Practical Joke 101 – Musical Greeting Card Desk

Periodically, I will do something to liven things up around the office. This trick is one of my favorites. I’ve had success with it though the years and I’m going to walk you through it step by step.

We are going to use a musical greeting card to rig up a desk. When it works (and this has always worked for me), opening a desk drawer triggers the card’s sound mechanism. Positioning the card correctly will enable gravity to shut the card off when the drawer closes.

The effect is magnified by the fact that there is very little chance the trick will be detected before it does it job. Everything looks normal…and then the desk starts singing.

The first step is to get a musical greeting card. Look for one that operates with a tab attached to the front of the card, like this one:

Look for a tab like the white one on this card

Cut the card, removing most of the front and back. Doing so makes the card more compact and easy to conceal. Leave a long strip extending from the tab. Be very careful around the sound device in the back of the card. The wires are fine and easy to cut.

When you cut the card, save the scraps and the envelope. You’ll use those later.

When you’ve finished cutting, the card should look like this:

We’re going to focus on the portion at the top.

Make a chain of rubber bands and tape them to the front of the card. The rubber bands will connect to the back of a drawer and the drawer’s motion will activate the card. Using rubber bands provides enough slack to keep the drawer from pulling the card apart or dislodging it once it is in place.

Correctly assembled, your card should now look like this:

When you cut up the card, you’ll have scraps left over. Save them. When you put your device on your victim’s desk, take the card scraps and put them in a trash can next to the desk of someone who is not in on the joke. Your victim will go looking for who is responsible for pranking him. By deflecting attention to someone who had nothing to do with it, you get the benefit of playing a prank on two people at the same time.

Remember, not your trash can. Pick someone and put this in their trash.

Your homework is to go get a musical greeting card. In the next post, I’ll show you how to set your device up on a desk and provide a video of how it works.

Speaking of video, here’s one that I created to explain what we’ve discussed so far: