April Fool’s Day was last week. We had a pretty good April Fool’s Day post here, but I am not certain how many people got it. This got me thinking about some of the better office pranks I have seen in my long tenure here at SlickEdit. Actually, I do not think any of them happened on April Fool’s day. But then its always April Fool’s Day here…
- Fun with peanuts – We’ve all seen the emailed pictures of this sort of thing. A cubicle “door” is closed off with cardboard, and the cubicle is filled with packing peanuts. There weren’t enough peanuts to completely fill the area, but I felt this performance was special for a couple of reasons:
- This an open area with multiple cubicles, so rear walls (whose sole purpose was to hold in the peanuts) had to be constructed.
- The Enter key was removed from the keyboard and dropped into the peanuts. This part, was just plain mean. A Starbucks gift card was also dropped in to soften the blow.
- Fun with Shrink wrap – An office classic. Various times multiple items on a co-worker’s desk have been shrink wrapped. There are a few fun variations:
- Shrink wrap the telephone, and call the prankee as they are unwrapping the items on their desk.
- When a member of the support staff left for some time to get married, everything accessible on his desk was shrink wrapped. Since we had the occasional office cookout that day, foil was available and the shrink wrapped items were then wrapped in foil. Finally, the desk was wrapped in foil. The look on the face when first foil was removed to reveal shrink wrap: priceless.
- We have not figured out how to shrink wrap an LCD display.
- Rickrolling – Rickrolling was all the rage around the office a while back. This is where a link in an e-mail appears to be one thing, but is actually a link to a Rick Astley video.
- The ol’ Box On the Desk – I no longer remember who or when, but one time after a vacation somebody came back to find their desk packed into a box. I always felt this was a little too mean.
- Moe’ing a Cube – One time a coworker returned from a few days off to find his cube covered in wrappers from Moe’s. For good measure, a CD player was hidden under his desk playing the “Welcome to Moe’s” sound clip over and over. I still have the CD.
- Mac on the Desk- At some point a co-worker had some Mac experience, but was hoping he would not be asked to work on a SlickEdit Mac port. He returned from vacation to find a Mac SE30, a Mac OSX CD, and note “We need to talk – <managername>”. Obviously, it looked ridiculous.
- A Call From a User- When a member of the support staff was leaving to take another job, we arranged for a user who had called support a lot to call and claim he had an absolutely ridiculous problem. The subterfuge lasted until we could be heard laughing around the corner.
That is all I have. Let’s hear yours.
Posted in Productivity
Good times… aarrrghghhhhh you got me Dan!
One of my favorite office pranks is simple as can be. Get a bit of scotch tape, put it on the receiver of the victims phone, especially good against middle aged people.
I took a shop air hose with 190 psi and connected it to an empty 2 liter plastic bottle and ran it from the shop into the drop ceiling of the very tiny office restroom. It was a one person restroom. As I watched one of our office workers(we called him Skippy) go into the restroom I ran out into the shop and turned the air on that was connected to this 2 liter bottle and OMG!!!! I should have done a test run first, I could not believe what i heard and was wondering immediately if Skippy was ok. It was a very loud explosion and it blew the ceiling tiles into pieces and Skippy couldn’t hear for two days. He was not happy but could laugh about it not too long afterwards. Kids, do not try this at home.
The place I’m working at has a lot of pranks. For example:
- Pitching tent over cube.
- Moving cube to roof of building, with umbrella.
- Suspending all desktop items (phone, LCD monitor, keyboard, paperword, fishbowl, etc) above desk with nylon fishing line.
- Adding “water feature” to desk, made with plaster and a stack of in-trays, complete with working fountain.
One of the guys told the manager he did his best thinking on the toilet. She went out to the store and bought a toilet, set it beside his desk, and told him to sit on it for an hour every day.
Regards
John Hurst