So we’re back for another round of the best practical jokes you’ve pulled during your shift.
Got even more? Leave them in the comments section!
“As a welcome to nursing students, they are sent to the pharmacy to fetch some glycerine eye drops and a fallopian tube.”
—Nikki F.
“Got a colleague to bring me an incontinence pad smeared with dark chocolate mousse. ‘The patient in bay 3 just passed this.’ (Smelled it. Stuck finger in and tasted it.) ‘No… seems okay.’ Cue horrified looks and retching noises from two junior doctors.”
—Sue M.
“Working in theatres on night shift, convinced the orderly to lie on the theatre bed before the morning staff arrived and covered him with a sheet. When the morning staff went into the theatre to check the room, he started moaning and sat bolt upright. The staff ran out of the theatre screaming. So funny.”
—Flee
“I used to answer the phone ‘You trach ’em, we take ’em.'”
—Anonymous
“One of my coworkers crawled under a resident’s bed, and when two of us came in to turn the lady, the one under bed grabbed my coworker’s leg and it scared the heck out of them, lol.”
—Eva K.
And finally, reader David H. appears to be doing all the pranking he can.
Here are a few of his best jokes:
“Several years ago, I discovered that Windows computers had a keyboard option to rotate the screen, which is used in conference/meeting rooms, etc., that have upside-down- or sideways-mounting ceiling or wall projectors. This lets the presenter’s laptop correctly display their PowerPoint or whatever in the appropriate orientation. FYI, that keyboard combo is Ctrl-Alt plus any arrow key to rotate the display. It’s an absolute riot to watch someone return back to their computer in utter befuddlement as to why their mouse moves the opposite direction and why their display is suddenly upside down. Someone I once did this to literally was trying to turn the entire monitor upside down to fix it. Since many facilities use computers for charting, this fun trick comes in handy for pranks all over the place. Sadly, though, in certain installations of Windows or under certain circumstances, that functionality is disabled."
“We’d recently moved into the new part of our facility. There were only five floors in the hospital. Oddly, when you called someone in-house from the new fourth-floor waiting room phone, it showed up as ‘sixth-floor waiting room’ on the caller ID. Why/how the telecom people did this is beyond me, because as I said, there were only five floors. Nonetheless, it was all kinds of fun, calling various random units pretending to be a lost, confused patient looking for the bathroom, looking for ‘my socks,’ saying Tell Margaret to bring me my shotgun,’ etc… They wouldn’t have a clue where you were calling from, and pretending to be confused allowed me to tell them I didn’t know where I was, either."
“I once was discharging a male patient and he asked if he could get a clean urinal to take home. His dx and condition hadn’t and with him being d/c’d certainly didn’t warrant him needing to use a urinal, so I politely asked him what he was needing it for. He said he wanted to serve iced tea to his buddies after he got home. I told him I thought that sounded like a splendid idea and procured for him his new ‘iced-tea pitcher."
“I’ve also done the urine specimen cup trick, but my liquid of choice was lemonade. Since lemonade is cloudy and pale yellow, the ‘urine’ appeared super nasty. I lightly placed the lid on the cup and walked up to my coworkers exclaiming how ‘gross this urine looked.’ As I was doing so, I removed the lid and chugged the lemonade. I still get a huge kick out of remembering all their faces, body language, and what they said to me during and after this little performance."
“I can discreetly make a cat meowing sound with my mouth. In a hospital in the middle of the night you wouldn’t expect to hear such a thing. It’s highly entertaining making that sound around new people and watching the quizzical and ‘what-the-heck’ looks on their faces as if they’re hearing things.”
My actual first job was in a facility that was a joined hospital and LTC. There was a direct line from nurses station in hospital to the back nurses station in LTC. Now, usually, late at night, we got calls from doctors with some orders. We also had one doc, who also happened to be medical examiner. Being the smart ass I was, I answered it one night, “Motezuma morgue, you stab ’em, we plan ’em!” I heard laughter on the other end, it turned out to be the ME!!!