A popular Army pastime...
Freezing Stuff - This is one of the oldest Army practical jokes around. One of the best targets for freezing was the old BDU cap (cold weather style). You could fill it up with water and it wouldn't leak very quickly. Plenty of time to put it in a freezer. After a few hours, you have a hat filled with a big block of ice. Very nice. Another thing you can do, and this applies to both the summer caps and the berets, is stuff it into a gatorade bottle and fill it up with water. We did that with a Marine's cover at my last unit. He left it on the watch desk and called later in the day to ask if it was there. We said yes and we wouldn't mess with it. When he came in that night, we showed him his cover (which was completely unmolested) and he thanked us. When we came in the next morning and relieved his team, he left it on the desk again. We then decided to teach him a lesson and we jammed it into a bottle and froze it solid. Just before he came in again, we cut the bottle off the block of ice so he couldn't just set it somewhere to thaw.
Besides, hats, another popular item is a persons pin on rank. One particularly slow night, my partner and I filled a gallon jug about halfway with water and froze it. Then we took the pin on rank off a guys uniform, dropped them in, and filled the jug up the rest of the way. This way, the rank would be frozen in the middile of a big block of ice. We then set about making clues that would lead the guy from one place to another all around our building. There was no way he'd find his rank without following the clues. We had him going upstairs and down, out to the gym, backtracking, and eventually to the freezer in the Watch Officer's office. We warned the WO by email about what we did and asked for her help in pulling this off. We told her to keep kicking him out of her office until he had rank on his uniform or the last clue that led him to her freezer. He told us that night that it had taken the better part of 8 hours to track down and then thaw his rank out of the jug.
A variation of this one is to jam a pencil through a bottle and use it to suspend keys in a block of ice.
After a few weeks of freezing hats, ranks, belt buckles, and other small items, my partner and I were ready to move onto the next challenge. A complete set of BDU's. We had a full sized vertical freezer in our break room that was perfect for this task. We purposefully let it slip that we were planning it, but never let out who our target would be. We also let slip that when we did it, we'd call the person the night before, so they'd have warning. One of the lines we wouldn't cross in our joking was that we wouldn't do anything to get someone into trouble from our actions. We always selected people based on their schedule, coworkers, and humor level. We didn't set people up to get chewed out for not having rank on their uniform or a frozen cover. We knew that not having a uniform would get someone in trouble, so we planned accordingly.
When we decided to take action, we actually pulled a little twist. We didn't do a thing to the guys uniform, we just called him up at 9PM and told him that we had. We knew this guy didn't have another uniform pressed and ready to go, so he'd have to spend time that night preparing another to bring in. The thought of him frantically ironing a uniform at 9PM was hilarious to us. It did kind of backfire, though. He got all pissed off and decided not to prep a new uniform. He planned on sitting through the entire day in civilian clothes and diming us out if anyone asked. We also knew he wouldn't make mention of the fact that we'd warned him to bring a new uniform. I do realize that' wouldn't have excused our actions or made us blame free, but up until this point, jokes and fun were made back and forth between the teams and it wasn't until this guy would have had to do a little work ironing a uniform that he decided he didn't want to play. It would have come down on us and all fun in the office would have been squashed for everyone. We left this guy out of our jokes for the rest of our time there and because of his lack of humor, left him out of other stuff that we did, too.
My partner and I never did freeze anyone's uniform. But before we left that unit, we were both the targets of a frozen uniform. They got my partner a few weeks before he left. The WO called him up and told him he may want to bring in a fresh one, because he wouldn't be able to wear the one he left at the office. I got the same phone call a couple weeks later. Fortunately for me, I was working a night shift in an office alone, so I didn't even bother changing that night. I just wore civilian clothes anyways. It was funny to see my ice-encrusted BDU's hanging from my chair when I walked in, though. They froze the uniform right on the hanger. Pretty funny.
OK, this has run on, so...
NEXT TIME - What smells like shoepolish? And sewing tricks.