Slashdot Mirror
Need A Few Post-Its Around The Office?
An anonymous reader writes "Like every company, we have an office prankster. So, whenever anything goes wrong -- say, your chair starts making unusual noises or your CD tray starts popping out for no reason, invariably you'll look up and see Dave, our esteemed leader, grinning foolishly at his handywork. So really, Damon shouldn't have been surprised when he came into the office one otherwise-normal Monday morning to find this. Nor should James have been surprised when he showed up early one morning to this birthday surprise. It certainly keeps us on our toes." Ah, the joys of not telecommuting ...
NOW I see why outsourcing to India is so much cheaper...
'Nuff said.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Also:
s/handywork/handiwork
Wow, and your boss doesn't mind all this wasting of time?
We need more fun things to do at the office. :)
http://www.do-not-sleep.com/images/priceless.jpg
You're old school? I beta tested the motherf***ing abacus!
Boss : Uhh Dave, what was the quotation from India
....uhh I got it on a postit somewhere..
........
again..?
Dave:
Boss :
Yup, Bill*, the network guy, is sure going to be surprised when he comes in this morning and finds that he's been thoroughly slashdotted! Post-It notes, balloons, HTTP GET....
*Simulated employee name
...
Now try finding the one he stuck under his desk that has his admin password on.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
I use to work for HP and they were no fun.. :( and any messing and you were out.. - well I live in the EU so it not that easy to fire me. :)
but my employer before HP saw that sort of messing good fun as long as the work was done and noboady or anything was dammaged...
I think its realy important to have a good laught in work it helps keep the stress levels way down...
is that why I am starting my own business.. ?
He was a great sport about it and is currently planning his pay back... :)
/.ing the server :) The admin won't like this ;)
Seems like he chose
...obviously the ./ crowd has killed another site. Just when I found the "Free scripts for your web site" section. Boo!
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
We attached bungee ropes to his swivel chair, and arranged it so that when he sat down, he'd go whizzing across the floor.
It was really funny when he went through the window, landed, and went whizzing down the road.
A massive bandwidth bill and website offline for a while :)
Wonder if he's also planning payback for having his email inbox full of spam after having it posted on the website?
Am I a humourless drone, or is this guy just a twat?
Building morale is one thing, annoying others for your own entertainment is another.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Those post-its remind me of a scene from the movie "Bruce Almighty" about an hour into the film. Bruce decides to 'hear' all the prayers in post-it note form and the result puts James and Damon to shame. It's interesting how striking a common office/household item can be when displayed in large quantities like that.
That is awesome, got to love your friends eh :) Reminds me of that friend that covered his friend's apartment in tinfoil.
/. gets to them.m ons_off ice/e s_offi ce/
Um yeah here is a mirror if the wrath of
http://catsdorule.torpedobird.com/slash/da
http://catsdorule.torpedobird.com/slash/jam
... when they start having to use them to pass along their website instead of HTTP.
They didn't even write notes on them...
Sometimes you drink something because you are thirsty. It doesn't matter what it is, but every now and then you will drink something and it'll taste just right, and you will feel good.
:)
This is one of those drinks, well story, that puts a smile on your face.
With all the cr*p that goes on in the world, it is great to see that there are people who get the job done but also have a good laugh doing so. People are too serious. It's good to have practical jokes and people that appreciate them for there good clean simply fun
Good choice on story.
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
Update: Sunday, March 21nd, 2004
We shared our story with 3M, the makers of post-its, and they must have got a kick out of it because they sent us 3 cases of post-its "for future decorating".
Aha! The missing step revealed:
1. Decorate office with products from Corporation X
2. Take pictures of said decorations
3. ??? = Send story and pictures to Corporation X
4. Profit! (as Corporation X sends you free product)
I suspect in a few months we'll hear a new story. Damon gets revenge on Dave by stapling a yoga mattress to every surface of his office. They share the story and ACME Yoga Mattress Co. responds by sending three trucks filled with yoga mattresses. Dave quits his job, sells all of them, and becomes the newest dot-calm millionaire. (Oh, you knew the punchline would be bad!)
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
PostIts and Balloons
Everything in his apartment is wrapped in alumium foil, except for a copy of Penn and Teller's book "Cruel tricks for Dear Friends".
... like this might be worthwhile for that office!
When I left a job, a friend of mine found a pack of Post-Its in my office and started labelling things. In the end there was one on the door, the chair, the telephone, the roof - even one of the Post-Its was labelled "Post-It!" When we had done my office we went to the secretary's office and started there. We even labelled the contents of her drawers! When I heard from her a while later she thanked us for helping her find her things! The best bit was that there was still a Post-It on the wall that she hadn't found yet! Aaaah, the joys of a piece of paper with glue on one side!
What this is actually about is the out-moded belief the computer programmers are in some way "special", that they have stresses and needs different from any other profession. This is simply not true. Back in the dot.com era you had to actually beg people to come and work for you. This is no longer the case, they will literally beg for a job these days. So theres no need to pander to their infantile "I'm a special clever genius" behaviour anymore.
have none of these requirements or costs. I suggest you update your CV as soon as possible.
The REAL storyline goes something like this:
Boss: Hey, Dave, what's the capacity of our website software?
Dave: What do you mean?
Boss: Well, a client asked me how much traffic load it can handle.
Dave: I dunnow, we never REALLY stress-tested the thing. Want me to find out?
Boss: Yes, please do!
