The Great Emergency Prank War

[murphyle, BSN, RN]

As I've posted on these boards previously, I am a recent grad working nights in emergency at a hospital in the Detroit suburbs. I was recommended to the position by one of my old clinical instructors, who works as a night-shift case manager in this department when she isn't teaching. We had had a very good working relationship in clinical, and still do as colleagues in the EC.

There's just one slight problem. I'm a very calm, collected and generally squared-away individual. Instructor was a stand-up comedian in college. A few other nurses got in on the gag, and thus began the Great EC Prank War; or, Why Working With People You Know Can Backfire...

* Finding rubber vermin on one's charting computer. Always a classic.

* Explaining to patients that it's perfectly normal for their nurse to get prank calls from EC Care Management on the SpectraLink. "I'm reviewing a case you worked on... do you happen to know why exactly the MD ordered a Foley for this patient Mr. P. Freely?"

* Getting one's shirt-tail yanked out while working with hall patients. The nurse who did it ran down the hall yelling "Dweeb!", while the patient (a little old lady with abdominal pain) cracked up laughing.

* Invited to the Care Management office to "hang out with your old school peeps." Instructor had brought in a box of Peeps candies.

* Hiding a stuffed monkey in a fake tree outside the charge nurse office. Charge nurse looked through the window, saw the monkey and cracked up.

* Finding a "Go Buckeyes" sticker on my U of M Alumni coffee mug. Got the perp back by hiding a musical button programmed with "The Victors" under one of his patient charts.

Surely mine isn't the only unit with this kind of tradition. Go ahead and write 'em in!

[franciscangypsy]

we mess with each others pagers. we have the capability of sending text pages to each other and have been known to prank this way.

My preceptor (back when I was on orientation) had sent an excitable charge a page about a fake pt being assigned to the floor. made the pt sound really horrible too! lol. charge laughed with everyone else when she found out that it was a gag.

we have an aide who is convinced this one room is haunted and who won't go near that room if there's no pt in there. so we kept flicking on the call light and jumping out at her. the icing on the cake was when I text-paged her that the pt needed his foley emptied. she blamed the charge and everyone else before I lost it and gave myself away.

She refused to believe it was me at first b/c I had never pranked anyone at work at that point. The rest of the shift she kept telling me she would me back. She never has. But she is now trying to get me to do the same to her orientee and initiate her to the floor "properly". lol

My former preceptor (yeah, she's special) has also left an (unopened) maxipad on my computer after a stressful shift. It didn't register at first (I was tired) and I turned to the oncoming nurse -- "this yours?". My preceptor, the off-going charge, and the other nurse "in" on it just bust out laughing. It was a good end to a horrible shift.

Apparently people on my floor have also put mucomyst on toast and then scattered it around the trending computer. It must have STUNK in there and apparently it took forever for people to figure out what was going on. lol. This was before my time there, though.

[javanurse2000, BSN, RN]

Night shift --- practice dummy dressed in a gown and a baseball cap... Parked outside the building in front of a glass door ... "WHO IS THAT?!?!?!?!" My other favorite is hitting the call bell (in the middle of the night) that was recently occupied by someone who's "moved on" - I would hide in the closet... Someone would finally get up the courage to come in and shut the light out --- when they'd leave I'd sneak out and turn it back on and then jump back in the closet... and listen to them freak out ... funny!!!!!

[talaxandra]

We once told the morning staff that we'd had a quadruple amputee admitted with hypertension and carbon monoxide poisoning - the bed was empty except for a red smily-faced balloon.

The samae balloon was used by the AM staff, who rigged it to an IV pole in one of the toilets so that when the door was opened (in response to a buzzer) the balloon and an attached patient gown were pulled forward like a ghost.

I was in charge one night when a couple of nurses at a party got a lay partygoer to ring through an admission, in the days when admissions were handled by a senior ED doctor. He did really well, telling us about a horrendoplasty of a patient, until he got to the past history - the nurses had used no abbreviations (apart from IV) until they described him as having a right-sided cerebral infarct. Or, as he said over the phone "and an R CVA" which totally gave the game away.

