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Thursday, March 27, 2008

office pranks

In a city that is fueled by mega financial companies and cut-throat corporations looking for their next million, my little office is anything but. In fact, this little office of mine is something that i imagine i will be blogging about rather frequently since loads of crazy schenanagans take place there. (Costume Friday, for example, is a weekly event. Sweatshirt day is tomorrow. My London, Fall 2000 sweatshirt will have to do the trick.)

Anyways, something my coworkers and i have not ventured into is the joyful bliss of "the office prank." You know, the old "stapler in jello" trick, or the "quarters in the phone" routine. (Yes, The Office provides many a good idea!) Well today, the office prank ship set sail and made a nice first showing. It was motivated by one of my coworkers and i being left in the office during lunchtime while most others were out to lunch on the company's dime. I make it sound like we were the two misfits who had to face our punishment or like we were "the young ones" who haven't reached the same level of adulthood as the others. Not the case. There actually was a very legitimate reason for leaving us behind during this particular lunch. Nonetheless, we bid adieu to those heading out to enjoy a scrumptious meal (for free!), while heating up our leftover Easter dinner (him) and munching on the second half of our mediocre wrap (me). And frankly, we felt the (totally exaggerated, we know) injustice of the situation! So we started brainstorming possible office pranks. We tried taping the chairs to the floor. No good. Our test chair didn't stick well and it would take up too much tape (we try not to be wasteful at the Midpoint/Beaufort office). We considered other alternatives, but after a few minutes decided to utilize google.com. "Office pranks" was the search term.

After reading through a few options, we settled on a simple yet effective prank. In fact, it's one that i highly recommend! It involves a small post-it and a computer mouse (i like that i felt the need to specify "computer"). Place the post-it on the bottom of the mouse. This causes the track-ball to be ineffective and the mouse cursor does not move. This is what Kevin and I did to the mice (mouses?) of all four lunch-goers (including one of the company's VPs). On each post-it, we wrote "and this is why you always bring kevin and laurie to lunch." When they returned, we got the reactions we had hoped for! Slight confusion for a short amount of time, followed by a good laugh...

(Had i been working at one of those mega financial companies, i may have had to add "followed by a good firing, followed by a good eviction from my penthouse apartment, followed by a good tarnishing of my reputation." Whew, glad that wasn't the case! I love my job!)

3 comments:

Ben said...

It must be nice to have a London sweatshirt to wear on Sweatshirt Thursdays. It would really suck to be the only person out of 38 students to not get one. I can't imagine such a tragedy!

Maybe you should have put "this is why you take Laurie and Kevin to lunch@blogger.com" on the post-its.

Kevin said...

I believe what we wrote on the post-its was 'and that's way you always invite Kevin and Laurie to lunch!' However, if Laurie wrote the note, there was a smiley face rather than an exclamation point.

EBenz said...

Okay, I have a prank for you: take Scotch tape and put some over the earpiece of someone's telephone, then turn the volume down as far as it will go. This will provide hours of entertainment for anyone sitting nearby as the poor victim answers the phone every time "Hello? Hello? Are you there?"