Dave: OK, I'll need 400 post-it note pads, 650 balloons and a digital camera.
Boss: Huh?
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
...first thing damon said that morning when he arrived to the office
I'm a natural cynic and the deliberate nod to 3M at the end of the article makes me think this is a viral marketing campaign.
On the other hand, I've mentioned 3M twice in this short reply so perhaps *I'm* the viral marketer.
I hada guy next to me playing small tricks on me all the time. One day I got him back by turning over everyhing on his desk - from computer and monitor to all his files.
Another time is was unintentional. I emailed him one of those stupid little flash games where you shoot up your desktop with a noisy uzi. Right in the middle of shredding his desktop, in walks the VP of the company. At the time we were seated with our backs to the entrance so it took my friend a minute that the room had gone pretty much silent. What really added to this was the fact that he was the most paranoid about using his computer only for company business - and the one time he decides to screw off....
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
That reminds me of something that happened when I was at college. I got back one day to find that some other maths students had filled my room with screwed up balls of newspaper. And I mean filled. I couldn't even open the door more than a crack. It took a couple of hours and lots of black bags to clear that one up.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
Sales will be up for a few days thanks to this cool advertising, 3M will also get some sales too.
And it's free!
Back in the mid 1980s, I was working for a division of a large multinational. Some of the employees had quite a creative sense of humour (including, fortunately as will soon become apparent, the department manager).
At the time, there was a lot of hiring going on. On the manager's birthday, he was conducting job interviews most of the morning. His last applicant of the morning was a plant! You need to understand that, while blessed with a good sense of humour, he was happily married and quite conservative. The "applicant" was an attractive 24 year old redhead, very well endowed, and as sexually dressed as was consistent with a possible job applicant. The interview started normally, but gradually the young lady started making more and more pointed hints that she really wanted the job and would be willing to be very grateful if hired. Eventually, she was draping herself all over our leader who was desperately trying to ease her out of his office and looking as if he was about to suffer a coronary. [We had arranged to catch everything on video tape for checking out later.] When he finally managed to get the young lady across his office and open the door, the whole department was outside ready to wish him Happy Birthday. That was his first intimation that it was a setup!
I work in a camera store as the manager. Including me, there are six people who work at that location.
We received about one hundred Russ brand stuffed bears, to be sold "as a deal" with film processing. As you can imagine, it didn't really take off, and in April I still have 70 odd bears lying around my store.
We had been playing games with each other involving the bears but for several months it was fairly quiet.
Until I took several days off following Easter.
I walked in on Thursday to start my week, and upon opening the door to the back room, discovered a curtain of bears in my way. The two girls at work used kite string to bind the bears about the neck and waist to suspend them, and tied all of their paws together so that they all faced the door. There was a sign in the center that said "Supplies!" (Referencing UHF)
On the white board on the door, there was this note:
"
24 Russ bears: $599.76
Kite String: $4.99
The look on your face right now: Priceless (We hope)
******* Camera, it's everywhere you want to be.
"
Somedays my job isn't so bad...
he's a friend first and a boss second... probably an entertainer third, right?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
If you write a company a letter, particularly a semi-deranged letter (see any book by Don Novello) they'll send you something.
Then there was the story of the guy who bought a bag of M&M's and squished them together eating the ones that broke, and sent the last one back to Mars (I think) as it was the champion and to be used in M&M breeding or something random.
If you actually generate a kind of good publicity for a company that sells a high margine product, like oh soft drinks or post-its, they'll likely go a little farther.
Go to Utah, throw a party near Brigham Young involving sharpies, post-it flags, white trash paper-clip necklaces, red 100% fuzzy cotton "Swingline" boyshorts(?), grain alcohol and quality control for the hot young mormon girl bodies, and put that crap on the web, Wild On, or Bthere tv, you'll be able to start an office supply chain.
The more I think about that the better that idea sounds.
It should be a crime to put a link on your site to another website when you know for *sure* that the flow of traffic from your site to their's will disable their servers or connection.
Back in 98, I installed a screensaver on a few file servers (NT 4.0). What was nifty about it was that it showed the total RAM count and was performing a filecheck that actually read the files (RAID activity can be heard) and flagged them as corrupted. Of course, the files were perfectly fine in reality.
Oh man...did I catch hell from my manager when he dropped his coffee mug and ran into the server room and pulled the plug on the RAID. Though I laughed really hard...he obviously didnt.
From that point on, we had to restore the file server because the system wasn't shutdown properly. Fuck...he only needed to move the mouse or press a key to kick the screen saver off.
Life is not for the lazy.
if you are going to get your companies web site on the front page of /. for some free advertizing, you sould probably make sure you're server can handle the load. Especially if you are an internet services company. By the time the site is stable again, the story will be off the front page and noone will care anymore.
Around my office, we have a tradition as well. At 12:00:05, the MOHAA server comes up and we spend our lunch hour chomping sandwiches between rocket attacks. Great fun, and the looks on the faces of the unaware are priceless. "Going out for lunch? No, thanks. I'm going to kill some co-workers."
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
I was going to say that.
/they/ get a bonus for Christma
I must confess that when I visited my American colleagues I was, to put it mildly, nonplussed by their relaxed attitude to actually doing any f'ing work at all while at the office. They have a nice canteen, great Internet access, big cubicles, we had to book ahead for lunch at the local restaurants... AND
No wonder we get the contracts. And six weeks off a year.
