Office Pranks

The Stapler in the Jelly bit from The Office, UK version

That last post got me thinking about the various pranks I've done/seen/had done to me since my birth into the corporate world. I think office pranks play a very important role in the life of an office worker. They are an outlet, a lifeline, the one way you can rise above the deadening stupor of cubicles, e-mails, and spreadsheets and retain some measure of sanity and humanity.

So here is a list of the best pranks I've seen in the four years since I've been Officed:

Remote Flatulence

My first assistant (not your bro, Cheeth, but his predecessor) had glorious stories of pranks he pulled at his previous job, pranks involving trip wires, buckets of water, and an automatic tennis ball shooting machine. He also had a remote controlled farting device. If you haven't seen one of these, it's a small, flat speaker about the size of your hand with a remote as big as a car alarm keychain. Pretty simple: you press the button and the speaker emitted an incredibly realistic and loud fluffy ("a real Bronx cheer!").

So we hid said device in various offices around the building, hid around the corner, then set it off whenever someone walked by. I'm giddy just thinking about the laughs we had. We soon found the best way to hide it was to remove the upholstery on the underside of the chair (not that hard, you just pull out the staples, stick that little beauty in there, then put them back in with no permanent damage). The funniest part of this period was when we hid it under the intern director (and son-in-law of the CEO's) chair and the remote started malfunctioning, setting it off at frequent random

Autospell

A few people did this to me. It's pretty simple but funny if the person doesn't know the inner workings of the Autospell function. Basically you go into Word options and change around the Autospell words to write something completely different when the person begins to type a word. For instance, when I typed in "you" it would automatically change the word to "diapers". "Go" would give me "follow the white rabbit" (a Matrix reference), and "I" would enter in "drunken frat boy".

I knew about Autospell, but didn't know you could customize it that way. So thinking I had a virus of some sort, I called up the IT guys. Turns out they were in on it too. Finally the coworker who set it up felt bad for me, so she filled me in. I am constantly looking for people who are as ignorant as I was about Autospell. In fact, I just thought of a couple...

The Love Gram

One of our programmers' wife's younger brothers is in the high school choir. For Valentine's Day just a couple weeks ago they did "Love Grams", where you pay them 5 bucks and they go sing to your Valentine. The programmer in question thought it'd be funny to send one to one of the male graphic designers, but say it was from a male co-worker he shared a cubicle with. So he did.

It was a wonderfully awkward 3 minutes for everyone involved (including the poor high school kids, who weren't sure if it was real or not), other than me and the programmer, who knew about it before hand and made sure a camcorder would be there.

The Tin-foil Wrap

I've seen a lot of companies do this. Basically you wait until someone is on vacation, then wrap their entire office in tin-foil. Here's a pic.


We used to have a ginormous tin foil ball that was the left-overs from this prank. The thing was as big as a beach ball. After a while we decided that everyone who saw it should sign it like it was a high school yearbook, so it was soon covered with inscriptions like 'You're rad. Biology was fun. Call me this summer. C-ya!'.

Yes, this sort of thing is our idea of a good time. I wasn't kidding when I said working in an office takes your sanity away. I wonder where that tinfoil ball is now...

I'll put up a few more later.

If anyone has suggestions or knows of any great office pranks, I beg you to send them my way. It's been a while since the last one and I'm beginning to feel the madness creep up on me...