmised that it was probably due to a problem in the exciter since he thought it wasn't reading right.

We finally picked up a phone book and wrote down the name and address of a dozen part's places and sent him on his way looking for fallopian tubes for the exciter IPA.
 
This one is military, but it fits. During the Late Unpleasantness in SEA, we had a light colonel who made it his project to 'take care' of all the troops. (We were a tactical airbase comm squadron) One day he was harassing the radar operators, and noticed the noise spikes at the bottom of the glideslope display. He spent a bit of time pestering the scopedope, who was trying to get an airplane landed,until the troop said "Colonel, it's just grass on the glideslope, it doesn't hurt anything." So he hies himself to the combined maintenance facility and goes for the Sergeant on duty, who happend to be me. Who realized this citizen had no idea what the controller meant by 'grass', and who realized also he hadn't the mental moxie or training to understand electrical noise or troop nomenclature. So I told him we weren't authorized anything in our shop to do away with the grass, and he should check with the First Sergeant. Who had walked out of Pusan as a young man, and who countenanced exactly zero crap, from officers or airmen. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when he asked the unit commander if he would mind hearing an unusual request for a moment. Top shared what he heard with the rest of us over beer that evening, but admitted he didn't stay in the commander's officer beyond the time it took to report and say " Lt Colonel >stupid< had a manpower request you will have to approve for me."
 
Ahh back in the days of good clean radio fun.

The new all night jock at a rock station in Knoxville was on his first shift. A jock from a competitor called him up on the hotline (hey we all knew everyone's hotline number) and told him he was the engineer, sorry he hadn't had a chance to get by and say hi.

The jock was told that they were having troubles with the remote controls. Please reach behind him and quickly turn the carrier off and then right back on again..... OK, again. Ahhh, I see the problem....now turn it off while I rewire the framistan filter and please don't turn it back on until I call you again or I'll get electrocuted and killed.

The station was off the air til the PD woke up at 5:30 in the morning.

Another oldie but goodie involved the use of reel to reels. The play by play guy at the stadium was listening to himself over the air. Board op puts the game feed into record, plays the output of the reel to reel at 1 7/8 back on the air. Of course you had to wait til just the right moment.... He's at the forty, the 35, the thirty, (flip), the twennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

Of course today's announcers are used to some delay but the sight of headphones flying into the bleachers was a sight to behold.
 
To add to the fun with reel to reels, though not quite a prank, involved a NASCAR race circa 1969. The announcer and the engineer would replay a race late Sunday evening, remember this was pre MRN. The race wasn't always sold out and both the announcer and engineer were operating beyond a forty hour week. So during the local breaks the engineer would forward fast the tape a few laps, okay lots of laps since it was recorded at 1 7/8 ips. I'm sure a listener was confused when the race was at lap 75 going into commercials and lap 150 when the commercials were done.
 
A station in Columbus playing classical music had it's share of over serious people working there. One person in particular was a stickler for no noise occurring in adjoining studios and hallways while he did his program. He was also the hardest on engineering types trying to get work done or not repairing items in "his" studio quickly enough. This went on for years. One day he asked for a cough switch to be installed. This was back in the early 70's when cough switches were virtually unheard of. Well as usual he was not happy with the time it took to install such a device and he read the Chief Engineer the riot act. Engineering decided to get even.
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I was amused to see this lead of the pranks thread. I think however the event predated the 70's as it occurred in the old studios before the move to the new broadcast center on North Campus. The gentleman who was the victim was a drama critic for the "Citizen Journal" who also considered himself an actor, he participated in local community theater.

The show he did was broadcast on the AM side, not the FM where the music was programmed for the most part. His show involved him reading from various novels and acting out the characters in different voices and accents. He was a "perfectionist" and a prissy person not loved by the engineering or the rest of the staff for that matter. The old studios were somewhat cramped and not very soundproof either. Because of the space issues an industrial vacuum used by engineering was of necessity stored in one of the studios and thus led to the equipment being present for the prank.

The rest was pretty much as described, the relay was wired between the cough button and the cleaning machine. When he got a tickle, he hit the button, which did not mute the mike as intended but fired up the vacuum on air. He was livid and refused to speak to anyone for months.
 
I remember spending several hours relaxing in a soft, comfy chair at the transmitter site whilst a certain fussy tin-eared PD instructed me on processing tweaks over the voice line, doing exactly nothing while interjecting a "how's that?" every so often until he decided it was just right. ;D

Not exactly a prank, I guess, but extremely satisfying.
 
Two cute incedents... ok, maybe you had to be there... the first was in the early 70's. There was a fellow who used to get some serious munchies every midnight, and he always hit his complex stash of ice creams which nearly filled a freezer compartment. We put a box of frozen peas in there with a radio in it. We ran a trigger wire from the door bulb to the next room where there was a cassette machine and an fm transmitter. George lost it when he heard the box of peas talking to him. He was finally SURE he had too much to smoke...

Another time at a recording studio they had a real metal plate reverb in a "sort of" 'soundproofed' closet. I went in and gaffer taped one of those chirping bird christmas tree ornaments on to the side of the wood crate, and connected it to a timer so it would start about midway through the late-night rock n roll mixing shift. The fun and games went on for nearly a week before the late night mixer finally said something about it, and he thought there was an attic chamber he didn't know about! The rest of us found it WAY funnier than he did, but eventually he appreciated it.

Told you ya had to be there...!
 
Doctor Wu....that brings back memories.....

we once had a 'consultant' who insisted that there was a phasing problem with a Revox playback

I jumped the two channels to mono and he insisted it was 'still there'

I fed him rope: 'maybe you'd better look at how I've got it wired, there might be something about this Revox I'm not familiar with, etc'

unknown to me, the announcers (who hated this guy as much as I did) had hung a sign on the terminal strip where I did the jumpering saying 'Idiot Consultant Trap (patent pending)'

I can still hear the rack door slamming as he walked out, never to return
 
one more, same consultant

claimed the 25 Hz filters in the automation were 'causing phase shift'

sent us a new set, which remained in the box until he pronounced the system 'cured by his custom filters'

at which point I told the receptionist to 'make sure he gets this box just before he leaves' and went home
 
soundoctor said:
Two cute incedents... ok, maybe you had to be there... the first was in the early 70's. There was a fellow who used to get some serious munchies every midnight, and he always hit his complex stash of ice creams which nearly filled a freezer compartment. We put a box of frozen peas in there with a radio in it. We ran a trigger wire from the door bulb to the next room where there was a cassette machine and an fm transmitter. George lost it when he heard the box of peas talking to him. He was finally SURE he had too much to smoke...

Another time at a recording studio they had a real metal plate reverb in a "sort of" 'soundproofed' closet. I went in and gaffer taped one of those chirping bird christmas tree ornaments on to the side of the wood crate, and connected it to a timer so it would start about midway through the late-night rock n roll mixing shift. The fun and games went on for nearly a week before the late night mixer finally said something about it, and he thought there was an attic chamber he didn't know about! The rest of us found it WAY funnier than he did, but eventually he appreciated it.

Told you ya had to be there...!
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I dunno soundoctor... That first one cracked me up, and I wasn't there. ;D Now if only you could have rigged an ice cream carton to do that ;)

R
 
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