Mirror here
Case of Post-It notes to plaster office: $74
650 Ballons for birthday prank: $55
1 air pump: $20/day rental
Advertising one last fun place to work to a million potential candidates on
Seriously though, it great to see that there are cool places to work still. One more sign of the IT recovery @!
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
Yeah, they all got in 1 hour early at 10:00am ...
And some do!
Maybe I'm the only guy on slashdot to feel this way but shit like that would just annoy me.
I've had a few jobs where there was strong office comraderie like that, but in general, I think I prefer a slightly more conservative set of relationships in the workplace even if it comes at the expense of office morale.
I'm not suggesting that things should be sterile. I do, however, think one's workspace should be respected.
Mr Party Pooper
Most professionals can count the number of "lunch hours" they've had on one hand. I'm not surprised outsourcing is all the rage if this is what you do. Hint: for most people lunch is taken whilst doing some work. If one goes out for lunch its nearly always with clients.
We have a prankster in the office too. For April Fools she did the post it prank on our CEO because she is one of those people that put post its on every damn thing they do.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
So I can black list them. Personally in these times of economic difficulties I don't see why I should be paying your organsiation a hefty premium just so you can have pool-side buffets. I understand outsourced operations don't build these things in to their billing. Perhaps that explains a few things.
James's? Oy.
I should point out that my victims always get me back, usually by spraying anti-static cleaner through the back of my desk fan when I'm not expecting it (instant winter wonderland), or by stamping "REFERENCE COPY ONLY" across my forehead with the drawing office stamp (permanent).
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
This is the classiest joke I've ever seen. Cover everything in a friends apartment in aluminium foil. Everything. Individually.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Not only is it good PR for 3M to ship them a few cases, its a classy gesture. Shows they got a good sense of humor and stuff. Not to mention they make that crazy adhesive that is not _too_ sticky...
I have come into work with tons of boxes in my area, redeployment hardware and stuff like that. I think the message was... don't take a Friday off when you have bored co-workers.
When waiting for someone to go to lunch.. an impatient worker started killing off the xterms of the co-worker who was holding us back. Yeah. He wasn't too happy.
I have found that some of the things that I think are hilarious.. just aren't funny to most people. Either they're not funny or "immoral"... "perverse" or "career ending decisions".
-un1xl0ser
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
I just think it is time to move on from this collegiate behaviour. Other professionals are held in higher regard with good reason. This isn't to say the workplace should be sterile and oppressive, its just that behaving like a bunch of frat kids is a poor excuse for morale.
If you think about it you've already answered the question as to why google do what they do. They are also incredibly strong financially at the moment. Remember many years ago if you will, one of the reason we liked Apple was because they portrayed their staff as genial, hippy free thinkers, mulling code over as the bounced on trampolines/kicked hackysacks. This was a lie however. We all now know how Steve Jobs treated people on a day to day basis.
It's like "normalcy"! There's no such word! It's "normality"! If you happen to be an illiterate Yank, put the prefix "ab-" on it and try it on. "Abnormalcy" makes even less sense!
From what I understand, it was FDR that made this mistake in the first place. Does this mean that the lot of you are now going to enshrine the non-word "nucular", as pronounced by, first Ike, now Shrub, into your limited vocabulary?
once got so bored in college we started drawing smily faces on a couple thousand postits of varying size and color (the smily faces and post it notes for that matter); once we were done with that we stuck them all over the campus; she even went so far as to go into the ladies room; unravel the toilet paper; slap a post-it in there somewhere and then ravel it back up.
Book on depression in the library, no problem. We took a post-it with a smily, wrote under it don't worry be happy, and stuffed it somewhere in the middle.
Hell, I'm sure there are still post-its from us in some of the books that were covered under and inch of dust when we got there, let alone now.
Yes, the devious things you can do with post-its when you're bored.
At a previous job one of the most subtle tricks was to drill a very small hole in a persons mug with a laser welder, this resulted in a very slow leak, a slowly expanding puddle and a puzzled mug owner.
When I worked at University, one Christmas we turned our shared office into a "fairly grotty" using expanded polystyrene chips as snow, much to the horror of the German exchange student who also used the office.
You don't need a lab to make mud.
I've worked at 3 companies. Those pranks were pulled by someone at all of them. Now it's common place. I wonder when they'll scale up to urinating in the water cooler? Happens at every company. Nothing to see here, kindly go back to your homes...
We got a memo with weirdly over-specific instructions for how to live in our offices several weeks back. It included several bullet points like this:
And so on. This memo's content was completely ignored by everyone, but it's had its bad effect anyway. After we got it, people sat around talking incredulously about the thing, spending untold hours of company time just bellyaching about it. The thought of those on high in this massive company spending time writing and approving stuff like that is just utterly despiriting.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Check this out, some guys in the office built a cage overnight...
http://www.klod.net/stuff/yannis_trap.jpg
It also had a door that could lock, the door closing would be triggered by pulling the chair when the guy got inside the cage.
I certainly was not trolling. I have serious concern for the lack of respect given to IT professionals and I think that the process should begin with us acting like professionals.
Anyway, you can't talk about trolling. I've read your regular postings at Kuro5hin.
Some pranks from an old job:
Seal a vacationing manager's door shut with industrial strength plastic wrap and tape 2x4s across it like you'd see nailed across a broken window.
Fill the company president's office with 1300 balloons, some helium and some regular air, for her 40th birthday. She almost had a heart attack when she opened the door the next morning and a wall of balloons fell out.
