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Best Engineering Related Pranks

I wonder if Gary's consultant was the same we had back in the 70's. Mr consultant insisted on flipping L & R channels on the hot/current reels....well he was the expert and had done this in several markets with "sucess". He beleived that by switching the left/right on some wide seperated songs the station would stand out. It did one reel at a time! Those too young to remember, the 25 hz cue track was in the left channel only.....so the reel played heads to tails. I could have modified the decks but he said it was not nessesary.

Lane
 
i thought i'd revive this topic to see if there were any other good pranks.

i've heard the classic "hide under the console after your shift and hit record on the shortcut, wait until the next jock cracks the mic and jump out and/or grab their legs and scream.
 
studiofart said:
i thought i'd revive this topic to see if there were any other good pranks.

i've heard the classic "hide under the console after your shift and hit record on the shortcut, wait until the next jock cracks the mic and jump out and/or grab their legs and scream.
Click to expand...

This wasn't a prank...at least I don't think it was a prank. I was doing a newscast and when I started the cart for the spot, it seemed a little strange. I said, "the news is brought to you by (name of restaurant)". I started what was supposed to be a spot for a restaurant, but the cart started with the sound of a tractor-trailer rig starting and idling. That was sort of strange, I thought. Then, the sound of the eighteen-wheeler starting down the road, changing gears. By now, I was wondering where this was leading. Where was the message of this commercial?!! It was the sound of an eighteen-wheeler for thirty seconds! That was it! I had serious difficulty making it through the rest of the newscast.

Someone had removed the cart from the control room and put it in production. When it was discovered that it had been removed in error, someone put it back in its spot in the control room. The label hadn't been removed, but someone else had used it to record the sound effects for another spot!
 
This is NOT mine, a friend told me about it ... in fact my friend was the Master Mind:

A small AM in the Northeast was undergoing a complete "makeover" and a 150' tower had to be dropped in order to do the proof. So one Sunday morning he went out and loosened up the guy wires and let the thing rip. Down it came, just as gentle as could be and landed in a bunch of brush. He promptly went into the station and walked into the control room, acting all ticked off, and started grilling the jock on the air. "DID YOU PUSH 14 LOWER??? DID YOU PUSH 14 LOWER??" The jock in a panic said 'NO! I just took a set of readings, I swear!' He then brought the jock outside and showed him the tower in the brush and said, "THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PUSH 14 LOWER!!! YOU MUST'VE HIT IT BY MISTAKE!!!" Well, as you can imagine, the jock didn't know whether to crap his pants or wind his watch! Finally the "friend" paid off the joke and the jock, totally relieved, breathed a total sigh of relief.

Absolutely masterful ... that was beautiful! Wish *I* could take credit for it!

C-
 
The Sales Manager at the little AM/FM combo I worked at was completely humorless. Which meant that we went to special trouble to think of ways to provoke him. ;)

One winter when he went on vacation to someplace warm, he left his car in the station parking lot. I guess it had been raining, and then it froze. The lot became a slippery sheet of ice.
I can't remember who first noticed it, but one of us realized we could easily slide his car on the ice, so we spun it around, and pushed it across the lot, leaving it at an odd angle away from the rest of the cars.

By the time the SM returned, the weather was sunny and warm, and the pavement perfectly dry.
When he asked me if I knew what had happened, it was all I could do to keep my poker face. He never did figure out how his car moved across the lot. :D

He became the new GM. :-\
He thought he was the King of Promotion. Somewhere he came up with a set of huge Warner Brothers cartoon character costumes for some hapless employees to wear at remotes, along with a helium tank and a huge supply of balloons to give away to kids.

One evening, after a few beers, we got the idea to stuff the Bugs Bunny costume with bunched-up newspapers to fill it out. Then we figured out how many balloons it would take to launch ol' Bugs, and tied on a few more for good measure. He went on a one-way flight to who knows where.
Went up really fast, IIRC. ;)

Kind Regards,
David
 
The statue of limitations must have run out by now, but back in the 70's a station I was at in CA was planning a format change, very secretly. It was rock, going to country. The boss let me play with the competition, so while still a rocker I started really jacking up the loudness, clipping, compression etc. way beyond anything I would have normally done. Legal but awful! It got quite painful to me. The other station kept trying to keep up or get ahead until they got almost totally distorted. Come sunday night, I swapped out the automation tapes from rock to country, put the prosessing back where I could be proud of it and sat back. It took the other guy weeks to get his shut back down, because his program director seemed to like it that loud! Their next book suffered. Their Engineer called on Monday morning and cussed me out for half an hour. We still are freinds however.
 
