Reddit Prank Goes Horribly Wrong - Tales From the Internet 

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Whenever you hear the words "Reddit" and "prank" together, you know for certain something must have went seriously wrong

I used to work at an online music instrument and accessories store. We were once called by a customer asking for a replacement metronome because "the bomb squad blew our first up". Here's what happened: We sent out a digital metronome like we normally do but while in transit it accidentally got turned on. It arrived at an office for one of the staff. The post room heard a ticking box and thought it was a bomb (even though bombs only tick in cartoons) so called the bomb squad who then did a controlled explosion on it. Just in case.

The best part about this "Prank gone wrong" story is it's implied that the huge trouble it caused wasn't even entirely because of the noises the device was solely made for, it's just the manager discovering a piece of a circuit board and immediately thought it was something out of a James Bond movie.

The one I had was programmable. I made mine say "Hey! Are you there?!?!?" And hid it on the duct work right beside my dad's head where he slept in his loft. About 2 months go by and he never mentions anything. So one day I try to bait him without being obvious. "Hey dad , have you been experiencing anything weird in the apartment lately?" "Yeah!" He said "Every night before I go to bed and sometimes in the middle of the night I hear a voice calling your name." (For some reason he thought it was saying "Hey Craig!") So I asked him why he hadn't mentioned a ghost girl beckoning his son in the middle of the night and he just sort of shrugs and says "I dunno. Weird shit happens to me all of the time. I've just learned to ignore it."

Having worked in a bank before, I KNEW they were going to jump to the "it might be a bomb!" conclusion, and I wasn't disappointed.

ThinkGeek was the biggest victim in this story. The moment they got bought by GameStop, it was over.

I was having a few tokes with a friend one night and he passed out. As I was leaving, he woke up and I say "See ya later... When you start to smell it you'll know" and casually left. He texts me 15 minutes later " WHAT DID YOU DO?!?!?!?!?!". Me: "Don't worry, you'll find it when it starts to stink really bad." He spent most of his free time over the next two weeks to discover what I hid: nothing. I hid nothing at all, it drove him nuts for 2 weeks. I'm glad he had a sense of humour about it, we got a good laugh.

I actually annoy-o-tron'd myself accidentally. I'd bought something from ThinkGeek that for some reason came bundled with a free one. I'm not really the pranking the sort of guy (due to a past office prank that also went wrong), so I stuck it in my "electronics stuff" drawer and forgot about it. Fast forward... several years, I'm sure, and I start hearing a random drawn out dying bleep noise. At this point I'd completely forgotten about it shoved in the back of the drawer and spent a long time looking at smoke alarms, CO alarms, computers, and everything trying to find it. Finally after a couple weeks of it I finally found it, apparently it'd drifted to the back of the drawer and fallen down inside the cabinet at some point, which knocked the switch on. The battery barely had a charge, which is why it was sounding so weird. So yeah, I did it to myself.

My father used the EvilTron on us kids. Put it on the top of our ceiling fan. We thought the room was getting haunted, because the EvilTron, instead of a beep, and instead of consistent intervals, would randomly make an assortment of noises ranging from thumping to scratching to a whisper ("Hey, can you hear me?") We tried to get several adults to look into it and once one of them heard it he finally shook his head, went to our room and yanked the device out LOL

My sister once placed one of the evil-trons under her friend's bed one time, and because that one has a voice whisper "hey, can you hear me?" At random intervals, her friend thought her home was haunted. Apparently she was tormented so much that she brought in a literal exorcist to get rid of the "demon" in her room. Because of this, my sister never admitted that this was her fault lol

stuck an annoyatron in my friend's car but I unfortunately didn't factor in that my friend's car is a pile of crap so he just thought it was the car making another weird noise and ignored it till the battery died and when it finally stopped beeping all he had to say was "guess it fixed itself"

I slipped a sedative into my cousin's drink and while they were asleep surgically implanted one in their abdominal cavity. CLASSIC.

7:35 "The Canadian feds suspect that the little annoy-o-tron might be a bomb" Jesus and I though America's feds were incompetent

"It's possibly a bomb. And - judging by its size - it could have enough C4 on it to severely scratch that small lock on your 10-year-old's diary, maybe even leave a black stain. We've never seen anything like it. Execute extreme caution."

