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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.
http://www.do-not-sleep.com/images/priceless.jpg
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.'
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?
I find that the ol' gun to the head makes my employees much more productive than any amount of "fun".
Game... blouses.
And what boss is going to complain about three new cases of post-its?
Hey they're even asking for ideas so the boss can do something back to them..
:-)
My suggestion: be very creative with superglue.
There's nothing superglue can't solve
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
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.
Yeah... They could have at least gone down to accounts and stamped 'Received' on them all
Reminds me of a suprise 40th Birthday party we had for a friend of mine... He was suprised, because it was held in October and his birthday wasn't until March... He was more suprised because he was only 34...
:-)
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
Everything in his apartment is wrapped in alumium foil, except for a copy of Penn and Teller's book "Cruel tricks for Dear Friends".
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!
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 always thought that the Patio Set, and gas grill that we can use whenever we want would be enough.
build a long Telephone line, and I can spend 2-3 hours outside for lunch if I get lucky enough.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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
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.
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.
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.
So you're telling me superglue is like perl?
Hell yeah it is. Nobody understands it, everybody screams about how great it is, promises to work forever but in reality only works for about three hours.
Hell yeah superglue is just like perl.
Like what I said? You might like my music
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!
Ok, but do they get a blowjob too?
blah
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
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.
...birthday presents (a vibrator), taken the wrong way and ...
Indeed. A vibrator taken the wrong way can bring tears to the eyes, I am sure.
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.
One Ford Escort + one hour + one roll of saran wrap/cling film
Hate me!
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.
I'm applying for a job at 3M.
I anticipate an increase in demand for Post-Its.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
Yeah, and it tastes funny.
No, that's a perl necklace.
hehe ;-)
Say no to software patents.
>I don't go to work to be friends, I get that outside of work.
I'm glad I don't work with you.
The Truth About Slashdot
Hey, I'm that friend who got covered in tinfoil... for all the press that story got, I was always a little disappointed it didn't make /.
Here's a link to some photos... second one down:
http://www.meetluke.com/NxAlbumList.asp
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...