[nitenite]

Sending interns to look for Fallopian tubes. LOL! Some took a long time to catch on!

[soulofme]

Sending interns to look for Fallopian tubes. LOL! Some took a long time to catch on!

While working in L&D...we did dirty deeds & they were done dirt cheap.... Not telling:idea:

[Elizabeth, RN]

I was never the type to engage in practical jokes but I observed a number of them. Back when I was working my first hospital job decades ago, there was usually an orderly on duty for heavy lifting, male caths, etc. Another task was taking a body to the morgue. New guys were usually a little apprehensive about that so they were pranked by being called to an empty patient room for that purpose. On the bed, there would be a body bag with a volunteer orderly zipped inside just as the new guy approached the room. As he and his helper would start to load the body on the stretcher, the guy inside would cough or yell or move or something. It never failed to get the desired response.

A TRUE story--I once went out with a guy who did hospital and nursing home pickups for a mortuary. The nursing home didn't use body bags; they just covered them up to the neck with a sheet. (Supposedly, when they were wheeled down the hall, no one would notice that they were dead.) Anyway, he picked up this small frail woman and was pushing the stretcher into the heorifice when he heard a little voice warble "Where are you taking me?" This big guy went very weak in the knees as he wheeled her back to her room!

[dthfytr, ADN, LPN, RN, EMT-B, EMT-I]

While working in a Level 1 trauma center/inner city ER, insanely busy. Someone decided we would play tourrette's syndrome. Staff started whispering in each ohers ears as they passed. I was doing chest compressions on a patient when the sweetest most angelic looking young nurse came over and whispered something in my ear that would make a sailor blush.

Other times while doing compressions it's amazing how often they needed to start an IV between my legs, with warnings about an 18ga needle slipping (I'm male. Still male too despite them).

[Lupan]

One time at halloween I took a rubber zombie and put it in a bed. Everyone got a kick out of it because I told no one except there was a new resident in room #310. At one hospital we tied a sleeping nurse to the bed with a sheet and then paged her. Got a doc to page her to report to the nurses station stat!! she never slept on the job again! One played on me was "fresh milk" from L&D used as creamer for coffee.

[dthfytr, ADN, LPN, RN, EMT-B, EMT-I]

A city cop was "gaurding" a prisoner awaiting jail clearance, handcuffed to a hallway stretcher. When the cop put his head down on the counter for about 30 minutes, we moved the prisoner, who loved the prank, down the hall and put the proverbial little old lady in his place.

We had a great laugh watching the cop snoring. Worst of all, when he woke up he calmy asked "OK, what'd you do with my prisoner?"

[dthfytr, ADN, LPN, RN, EMT-B, EMT-I]

Insanely busy inner city ER. Residents would fall asleep on the phone, while charting, while reading, anywhere. They were so tired it was easy to pose them in compromising positions with a rubber chicken and snap a picture. When I got the film developed, they got a copy, and I kept the other under lock and key in an album. My all time favorite was of a resident who hid in the trauma bay where we couldn't find him, and later gave him a picture of himself with a handcuffed rubber chicken.

[EMSnut45, BSN, RN, EMT-P]

We had a very gullable charge nurse, and a few of the techs got together to "get" her. It was right at morning change of shift, so there were many on-lookers. One of our techs takes a "urine" sample out of the biohazard bag, and hands it to the charge nurse stating "the lab keeps sending this back... I can't figure out what's wrong with it." The charge nurse takes the sample, looks at the label, and agrees that it is labelled correctly, the lab shouldn't have any problem with it. Another tech takes the sample to look at it, uscrews the cap, smells it (saying "hmm... it smells ok"), then takes a big swig!! Oh, my goodness! The poor charge nurse almost had a heart attack!! The rest of us were on the floor hysterical!