Office Practical Jokes
Some of these are recognizable as mimicing The Office. Others were inspired by different sources, and some were completely original. I was the main or sole perpetrator of many of them, was tangentially involved in a couple, and was the victim of only one.
In chronological order:
1. Modified my boss’s browser so that when he thought he was reading Yahoo! News, he was actually reading a page I put together myself. Sample headline: “Bill Gates Resigns from Microsoft, Joins NAMBLA.” My boss actually went around the office asking people what they thought of the big Bill Gates news.
2. Reversed the N and M keys on numerous coworker keyboards. It’s way more effective than it might seem.
3. Installed a macro that made the Scientology site your Internet Explorer home page, no matter what you did to try to remove it.
4. Embedded a coworker’s calculator in lemon Jell-O. It even continued working for a while, if you jabbed the buttons with a pen.
5. Hid upwards of 300 business cards in a coworker’s office: in books, taped under the desk, in his jacket pockets, in the ceiling tiles, etc. He’s still finding stray ones three years on. Oh, and a couple of dozen were hidden around his truck, too.
6. Hacked a network printer to change the READY message to INSERT COIN. A bewildered elderly employee was discovered standing in front of the printer, patting his pockets and asking passers-by if they had any change. The CIO of the company came down himself to see it, declared that it must be a printer model that is also sold to libraries with a coin-op mode, and spent half an afternoon trying to fix it (all he needed to do was turn it off and on).
7. Moved a vacationing coworker’s desk into the men’s bathroom the day before he came back from vacation.
8. When a coworker had his blinds taken away by management (they made it hard to see into his office and prove he was working), replaced them with ones made out of toilet paper.
9. Reversed the number pad on a coworker’s keyboard so that it was laid out like a telephone number pad. Resulted in a call to Help Desk, wondering why he couldn’t locate a record by punching in the ID number. (A variation on #2)
10. Covered every square inch of a vacationing coworker’s office (same guy as #7) with tinfoil. Every pen, book, paper, mug, etc. was individually wrapped. For freshness.
.:
May 5th, 2008 at 10:47 am
A riotous post, Your Krankitude. Love the ideas.
Do you dare report which one victimized you? (I’m sure you found a way to exact revenge.)
May 5th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
#3 was the only one. And yes, revenge was sweet in that I eventually fired the perpetrators (for other reasons).
May 6th, 2008 at 6:55 am
Fired them? Wicked. Y’know, I’ve only ever had to fire one person in the 16 years that I’ve worked in a management role, and it wasn’t any fun. The expected rush never materialized, and I was very disappointed. I hope someday to be able to show someone to the door, preferably in a rough manner, preferably someone who has worked for me three months or less, and who therefore is entitled to nothing: no notice, no severance, no reason. Woo! I get goosebumps just thinking about it.
Getting back to the office practical joke theme, I thought for sure that the perpetrator in #3 was you, since you love Scientology and all that.
I had to look up NAMBLA in Wikipedia to see what it was, and when the article loaded, I spewed coffee all over my monitor. Thanks for the guffaw!
Here’s another practical joke that I read about, albeit a somewhat vicious one: a miserable bastard named Jim manages a group of people at an IT company. Jim is about to present a budget proposal for his group for the year. One of his underlings slips an item into the budget: a huge sum of money earmarked as “severance pay for Jim”. Jim missed it, submitted the budget, and was fired for putting this item in the budget request.
Not recommending anyone be mean, for sure, but one has to wonder about Jim’s attention to detail after something like this.