My brother had a version that would alternate between different fart sounds. I eventually was able to ignore it after he set it under the couch cushion and had it fall through a hole into the couch. However, until the battery died, every hour a rip would be heard and my dad would have a cow. 6 whole months of couch farts and dad yells.

Not quite the same as a noise maker prank, but I had a dream where there was an alarm clock going off and every time I turned it off another one would go off somewhere else. This went on repeatedly until I finally woke up to find out my actual alarm had been going off for 10 minutes.

I worked at a TV station from the late 1990s until 2013. It was a fun work environment in the early years there. My coworkers put an annoyance beeping device in our department managers office. The manager was an English guy, kinda crazy that was constantly telling jokes, they figured he'd get a kick out of being pranked. The manager, Jon, was in his office a lot of each workday. My office was next to his. These were open door offices with paper thin walls. My coworkers thought Jon would be bothered by the device right away. They thought he'd call our resident PC tech to have him come and check the PC. so the tech guy was in on the prank too and was going to come, ask Jon what he'd done to his PC before spending time checking it out and finally declaring it was not the PC. Tech guy was then going to say it was not a PC issue to call Sam the maintenence guy because it had to be something to do with the office lights or heating. Sam was in on it and was supposed to come up and say it was a PC warning beep. lol The first day passes and Jon didn't say a word. More days pass and nothing. I could hear the beeping from my office and I could hear it when I was in Jon's office. It was really annoying to sit with Jon in his office helping him on the PC, his computer skills were notoriously bad so I was in his office often especially if he was trying to use Excel. I'd hear it beeping while in his office but didn't want to say anything and ruin the prank.. so I kept quiet. Hearing it constantly from my office was starting to really bother, omg it was worse than trying to sleep in a room with a loudly ticking clock but it never seemed to bother Jon at all. Finally after about 3 weeks I was in Jon's office and when the thing beeped I asked Jon if he heard it. Jon said yes, he heard it all the time. I asked him if he knew what it was. He said he didn't know but that whatever it was it didn't bother him. He said everything was working fine so he tuned it out. He said he figured it was something with the computer but no big deal. I didn't tell him what it was but later that day I told the guy that had put it in Jon's office about Jon not caring and also how the thing was driving me crazy so my coworker removed it from Jon's office. The only one that wound up being annoyed by the prank was me, lol. Jon wasn't deaf but he was a father, we figured he'd developed a really strong ability to tune out noises because he had 2 young daughters that we knew, from office visits, had high pitched voices and were loud children. Jon also had a wife with a high pitched whiny voice. Jon had evidently really mastered the dad ability to not hearing annoying noise. lol I was sad to hear about Thinkgeek going downhill. I remember it as the go to website back in the day to buy PC and internet related T-Shirts, mousepads, cool gadgets. My son used to request PC related gift items from there pretty often. We early netizens have seen so much change.. I felt a sense of loss when I realized TwoCows was no more and sadly it's been years if not decades since I could talk to a dragon online. I'm afraid to go try to push the big red button. And I haven't gone to my dead Tomagotchi's online gravesite in 20 years. lol

I left an annoyatron at my mothers house. She ended up calling the cops twice thinking someone was in the house trying to kill her 🙃

I remember back in the day there was this program we would sometimes install in coworkers/classmates computers that would just randomly move their cursor a bit from time to time. It was hilarious seeing them misclick everything and then think their mouse or computer was broken. There was also this one prank where we would screnshot their desktop, flip everything in Windows config, hide their icons and then just set the sceenshot as a wallpaper. That way when they tried to move their cursor up it would go down, left would go right, etc. Just some minor harmless pranks to liven up the boring days.

I have to say, a Whang Reddit video that isn't traumatizing and disgusting is a refreshing change of pace

This was how I learned ThinkGeek was ruined. I could never afford the stuff since I'm Scottish and it's an American company, but I spent ages just looking through all the cool stuff. Sites like Firebox carry on the torch, but I dreamed of being able to get some of those things as a kid. I wanted to go on a ThinkGeek shopping spree when I moved to America, something I still haven't done. Looks like when I get there I'm gonna have to find something else.

The second you said the prank device would beep at a low frequency i immediately knew where this was going.