TP the comapny founder's office on a day when he wasn't in. Housekeeping cleaned it up before he saw it!
There was a roof leak over the development area so we put up a makeshift roof with 2x4s and tarps to protect the computers. My supervisor asked me to help her take them down after the leak was fixed. We were carrying everything back to the warehouse when I noticed the guy in the next cubicle wasn't around, so I dumped everything in there, rather than carry it the additional twenty feet.
We had foam rubber computer mice with the company logo, url, etc. that were supossed to be given out at trade shows. They usually ended up being used as missiles by the founder. The wars never lasted more than a few minutes, because the company president (also his wife) would hear the noise and confiscate our arsenal, and tell him to get back in his cage.
It's not surprising how often pranks were played at that company. My second interview (with every manager at the same time) degenerated to the founder and I insulting each other within ten minutes. He said I'd fit in well.
They want their corporate culture back.
Seriously, when so many of us are having such a hard time just getting jobs, these guys get away with it as if their jobs weren't in danger.
I can't get a job in INDIA, I can't get a job HERE, why don't I just lie down and die!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Its time to grow out of thinking that theres anything "cool" about goofing off at work.
One Ford Escort + one hour + one roll of saran wrap/cling film
Hate me!
Last year our group moved from a satellite office into the corporate building. Gone are the parking lot BBQs, etc.
Last month our manager turned 40. We spent 3 hours after work decorating her office with black balloons, streamers, static stickers with over the hill slogans, a walker... You know the drill.
The next morning we were all called into human resources and for 45 minutes admonished for what they perceived as "age discrimination".
Yep... Isn't corporate fun?
And when the office web server crashed from a posting to slashdot, low and behold, there was Dave closing a browser window to slashdot.org
... they're a bunch of interactive tools.
Just kidding - harmless office pranks are great for comraderie.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You must be a manager for AT&T Wireless
And look what happened to that sorry excuse for a company.
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
Might take a few weeks - but covering your car / house / cube / desk with beer labels carefully removed from your Budweiser (the proper stuff - not that 'fresh beer tastes like pish' shit) has to be worth a crack for a few free cases.
Presided over the outsourcing there as well. When will companies learn that some people are NOT good leaders?
but this just seems to be a massive waste of resources.
Get the office's web-site slashdotted...
Post-it note prank
Balloons
WAY back when, when news stories were delivered by teletype, I was at a small radio station that was NOT on the air 24x7. The thing is, when you had a contract with AP, they SENT you enough paper to run the teletype 24x7, and they did NOT want it back, and there seemed to be no way to say "Please, do NOT send any paper for the next 6 month contract, we have way too much..." (Let's face it, if you only run 12-14 hours a day, after a year, you almost have a spare years worth of paper)
Well, one day, we wallpapered a hall, and left out magic markers, and told people "Go nuts" - it was the graffiti wall. Took up about 2 cases of paper. We took the OTHER 30 or so cases down to recyling
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Yeah, right.
Nothing beats powdered sugar between the sheets on a warm night. Unless it's remapping the boss's keyboard.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
No, work should be fun. You spend way too much of your life at work for it not to be. I'm so fucking tired of all these people who say that "work is not supposed to be fun, that's why they call it work". Give me a break! Why shouldn't you have fun at work? Is there some kind of universal law that states work and fun are mutually exclusive? If you think that's the case, then you truly are wasting your life.
Work should be something you enjoy going to. You know, waking up every morning thankful its a work day.
Work should be something you enjoy doing and take pride in it. You know, I love programming or I love making money by trading on the market, or I love teaching children, or I love working hard building a skyscraper.
Work should be fun. You know, programming is fun, working outside is fun, the people at work make my boring ass job fun.
Ever hear "work hard, play hard"? Work should be exactly like that. People at work should still work hard, but remember to play hard as well. Now we know that in most places, this is not the case, but we should be striving to change that. We should be trying to make work fun... it's a truly enlightened way of life. Take it from someone who has worked in both situations. It's just not worth it to work for a boring, restricting employer. Show me some studies that prove a fun corporate environment lessens productivity. Seriously. I want to see a carefully controlled study that takes into account an employee's work ethic in both environments.
I work at a large company but in a fairly small and friendly group, where the friendly banter we have could easily qualify as harassment -- but isn't, since everyone's in on it; the women are the most "offensive" of all.
The worst of them recently got married and so we had to do something to get her back. So while she was on her honeymoon, a bunch of us pulled everything from her cube. All her cabinets got locked, all her stuff got boxed and hidden by various people, her boss even stashed her computer. Her nametag got taken down, everything. They even managed to get her network password reset.
Unfortunately, I wasn't there to see her reaction, but I heard it was pretty good.
If you're likening the guy to anyone from the office, surely it'd be Tim...I can't think of a time when Brent's pulled a prank on *anyone*.
If a prank is taken in jest, and it seems this one is, where's the harm? It's not like they put his stapler in some jelly...
Another one was my April Fool's joke. We get lots of bulletins and memos all the time; updated dress code (it's not too bad, but everybody complains anyway), holiday notifications, timecard instructions, security info, all sorts of stuff. They're printed on colored paper, usually green, and follow a very standard design.
This same group of coworkers goes out for lunch all the time, and the one's wedding was coming up quickly. So, I prepared a security bulletin that I distributed to their mailboxes the night before.
