Chair pulled out just as you were sitting? Someone you love erroneously and purposely told you that (s)he has stage 4 carcinoma or that another relative died? On your wedding day, your beloved schmushed the cake into your face? A relative promised you money if you'd "catch" it with your head. You, as a child, were led to the wall and the relative let the money slip down that wall while you thrust your head forward BANG into said wall? Or something more harmless - albeit stupid - like luring your face into a plastic bottle where you got a squirt? Fortunately, I don't have any to beef about -- knock wood.
I've not been on the receiving end of anything too over-the-top. Maybe removing the mouthpiece from my telephone so the caller cannot hear me speak, or stuff like that. But I got a story about somebody else. I worked at a small company that installed security systems in office buildings. The guy who managed the installation crew was not wrapped too tight, but he was a good guy. (We would sit at monthly status meetings and out of the blue he would turn to me and say "Damn dog peed on my leg.") So on his birthday (or maybe it was Christmas), his crews bought him a genuine straight jacket and they filled his small office with styrofoam packing peanuts (and I mean they FILLED it, lifting the ceiling tile from outside the office door and dumping them into his office, completely filling the entire office all the way up to the ceiling.) You could tell that straight jacket cut pretty hard. It ended up not being funny.
I won't repeat them here, but I posted a couple of them that I was involved in playing on other people in this thread. To that, I will add that one of my co-workers who was working the swing shift before me, as I was working the graveyard shift, left his toolbox unlocked when he went home one night. When I was a machine adjuster in a paper bag plant, we each had large roll-away toolboxes that we locked up when we went home, since we supplied our own tools, although the company also gifted us with a lot of them. Since we had a skeleton crew on the graveyard shift, there wasn't a whole lot for me to do sometimes. We also had a shrinkwrap machine that wasn't in use, so I took every one of his tools and ran them through the shrinkwrap machine individually, tightly wrapping them in cellophane, and then I ran his whole toolbox through the shrinkwrap machine. When I ran a computer BBS (for those of you who aren't familiar with computer bulletin board systems, they were the forerunner to the Internet and a little bit like Facebook in some ways), on April 1st one year, I added some code to the BBS that would add a block of text to page that said something like -- GET TO KNOW YOUR FEATURED BBS MEMBER. GIVE THIS PERSON A CALL, but think first about the date -- and then it posted all of the personal information, like the telephone number, address, birth date, and so on, for the BBS member who was featured. Because there was a fee for joining the BBS, I had all of that stuff. People were furious when they saw their private information posted to the opening page of the BBS for everyone to see, and this was probably true of most of them, and some of those who didn't think about the date (April 1) quit. However, everyone saw only their own information. No one saw anyone else's information, and most realized, before long, that it was an April Fools joke. Don't worry, I am an adult now and I won't do that here. These were fun, although I wasn't the victim, and you're asking about practical jokes in which we were the victims. When I worked with the Open Directory Project, this was a huge web directory with more than a hundred thousand editors throughout the world. One day, I logged into my account to find a big red button. Below the button was a warning that read something like - DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON. Of course, along with tens of thousands of other editors, I pressed the big red button, and immediately I was logged out. When I tried to log back in, I received a notification that my account had been deactivated because I refused to follow instructions. Along with everyone else who pressed the big red button, I was unable to login into my account for a full 24 hours. Not a lot of editing got done at the ODP that day. A few editors, including Michelle, who I wasn't married to at the time, and may not have even met by then, called me to say that they had been removed from the Open Directory Project, and wanting to know if I could do anything to get them back in, since I was one of the meta editors, as was Michelle. Of course, I had to tell them that I had pressed the big red button too. Twenty-three years later, whenever I am in a group of former ODP editors, we laugh about the big red button. Because I am, you know, such a nice guy and everything, I have never been the victim of a really mean practical joke.
In military school some fellow cadets stuck my hand in warm water while I was sleeping, then slowly poured a pitcher of water into a metal pail. It made me want to go & woke me up, but I heard them whispering so I kept my eyes closed and they got zero satisfaction. I short-sheeted the ring leader a few weeks later. He never knew who did it but *maybe* he suspected.