Reddit and the phrase “going wrong” really do tend to go together well. Edit: hi whang, could you maybe do a video on a piece of lost media called “Casey’s Cave Entry”?

I don't know how to feel about the very second you said "it emits a barely audible beeping sound" I *INSTANTLY* knew the mounties were gonna think it was a bomb, I just KNEW it was gonna come to that!!!

still mostly just confused why the canadian feds would let someone take home a mysterious gadget that is potentially a bomb or listening device or why anyone would want that in their car to begin with

What I learned from all this is that people actually think bombs beep like in the movies

Decades before the annoyotron I studied on a technical high school (this is a thing here in Brazil) that taught electronics: one day a teacher was annoyed by something and moved the blackboard (that was green) corner out of the wall (it was kind of loose): there was a BIG PCB whit a high frequency oscillator behind it that was barely audible. The night shift class had put it there.

Worked as the security director for a large hospital system and their affiliated medical office buildings. After 9/11 the administration was freaked out about security issues for once. We had a huge panic for several hours after somebody dropped a powder sugar doughnut on the floor of and elevator! It was of corse Anthrax without a doubt in the gossip mill.

Wow, this is actually hard to watch cause I had an experience very similar to this in my younger years. A small prank gone awry that didn't lose me my job but definitely set the tone for my employment there until I left.

Having visited the Google offices in NYC, it definitely gave me adult daycare vibes.

God damn. Imagining the dead silence after he admitted that it was him. So humiliating

"you kinda expect some bodily fluid, some sex stuffs" I feel so attacked but yes.

I had thee downstairs neighbor's smoke alarm beeping once every few minutes for a week and that drove me nuts. I couldn't hear it while watching TV or sleeping, at least. I eventually confronted them and they said they were working from home and just ignoring it. WHAT?

Old Think Geek was awesome. And Things You Never Know Existed was a huge part of my childhood. Circling things to buy. Only ever having enough money to buy like three things.

My dad had one of those little circuit boards that made cricket noises in the dark and hid it inside of an Ethernet port at his old office. Building maintenance ended up getting called to tear the place apart because they thought it was an alarm going off. He never fessed up to it because if they knew he did it he’d have been responsible for paying the maintenance people personally. Nice going, dad. 😅

I fear those things. I get wound up really bad with noises like that (look up Misophonia). When I found out these existed I dreaded the day my friends discovered it. It's never happened to me but I'm 95% sure I'd go crazy if I couldn't find it .

If they had a sticker on the back that said " annoyotron" or printed on the circuit board , the really dire issues wouldn't happen . If the target of the prank finds it , good enough ,right? Unless the point is to really terrorize them

In the early 00's I worked in a machine shop as a tool maker and production setup person. There were about a dozen of us on 2nd shift, each with 3-4 machines for which we were responsible. Since you couldn't watch each machine simultaneously, the more experienced of us learned to monitor by sound. Our lone maintenance person, whom I'll refer to here as Lurch, was our own walking Annoyotron. He loves playing pranks, yet was consistently offended when his victim got pissed off. One of those dudes. His victim, let's call him Dwight, was an unassuming nice guy, whose machine center was perfectly located for Lurch's newest idea. Lurch had access to the roof for maintaining the air conditioning and circulation units. He realized one day that one of the sunlight windows(I can't remember what they're called) was right over Dwight's workbench. Lurch proceeded to lightly tap on the window, which subsequently sent Dwight on an hour long search for the source of the noise. Lurch thought this was absolutely hilarious. So he proceeded to continue to do this every day both guys were there and he could get to the roof. Not for a week. Not for even a month. 6 damn months this went on. So, I'm not a rat. I wasn't going to give up the secret. I did appeal to Lurch to come clean, but I suppose he wasn't the kinda dude that could do that on his own. Dwight did finally figure out where the tapping noise was coming from. Not before it had him cursing in frustration, doing everything he could to locate the noise. I'm not sure exactly when Dwight figured it out, but the scenario played out exactly as I had warned Lurch that it would. The entire shift of setup guys and Lurch were called to a meeting where we got reamed by the shift manager for the waste of time and resources. We were told we were behaving like third graders and ought to be ashamed. Also, we were told to expect another meeting at the beginning of work the next day with the plant supervisor and the VP of the company. Lastly, the shift supervisor asks Dwight if he has anything he'd like to say. Dwight nods, stands up, looks around the room and says, "Gotcha!"