Our company is very security conscious (being a defense contractor) so I played up that angle. Basically, the bulletin said that inter-employee meetings were prohibited outside of the office unless the appropriate forms were filed which might indicate the need of security personnel being assigned to oversee the meeting. Unexpected meetings had to be submitted to security by means of an audio recording. Unrecorded meetings had to be reported, and possibly followed up with interviews.
I didn't really expect to get anyone, but I did; he found the notice in his mailbox and assumed it had been there a few days, so he sent out an e-mail to all of us bringing it up; he propagated my joke without me having to do anything. They figured it out pretty quickly since I included a number of subtle clues that it was fake (didn't want to get in trouble) but everyone still enjoyed it.
That's nothing. At one of my recent clients' office, we once filled the VP of development's office four feet deep with styrofoam packing peanuts* while he was on vacation. His office has a vertical glass front so he was able to see it from the outside. It was pretty impressive :) If I can find the picture of it I'll post it.
He is a former programmer with a great sense of humor and was touched that we thought of him as 'one of the guys'. Of course we did it on off-hours and cleaned it up afterwards.
* We didn't actually fill the room - we arranged plastic sheeting over most of it so that there were 1-2 feet of peanuts on top, and brought the sheeting down to the bottom of the front window so it looked full from outside. This way it took fewer peanuts and was easier to clean up. The effect was the same though.
Read my keyboard review.
Everyone on ./ seems to have a friend who's done this with post-its - but it takes cheetos to make you an acclaimed artist.
My commute is 10 minutes, 15 on my pushbike, 40 if I walk.
I usually work a 37 hour week
Exceptionally, this week I'm going to work 50 hours.
Every extra hour I work I can claim as overtime, or I will flex off. Due to my tax situation, and general slackness, the latter will do.
If you don't routinely spend half your life at work, then it no longer has to be socially fulfilling. You can get in, do it, get out, and then, as I do usually, race yachts 1.5 days a week.
Anyway, thanks for the in-depth analysis, that's saved me 10c for a fortune cookie.
I work for a fairly large Corp, but several years ago our group was in a satellite site several hundred meters from the main buildings. So we were essentially left alone. Our director had a sense of humor and let us have some fun while we were working. She had a sign up that said "Sexual harassment will not be tolerated, however it will be graded". Our HR people nearly had heart attacks when they saw _that_ one. The sign didn't last long.
However, I was on vacation and returned on Monday, to find "Wanda" sitting at my desk. Wanda is a not a real lady, she was an inflatable best friend. This would have been fine, except that we had a potential new-hire coming through the offices that morning for interviews. So all day long we were running around with Wanda about one-step ahead of the candidate, lest she get the idea that we were nuts.
Another good prank was when we filled up the office of a colleague with empty boxes while he was on vacation. Ahhh those were the days. Now we are in the same building as the rest of the organization and have fewer opportunities for mischief.
Timothy - time to up the voltage on your shock treatments.
Blah, blah, blah, Post-It, blah, blah, blah.
I went on a week vacation and the regional secretary who relied on my technical support made sure that I knew she'd call me at home if there was anything she needed.
I never got personal calls at home during working hours. So, on my first day of vacation, I forwarded my phone to her.
She tried all week to get a hold of me. When she called me her line two would start ringing. Waiting and waiting finally she'd hang up and answer line two but no body was there.
She'd try again and line two would start ringing. She'd try putting me on hold to answer the other line. No one was there, so she'd hang up and come back to me, but because she had answered and disconnected, the line she was calling me on was now a dial tone. She figured I had probably answered and hung up.
Apparently this went on all week. Every time she'd call me her other line would ring and then all the stuff with disconnects and no one on the other line... She never figured it out and by the end of the week was very frustrated.
When I got back she went on and on about how she tried to call me. Then all the stories about how every time she did the other line would ring and then the disconnects.
I fessed up and told her what I did. Everyone in the office was laughing their ass off, except for her. She was stunned. I could see her thinking back and then putting two and two together. She finely got over it, probably after spitting in my coffee for a week or something to get even.
lemme see... 1. It's a company that sells web development tools. 2. It's servers were basically ready to get /.'d
3. They get a post on /. that portrays them as fun and friendly folk, successful enough in selling sw tools to have such time for foolery.
Sure looks like a stab at free advertising and publicity to me. I wonder what the sales figures look like post-/.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
This is the kind of 'news' that appears at the end of local news broadcasts when nothing else better is going on.
I am truly surprised at the volume of output (and tangents) that this article produced.
ZZZZzzzzzzz.........
...anymore than baldness is a hair colour.
It's a dialect, perhaps, or more accurately, a collection of dialects, most of which make the speaker sound as if he's an illiterate!
I just wanted to know how people would react to the following prank that a colleague and I pulled on a brand new hire. I was a coop back then and a new hire was brought into the group. On his first day, after the formal introductions, we took him to lunch at an all you can buffet and encouraged him to stuff himself. Back at work, his boss gave him an extremely boring book and he sat there reading it. The temperature in our office is often cold when the air conditioning kicks in in the summer and wearing a t-shirt, he was a bit cold. Chilled, full and bored, it was 15 minutes before he went to sleep. That's when the fun began. The first dare put out was putting a post-it note on his monitor with the words "How was the nap?". That was simple. The next one I came up with was a little meaner: Take a picture of him sleeping. Still not really mean... someone inevitably falls asleep once during the year. The stakes were raised when I suggested we change his desktop background to the picture of him sleeping. So after transferring the picture to a machine (didn't have a digital camera so had to use a Sony DV camera and find the external card reader), we dropped it into a network share, and the biggest guy(6'4" - yet most nimble amongst us) snuck into his office, balanced between the chair and the desk and changed his wallpaper. 15 minutes later, the victim woke up to find a picture of him sleeping on his monitor and 4 people peering over his cubicle wall waiting for his reaction.
