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.
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 :
1) Wasn't done on work time, at least not creating the messes. The clean-up wasn't so bad for the balloons, evidently. Can't eb so sure about the Post-Its.
2) A good manager sees the value of good clean fun, and knows that it can be a morale booster in moderation. Happy workers == productive workers.
± 29 dB
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?
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
Bosses who don't allow it usually find themselves with companies that fail. Sure, workers should be productive, but if you as an employer try and make the workplace into something too rigid and constraining, your employees will be demoralized and will not function as well as in a more relaxed enviroment. I know that you might be thinking of a company which is at the other end of the spectrum - where very little work is done, and it's true that that is not a desirable situation. The truth is, though, that the optimum level lies somewhere inbetween.
You have to allow a certain amount of goofing around, you have to arrange company braais (BBQs for you American folks), go-karting, bowling, golf, horse-riding, etc. What you want is for your employees to get along with you and with eachother. If you don't allow that to happen, your employees will either not care about what they are supposed to be doing, or try in vain to do what they are supposed to be doing in an enviroment that they hate. Noone wins.
Now a whole lot of people will say: "But the employer has the power! They can outsource! Your job is not safe! As an employee you have no right to complain!". That's true, to a certain extent. But remember: If an employer was thinking of outsourcing, it probably wouldn't make a difference how well you were or were not performing, the key factor to companies that outsource is saving money and increasing profit margins at all costs. They will learn in time that quality products do make a difference, however, and will be back at square one. I've dealt with outsourcing first hand, and there are pros and cons to it, like with anything. In reality, what most companies will probably end up doing is outsourcing things that make sense to outsource, and bring things that make little sense to outsource back to the physical office. So that "but you'll be outsourced" argument goes out the window.
As for people having no right to complain and being forced to be happy that they have a job at all, this might be true for a lot of people in the current economy, but it still doesn't mean that slave-driving will produce good results. You'll end up with an employee-base that really hates working at the company, and every time you fire someone and get someone new in, the same thing will happen. They will start detesting their working conditions and perhaps even deliberately go on go-slows or worse.
Both employers and employees have to find a balance in the work enviroment. Employees must understand that they can't party at work and goof off for 6 hours a day, and employers must understand that trying to impose draconian rules and policies will not benefit them in the long run.
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
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
Some companies actively encourage it.
Where I worked a few years ago, we had something called a 'friday meeting' the 1st friday of every month. A colleague of mine got severely ridiculed because he thought it wise to bring a pen and some paper for his first attendance --- which was about playing hockey in one of the empty studios. On other occasions we've been out go-carting, and even to a grand casino (complete with free pool-side buffet).
Sure this costs the company money, but they do get return value for it.
"Good news, everyone!"
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'!!
No one has mention that there are downsides: if someone is hurt in a workplace practical joke, then the employer is liable. So it's good to have fun, but be sensible and play it safe
The two pranks listed in this article are fine, but you need to be aware of the danger.
Generally, (a) keep the pranks and humour safe and non-dangerous, watch out for anything that could be considered offensive, (b) if it's a large scale prank, make sure you have some "informal" chat with people (say, your supervisor) before hand just to get a verbal indication that it won't cause any problems. Your supervisor may tell you that the global CEO is going to be in the office that day so you might want to try your prank the next day
Some pranks I have experienced that don't work well: (a) giving people supposedly "funny" birthday presents (a vibrator), taken the wrong way and employee was really quite offended, (b) publishing prank photographs on internet newsgroup that also included a couple of shots that a person considered offensive. I don't think there were any legal issues in these cases, but it quickly turned from fun into a problem.
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...
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.
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
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
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
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
I find that the ol' gun to the head makes my employees much more productive
Hey! Do you work for AT&T as well?
This is where the serious fun begins.
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
The place where I used to work had "4-o'clock Fridays" when we would stop work, drink beer, and play WarCraft III. Good times.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
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
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.
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.
...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!
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
I'm applying for a job at 3M.
I anticipate an increase in demand for Post-Its.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The environment doesn`t have to do with the prank in itself. When I was in the army, wich is not the most happy environmnet you can get, we actually turned 180 degrees the bed of a sleeping friend without waking him up! Oh, the look on his face when he woke up and in front of him was a wall..! Took about 1 full minute looking arround, trying to understand what had happend.
We managed to best this by doing something more "extreme" along the same lines. We managed to transfer a friends bed, again while he was sleeping on it, out of the room where he slept. He woke up under a tree...
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!
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hehe ;-)
Say no to software patents.
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...
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.