Say what you want about office jobs, after years of being shit on by people daily in retail I got into Macy's corporate and it was the best job I've ever had. I'll take monotony, cubicles, fluorescent lights, and free coffee and donuts over receiving death threats over coupons

I think I still have one in a box somewhere. But I also supplied one to a friend who hid one in a classroom at school. The report was that the next period class found it pretty fast and snapped it in half when they did.

We had something very similar, I work in an office in the Air Force and someone put a device down that would every now and then, very softly say “hello? can you hear me?”. Everyone was going crazy thinking we were being listened in on and hacked by a foreign agency, but thankfully it was resolved very quickly and without detriment to the person who placed it

This easily could've been in an episode of The Office with Dwight freaking out think it's a bug or bomb. 🤣🤣🤣

Some say the man who invented the annoy a tron is still trapped in Brazil by the FBI for bomb scares.

As soon as you mentioned the beeping device I knew exactly where this was gonna go. Someone put one in my school and the bomb squad were called. Kid ended up getting expelled

There used to be a chain of novelty stores in Canada called “San Francisco” that sold all that sort of stuff, got me kicked out of school on a couple occasions 😂😂

I have a doctor who shirt from think geek, I had no idea the site was mostly gone. That was actually my very first online purchase, as I finally convinced my grandma that the computer was not going to eat up her credit card.

Back in late highshcool I hid an annoy-a-tron in my friend's ceiling panel at their rental apartment, as they had aged out of the foster care system and were on their own. I came back the next morning to go "Haha got you!" but was greeted by the tired sunken eyes of her and her boyfriend, and they were very hesitant to let me in. When they finally did, the place was DESTROYED!! They ripped out stuffing from the couch (almost all of it), all of the cabinet doors were open and drawers taken out, everything was on the floor. I almost..didn't want to tell them it was a prank. I asked "Lose something?" And they said "Oh..just..looking for a cigarette." I had to use the bathroom to compose myself and noticed drug paraphernalia (used burnt spoons, lighters, that sort of thing) and went *ooooooh.* I came back and told her "Don't be mad...but uh.. You remember the annoy-a-trons from Ms.Gibson's class last year?" And the realization on her face. Then relief. Her boyfriend exclaimed "We thought we were bugged!!" and she asked "But WHERE is it?? We looked everywhere!" and I pointed to the ceiling tile. He got up, opened it, it still took him so long to find and get it down (magnetic, stuck to inner frame under a lip.) They were just relieved. I looked into my friend's eyes for a long time and didn't say anything, and left. I think she got the hint, and as far as I know, she actually (almost immediately) became drug free! I know relapses happen, but she soon had children and became a home health nurse, got a house and a car. :)

I wonder if any of the Annoy-a-trons came with a timer/delayed activation feature of 30+ days. I ask because most security systems are automated these days; no one actually looks at the footage anymore unless a problem is found. The system of most models deletes old footage after thirty days.

I think coming clean was probably the smart move. Even if chances are low that they'd link it to him, that also depends on how bad a liar he is, and his continued conscious and composure afterward. If he was found trying to hide his guilt, things could have gone much worse for him. So his coming clean likely had a hand in being backed up to keep his job.

As a parent and former teacher, I’m pretty much a professional at blocking out annoying, repetitive, sounds. The tinnitus probably helps 😅. I can’t imagine going to those lengths BEFORE asking the staff if they knew anything about it.

"Nobody at the office understands my sense of humor" is just another way of saying "I'm that weird guy at the office that nobody wants to run into in the break room"

That prank went really well actually, everyone was scared for life after this

A friend of mine had shown me this thing on the website back when I was in college and we lived together, and some time later, I started hearing the beep in my room. It took me a couple of hours to find it, tucked in an inside pocket of a jacket I never used. So I just turned it off and placed it elsewhere. Weeks later, he admits that he bought one and hid it in my room, and asked if I have it because he couldn't find it where he put it, and I just told him I had no idea what he was talking about. I think I still have it in a box somewhere