He was shocked but took it well. Some others there stated they would have resigned on the first day if that had happened to them. I'm curious as to how many people feel that way.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
they forgot to put post-its on the ceiling!
The images are loaded from the server regardless. The google cache accomplishes exactly nothing in case of slashdotting.
No. I just work when I'm at work. Outside of work I play hard.
You get time outside of work?
Seriously though.
Here in the US, I'd say I've never seen this prankster phenomenon except in places characterized by many if not all of the following factors:
(1) Predominance of bright creative people.
(2) Creativity is a core value; breaking expected norms is an expected norm.
(3) Egalitarian businss culture emphasizing and things done over managerial hierarchy and perogatives.
(4) Main hierarchy is not managerial, but brainpower pecking order with intense competition to establish superiority.
(5) High intensity, pressure cooker atmosphere with long hours; people need to blow of steam.
In other words if I heard these kinds of hijinks were going on at a competitor, I'd take them very seriously rather than dismissing them as a bunch of goof offs. If you go head to head with them, you just might be facing a bunch of hard driving high IQ workaholics who think outside the box, and have both team cohesiveness and the flexibility to self-organize in novel ways to solve problems. In other words a competitive nightmare. Since in programming work (for example) there is easily a ten fold if not greater difference between the best teams and the mediocre ones, having a three or fourfold difference in compensation might not be enough to avoid getting squashed like a bug.
Then again, they might just be a bunch of immature goof offs with managers who are asleep at the switch. Paging Dr. Von Neumann: which assumption miminizes our maximum loss?
Culturally speaking, there's different ways to get things done. Having a little fun doesn't hurt.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sever goes down. site goes dark!
/.ed
they've been
my friends in the tin foil brigade wouldn't see that as a joke but as an act of mercy.
take care.
k3n.
Just curious, you at work?
Office pranks are OK. The swapping of telephone and keyboard keys. The taping up of mouse balls. Phantom phone calls... but nothing compares to factory floor pranks. They can be truly evil.
As patternmakers, my colleagues and I had to make...um...patterns. This involved a lot of measuring and marking out with steel rules. One day I guillotined the first 10mm off of my mate's steel rule - it's not the end you look at very often. He marked out half a dozen pieces that would have formed a box shape and proceeded to cut them out... The laughing started when his pieces wouldn't fit together properly as they were all 10mm short. It slowing turned into howling as he marked out the pieces again and proceeded to cut them for a second time. We were all clutching our sides when both sets of pieces were sat side by side - they were identical. He never found out it was me.
We played around with plaster from time to time too. The favourite was to fill a plastic coffee cup with plaster and attach a self-tapping screw to it. When set, we would screw the cup to the floor upsidedown... Everyone who walked passed would kick the cup in their best David Beckham style and fall flat on their faces. Oh the joy. They didn't see that coming.
Rubbing people's pencil down the crack of your arse was a favourite too. Some people, mainly the smokers, could not go for more than a few minutes without having a good chew on the end. The smell hits you second. Hmm tasty.
Filling people's gloves with grease was always good for a laugh too.
Holes for washers, long weights (waits) and left handed screwdrivers were a favourite with the apprentices. Each year September was the best.
It’s a wonder how we ever made any money. Oh wait, we didn't and that's why I now work in an office...
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
A friend of mine had his old Volvo rolled with wallpaper glue and then sprinkled with breakfast cereals. It looked like an infected warthog.
can these people stop wasting resources like this? can't they come up with anything more creative? come on, why waste so many post-its for some foolish surprise? the same thing with all the balloons... GROW UP! these people must be stripped and have their behinds whipped for irresponsible use of resources.
My sister came up with this prank tactic a couple years ago. She called it posting. She made it a little more interesting because she would write little notes, sayings or words on each post-it. She posted friends cars and front doors, random convienence stores, teacher's classroom doors. it is probably one of the best pranks i've ever heard of.
Well, as a former employee of interactivetools.com, I can testify that it's a great place to work. The company has a catered lunch every day and all kinds of other perks.
:-)
Oh, and "Dave" is the owner, so you can get a sense of the corporate culture, considering it goes all the way to the top.
James was my replacement as the marketing director, after I left - that could have been me.
Publisher, Universe Today - http://www.universetoday.com
We had an office prankster at one of my former workplaces. He would always lower my chair before I went into work. He would mess up my desk so managers would think I was sloppy. He would take employee photos and Photoshop them and print them out. Every day we got joke messages from various Yahoo accounts. I confronted him in email about it, as I was getting sick of the jokes. He finally admitted to it, but kept on joking around and didn't do much work.
:(
Eventually they let me go but kept him, he was the boss' favorite friend. Favoritism, you got to love it!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Who the hell decorated that office? The same person who decorated my kid's preschool? Whoever it was, they were clearly color blind.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I don't work hard and I don't play hard either. Life's pretty long these days, if I don't do something today I have another 40 years to do it. So relax, kick back, and enjoy a beer. :)
The good news is these guys are actually Canadians!
The bad news is they don't have any job openings.
"I wonder when they'll scale up to urinating in the water cooler? Happens at every company."
...for all of the people that think bottled water is a waste of money...