The helium tanks usually found around a radio station for filling up kiddy balloons are always fun. One clear summer night in the late 70s I filled up 3 large garbage bags with helium and tied a 30min road flare to them from a short rope. That sucker was visible for the full 30mins and initiated UFO reports. Not as much fun as flying your lawn chair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Walters but the truth is out there somewhere.

Engineers get bored.
 
My favorite was turning the Tower light alarm on at the transmitter every time I was there .. Although unbenounced to the Board op... I would time him and see how long it would take to get a call. the average was 30 minutes.

Also I superglued bus change to the floor behind the talk Host/Board op positions
to see how long it would stay in place... about 3 days I checked on it one morning... and found a note..."Cheap Underpaid Engineer was here, Next time please leave lunch money!" :D

The last one ...

our overnight guy was responsible for vaccuming the control room, Producer/Screener's booth and production control...I took the bag out of the vaccum and intentionally left the bag open... needless to say he also inherited a dusting task... :eek:
 
Former WAKY Louisville PD/Current WAKY-FM air talent Johnny Randolph tells a story of taking over competitor WKLO. He loaded a cassette with WAKY jingles and armed with a portable cassette player, he covertly made his way to the back of the WKLO studios and did the following:

1) Locate the program line to the WKLO transmitter site.
2) Attach the cassette audio to the program line
3) Cut the studio feed.
4) Run like hell!

When management tried to call the transmitter engineer and order him to shut down the transmitter, the line was busy. In the meantime, WAKY jingles played on WKLO.
 
A friend of mine told me one

When they were doing a LIVE NEWS CAST on TV,someone would strip NAKED and stand so they could see them.. (Trying to make them "lose it" on air) -- My friend didnt lose it though.....

I would have ;D
 
Aluminum Foil

LNB- LNA

Replace Blue Plastic Cover
 
The late John Talbert, former chief engineer of WSB/Cox Atlanta, had a great story from a urban station he worked for in the market.
John was one of the nicest people I have ever known - he was always patient and kind - he liked most folks and most folks liked him.(There is a plaque at White Collumns for John - the only engineer in it's istory to get that honor)
Well....it seems there wa a rather troublesome young jock on overnights that was always complaining about something. He calls one early winter morning at 3 AM to tell John, "there's something wrong with the announce mic - it just doesn't *sound right*"
Now instead of telling this guy to take that mic and stuff it somewhere John says, "there's a little hole at the top of the mic muff. Is it facing you or facing the console?"
The jock replies, "facing the console."
John tells him, "well, that's your problem. The mic muff is out of phase. Turn the mic muff until the hole at the top is facing you. Try that and see if it sounds better."
He gets a call five minutes later and the guy is elated. He hasn't sounded that good in MONTHS! The mic muff had obviously been out of phase for some time. He also mentioned that he suspected other mic muffs were out of phase in some of the production rooms - he would check all the mics and make sure the muffs were in phase.
And we complain about computers.......
 
Back in the Harris System 9000 days, early one morning we moved it to another room.
Around 5 am the morning newsman with news and weather carts in hand found nothing but wires hanging from the ceiling. The morning DJ crew said he was a bit shaken up and spent the better part of an hour looking for it.

Not really a planned prank, but we were smiling about the possibilities as we finished up the move.
 
I just found this thread and so far I've spilled Coke in my keyboard and ran the cat out of the room laughing. Ok, I have one for everyone. In the late 70's at WORD/Spartanburg, SC the Collins 21-E main tx had no glass up top where the meters are on the right cabinet where the 3CX2500's and 3CX3000's resided. I went behind the transmitters and lit one of those little cherry bomb-looking smoke bombs and watched the blowers pull it in. The overnight guy could see that cabinet from the control room with a bit of smoke starting to weft from where the meters were. He caught on pretty fast since he heard me busting a gut laughing from back behind the transmitters. Ted was looking ... then looking again .. then shook his head like "no way" and came out in the hallway and was looking down in the transmitter with a "how am I going to explain this one" look on his face.... On the subject of the fake hvac thermostat, I have set one of those up at several places of employment, including my current one ;D It's fun to watch staff stick their heads into engineering and adjust the old thermostat, some of them have been doing that for years!!!
 
Fun with unsupervised headphones:

If the earmuffs are detachable, stuff a layer of napkins or tissue behind them on one side. If left unattended again, switch sides and the fun then escalates.

Also, a fellow who no longer works at my station discovered he could log into the Logitek virtual console for any studio in our cluster from anywhere in the building. One day when a jock he wasn't too crazy about was on shift he waited until he opened his mic then cranked the monitors up full blast from another room. The unsuspecting jock was all but knocked out of his chair when he shut off his mic and the monitors unmuted. I'm pretty sure that was the reason he got fired.
 
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