I know that the RCMP is more famous, but the fact CSIS got involved shows that it’s really serious. To give you an idea, people who work at CSIS are not allowed to tell people they work there

I love that he has the music from the DOOM mod "Going Down" in the background 😂

Redditors going outside is always a recipe for disaster

The bit where he steels his nerves and then proceeds to take the dumbest possible course of action is classic Reddit

One time I bought three of those annoy-a-tron prank sound makers and one April fools day I hid them around the house to wait for my roommates to start searching for the beeping. Then I pretended to help my roommates search for the source, which I did in order to secretly keep changing the location of them to places I knew they had already looked, then I hid one in my roommate's lunch box when he went to work so that the sound followed him, he was losing it. They had all these theories about what was making the sound and what was going on, everyone forgot to check the date.

My friend's father really did him wrong over some stuff, and we both seriously considered hiding similar devices all over his place. Didn't go through with it, but his stupid ass probably would have thought it was a spy device too.

Everytime I see you upload something, I HAVE to stop everything, and click the video, but not for the content. No. I watch your video's because of the glorious and hypnotizing caterpillar dancing on your upper lip while you speak. It mesmerizes me, it makes me go into almost a trance. Never stop making video's, please.

sometime when i was in elementary school we had a secondary gym teacher come in (i think she was a student teacher). she was there for about two years when suddenly a cricket showed up in one of the air vents and wouldn't go away. it was up in there for months and they even sat us down to warn us about it. however it was eventually revealed to be just a little noisemaker the second gym coach put in the vent to troll the first coach. i miss those days

When I moved into a townhouse, I left a few boxes of stuff in the basement, next to all the electric and phone lines. I forgot one box had a smoke detector in it (new place already had some up). Couple months later it starts to low-battery beep. Not remembering it was in the box, I ended up cutting every phone line and a few electric lines (breaker box turned off, I'm not a complete idiot) before phoning the office for a maintenance guy, who found out what it was. Hour of stripping and taping wires back together and it was good. Maintenance dude was great and never told the office. I loved that place; it was on the Kalamazoo River and a friendly squirrel would eat peanut butter out of your spoon in your hand.

Just last week someone put an annoyatron (or something similar) in my profs shared office. Every so often he'll pull a bunch of stuff into the hallway, wait for the beep, realize it was in that stuff, and put it back in his office. To my knowledge he still hasn't found anything

0:04 I work in an office and been covering my boss who is in the hospital I’ve been working over 52 hours a week… for almost a month soul draining is an understatement

One of my favorite running gags on this channel is the pictures of wrestlers whose gimmicks are related to the topic (The Mountie for the RCMP, FBI for the more famous FBI, Right to Censor for pro-censorship groups, etc.)

Whang also known for his critically acclaimed role in the Netflix hit series “You” as “one of the moving guys”

I pranked Tim Horton once and he came and killed me

In Electronics class, we have an electronics kit that has a section on how to make your own annoy-a-tron. It's not quite the same as it's light-based, and it creates one single drone. Its still fun build the circuits and gizmos.

4:18 I've actually soldered one of these things before. I think it was last year specifically, you can build one pretty easily with a breadboard and by just following a schematic. You can (for the most part) adjust the time delay between beeps by swapping some things. I think the longest we were able to get it to with the stuff in the classroom was around 2-3 minutes. So if you really want the parts, they're very good for annoying people.

When I was in high school, a guy hid one of these devices in the classroom and the beeps drove everyone mad in just a day, then during recess, the guy that planted it, revealed it was him and that it was a prank, he was beaten by 9 other students that afternoon after he left school.

Babe wake up, new Whang video just dropped

Oh man, I remember ThinkGeek Christmas shopping back in like 2012. My mom bought a few neat desk gadgets, and I still have a ThinkGeek monkey sticker on my old laptop. Really sucks how badly they've fallen. I cherish the few years I got to spend browsing for nerdy gifts for my friends

What's funny is that everyones first reaction was that it was something sinister, like a bug or bomb. The manager never once thought, "Am I or is my position important enough to spy on/blow up?" Never did they consider it might be something simple or innocent. Further she never considered getting any of her tech experts to check it out. Just went straight for the industrial espionage explanation.