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
I'm sure we'll soon replace it with something constructed to be much more elegant and useful.
GrimRC
The definition of fun here is a very subjective one. Stuff as described here is basically fun if you are sufficiently young and didn't see it all before twenty years ago. This is part and parcel of a culture that thinks you are ready for the scrapheap when you hit 40.
Personally I do a job I love. I don't need to dress it up as a lan-party or a BBQ for it to be fun and rewarding. Many of my colleagues are friends and it didn't take any bogus "team building" exercises to make things that way either. I think its the nature of the "fun" described here I take issue with. Today I might have laughed, but yesterday I would of killed you if you'd filled my working area with balloons/postits etc. OTOH a funny aside or pleasant conversation is nearly always welcomed so long as I don't have things to do.
PS. There are no carefully controlled studies extant on this matter either way. There are some anecdotal ones in Peopleware but I wouldn't trust them.
Here at NASA if you are suspected of hacking, treason, espionage, running kiddy porn off a server etc you are initially informed of this when you walk in your office and theres this official document taped to your monitor that basically says YOU ARE ACCUSED OF SOMETHING INCREDIBLY HEINOUS, DO NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER OR ANYTHING IN YOUR OFFICE, ARMED GUARDS ARE COMING TO COLLECT YOU. So naturally i come this close to pissing my pants, rip the sign off the monitor, am scrambling covered in sweat swearing at the top of my lungs as i move to wipe the hard disc (had i done anything wrong? well probly i figured) and then this guy in my office starts to laugh.. bastard... where the hell did he get one of those signs anyways..
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
The glue used on post-it notes is carcinogenic. 3M employee exposure during the manufacturing of this glue is evident in elevated cancer cases among 3M employees.
Post-Its are not are harmless as one may think. I try to use them sparingly
Hmm... A story involving massive amounts of post-its, submitted by an anonymous reader, eh? Who wants to bet that it was an anonymous reader in 3M's marketing department?
They get loads of publicity throught the Slashdot story, and they don't even have to deal with the Slashdot effect!
When anything related to a 3M product is used in a prank that gets mentioned a lot, they're quick to send product for free. One of the things my brother did during a co-op with them in high school was checking on some of that.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
hehe ;-)
Say no to software patents.
Please mods, read the modding guidelines?
(I'm posting this anonymously, because I am less brave than you are...)
Why are the people who do this sort of thing and cause trouble always called "Dave"?
HAL9000 knew from the beginning he couldn't be trusted. How? He was called Dave.
It's still installed for the most part, although one of the rooms has had the foil taken off the walls at least. There was an open-house night which raised over $700 for moveon.org.
- Fake words of the day from dictionary.com, which were later used in conversation with management.
- Wimp of the year email poll
- Switching the microphone and receiver in the telephone.
- Holding desk trinkets hostage, complete with ransom notes and 'terrorist-esque' videos.
- Putting index cards randomly throughout the other's books and files (still finding them to this day).
- Replacing the background on the computer with a fat man in a thong and deleting the feature for changing backgrounds.
- Setting the background to a remote file and slowly reducing brightness over a few weeks.
- Cleverly renaming humorous audio files so that fart noises are sent to one's wife and mother.
- Stealing a trailer hitch cover, encasing it in scotch tape, wire, and expanda-foam, and hiding it in the plant with a series of clues strewn about the building.
In the end, David pulled a prank that questioned Andy's personal character, which led to the end of the prank wars. Although we were all having fun, it is paramount that you don't make the pranks personal. The fun stops there. Period.There are two types of people: those prepared for the zombie apocalypse and those who will be eaten.
Aluminum Foiled Apartment
If firefighters fight fire and crime fighters fight crime, what do Freedom fighters fight?
I don't know about anyone else, but the original post reminds me of The Office. They are trying to be funny. But, the problem is that they just aren't.
We did something similar to a co-worker's office with packing peanuts. Not quite filling it up, be we made it LOOK like it was filled to the brim. The door to the office was a french window door with many small panes of glass. We draped a black plastic bag over the back of the door, made a pocket out of it surrounding the windows, and filled it with peanuts. From the outside, it definately LOOKED like the room was filled with peanuts - we even shoved a good number of peanuts underneath the door to make it look like the room was bulging out. No pics unfortunately, but it was a good laugh...
"I do, however, think one's workspace should be respected."
We're gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs into storage B. We have some new people coming in, and we need all the space we can get. So if you could go ahead and pack up your stuff and move it down there, that would be terrific, OK?
Sounds like all the errands we would send n00bs on in the Navy when we were bored during a deployment.
We sent one guy from the engine room down to the corpsman's office for 10 feet of Fallopian tube. There was also sending them up to see the bos'ns for buckets of prop wash. Or ordering steam blankets from supply (for those who may not know, a steam blanket is actually the process of laying up an offline boiler with steam from another source - prevents corrosion). Or getting batteries for the sound powered phones. Or going to the yeoman for a 1D-10T form (there was also a PU-55/Y form but we had to be careful about that one).
One of the best ones was the 'sea bat'... we were underway on a Med cruise in the summer of '93. Close to sundown, word went around on the messdeck that someone had actually caught a sea bat up in the helo hangar. The n00bs went running up, and were let in one at a time to see a cardboard box upside down on the deck, with a bunch of guys standing around it in a circle.
The new guy would be told that he couldn't just pick the box up as the bat would get away, so he had to bend over and pick up the edge a little and peek at it that way. As soon as he bent over, another guy would belt him across the ass with a broom. Get it? Har har... well, one dufus actually said "Hey quit it - I'm trying to look at the bat, and you're going to make me let him loose!" That dumb fucker took about 7 or 8 hits on the ass before he finally got the joke.
Another totally hilarious one, that our XO was in on - he loved to play jokes, was "mail buoy watch"... there were actually people who could be convinced that we got our mail onboard by leaning over the bow at a predetermined location with a boat hook and snagging a bag off a buoy floating there, like the old Pony Express or something... so some poor dumb SOB would be assigned the midwatch (midnight to 4am), and be sent up on the fo'c'sle in full battle dress, kapok, helmet, phones, etc - with a boathook and some binoculars. The bridge would call down every so often and tell him to keep watching... eventually they'd let him in on the joke, and a good laugh would be had by all.
Well one guy thought he was so smart - he'd heard about the ruse when in boot camp. So he decided to sleep in and not do his watch. That would have ruined our fun, so we got the postal clerk on board to give us an official mail bag, and we soaked it in salt water, tore up some paper, and slashed the bag up with a knife. We then went to the aforementioned SOB's rack and threw open the curtains, throwing the bag on his head and yelling at him about how f-ed up he was for blowing his watch, and now we ran over the damn buoy and the bag got shredded in the prop.
The look of horror on his face was priceless... "I thought that it was just a gag!" We said hell no it's no gag, and now we've got no mail, and the XO wanted to see him in his dress uniform ASAP.
So the guy gets out his dress blues and heads up to the XOs stateroom (at 0200 or so). The XO chews him out for a few minutes about obeying his leading petty office even if he thinks it's bullshit, etc. The guy got quite a bit of kidding the next day at breakfast...
Ahh, good times...
I took a vacation to Florida back in November and was gone for a week. As I work for a software company, I pretty much expected to be pranked.
Sure enough, when I returned, I found everything in my office had been taped to my monitor. And I mean everything -- the protrusion was 3 feet long.
Apparently they had done more, complete with netting and such, but one of the higher ups walked by and said it was too much. It was pretty funny, until it came time to separating everything that had been taped together...
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
A manager had done the ping-pong ball avalanche and, afterwards, he asked where all the balls went. The response was, "in a safe place." He spent the following days opening his cabinets... ever... so... slowly...
Of course, we had much more elaborate plans...
We took several bungee cords from one guy's truck and attached them to the doorknob on the back of his door. The other ends were attached to a large file cabinet behind the door and the cords were stretched to the limit (and I mean it) as the door was shut and latched. Between the door and the cabinet, we placed two large, hardware-grade, garbage bags. The bags' openings were taped to a series of 15-20 cardboard tubes, cut and joined to create several angles, with the openings pointed at the doorway. The tubes were filled with the balls, the bags inflated, and the openings were lightly taped.
When he opened the door, there was an ungodly bang and a volley of ping pong balls went flying everywhere. It was over before he even had a chance to react. He said that the extra resistance in the doorknob didn't tip him off until it was too late.
The kicker... when he unlocked the door, his keys were on a small chain to his belt. If the keychain hadn't broke, it could have only been better had his pants been ripped off in the process.
If InteractiveTools had designed HTTP and HTML, they'd be using it, alone, in their basement.
Good luck taking me to court for distributing this, guys!!! The rumour in Vancouver is that you'll try.
Some places just have no sense of fun.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
mod parent down as flame/offtopic
- I regret my previous post.
I'm a fairly socialable person and enjoy spending time with my coworkers, but the first priority should be getting the work done.
At my last job, there was so much focus on "having fun", and "building the team", that the company went out of business before the product was finished. I remember the sounds of Foosball(tm) drifting through my cube for about 6 of the 8 hours I was there.
When I first saw this story, it seemed like you were linking to an old site from archive.org!
Seriously, if you were one of their clients and they were underrdelivering, this wouldn't please you.
Best Buy can have you arrested
I work for a local telemarketing firm. Please don't kill me yet.
My very first day there, April 1st, I get to the office an hour late. My shift is from 6am to noon, Pacific time and the pay clock says it's 7. They are fairly strickt about being on time and it was also my first day.
As it turns out, the manager had set the payclock forward by an hour for April Fool's day. Needless to say, not all call-center jobs suck. This one is actually pretty cool.
I'd also like to mention that if anybody does order from a telemarketer, the telemarketer usually get's a commission. So please, for the love of Internet, please order from telemarketers. I get $5 per sale and $50 after 5 sales in one week on top of the normal hourly rate.
wow, what a waste. seriously, no wonder why our world sucks. the seriousness of this wastefulness far outweighs any humour involved.
Why yes, as a matter of fact, we're always short post-it's here at The Roanoke Rescue Mission. A case of post-it's would come in quite handy.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
I wish someone would play these tricks on me....
Im a homedad, with 3 sick kids and the only prank I get is one of them misses the bowl when they've got the runs......
Yup, that's my penguin. One of my buddies, a big linux guy @ Vanderbilt knew I was going to Microsoft and dared me to give it a good home. And it's been a fixture in my office for the last 4 years.
You just publically admitted on Slashdot that you are (or at least that you were...) working for Microsoft?!? You fool!
Here's a picture. Enjoy!
Read my keyboard review.
I see all the post its, but shouldn't they all have witty or sarcastic notes on them? This was a prank that wasn't completed.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?