This made me think of those anti loitering devices they have outside of shops that only young teenagers can hear lol

Sounds like the pivotal mistake was placing it behind a poster, something which shouldn't normally beep-thus becoming a very obvious place to check when the sound comes from that direction. And furthermore appearing much more suspicious when a circuitboard is then found where circuitboards are not normally found.

My family used to get the ThinkGeek catalogue and I lived in fear as a kid of my older brothers buying an annoyatron and putting it in my room. I was so paranoid that one time I THOUGHT I heard a beep in my room and I started tearing it apart to find the annoyatron. There wasn't one. I was just so terrified of the concept of an annoyatron being in my bedroom that I gaslight myself into hearing one. I think I win a world record or something for that.

I would specifically get a group of people in the office in on the prank, and have one person not know about it and just gaslight them. "We don't hear any beeps, it must be in your head"

Every time you see an RCMP agent you know you're in for a bad time

That's on the mounties not being able to recognise a tweeter from a bomb. Any first year electrical engineering student would have been able to identify it as harmless.

This was going on with me for about 2 months straight until I realized discord stays open in the background when you close it and you have to go into ur operations and quit the app

A coworker just tried pranking me with this a day after your video came out. Thanks for the heads up Justin!

My dad got the annoy-a- tron to prank a fellow teacher. He put it up in the ceiling and it took the dude pretty much the entire day to locate it.

For anyone wondering, the bg music throughout most of the story is by Cyriak.

I built one of these for my beginner electronics class in high school. It was called a "noisy cricket" when I picked the kit to build. It was fairly simple to assemble, just a bit of soldering. Mine had a light sensor and would only activate in the dark. I left it my my friend's room when I was hanging out one day but he found it after a few nights of it going off.

Ahh ThinkGeek....I used to have the mini universal remote that attached to your keychain (the "Ninja Remote") I would turn the TVs off at Best Buy. I also bought caffeinated soap, the speaker T-shirt (that was an actual speaker on your shirt).. Kinda sad it devolved into selling FunkoPops & cheap bargain bin crap.

I like how they found a piece of circuit board the size of 2 quarters and immediately assumed it was a bomb. Like what is it supposed to blow up? A rat?

Giant props to that guy for being honest!

I never had an annoyatron, but I had an evilTron which is a variant of the annoyatron that made scarry noises. It would do 5 noises: Scratching, children laughing, breathing, a door creaking, and “hey can you hear me”. I had three of them so I could hide them in an area and make it hard to narrow down the location of them. Some of my greatest hits were getting my dad to think the refrigerator was haunted, triggering a houseguest’s PTSD from his time in the military, Getting a coworkers medication upped, driving a bunch of stoners crazy, and convincing 40 coworkers there workplace was haunted. I miss my evilTron’s

"As the kind of person who double checks everything a million times" Can relate

this just helped solve a mystery for me that I forgot about. 15 plus years ago I heard a beep that went on for a while and could not locate the culprit. now I know

"when she heard it was a bomb she burst into tears and almost drove the car into a ditch" - Sounds like the prank of the year to me.

Attached the Annoy-o-Tron to the bottom of an office rolling chair, guy started disassembling everything in his cubicle looking for it and the best part was that because he kept moving the chair while searching the source of the sound kept moving as well. We eventually fessed up, he was a good sport about it, and we spent years using it on new hires.

I RECONGIZE THAT GOING DOWN MUSIC!!! You never will stray away from the doom community will you bio?

Love the music choice for this video. Going Down is a great WAD.

Reddit took the "It's just a prank bro" to a whole new level of extreme, and I wouldn't be surprised that it can be just as bad as the RU-vid pranks. Both of them failed to become the next _Just For Laughs Gags._

My close knit, 40-person IB cult-type group burried in the public high school somehow got a hold of a device of this type (I don’t know if it was an official “anoy-o-tron”, or if it was just the chip out of a talking stuffed animal or other toy), around the time we discovered a loose ceiling panel in our 1960’s bomb-shelter ass classroom, right above the desk reserved for the teacher. Needless to say that thing went up there right before our class with our love-hate Theory of Knowledge teacher. Good times.

The moustache man graces us once again

Jesus Christ this is worse than that time an email almost got me expelled from a public school

Having just heard about it, I wonder if we'll see a Tales From The Internet on the Better Hoagie Down story.