Office Pranks

My office is pretty quiet. Most of the time, all you hear are a bunch of keyboards typing a mile a minute. To shake things up a little, I like to play pranks on my coworkers every once in a while. Typically it is while they are on vacation so they have a "surprise" when they come back.

If I was smart, I would know that all this bad karma I'm building up would eventually come back to kick me where the sun don't shine.

I'm not smart. In fact, I fall for pretty much every gullible joke there is. I even fell for the, "Did you know the word gullible isn't in the dictionary?" Yup. I fell for that one ... twice.

Another favorite is ... (when pointing to the ceiling) "Hey, who wrote the word gullible up there?"

Back to my karma beating ...

One day a few weeks ago, I had to work from home. That afternoon, I got an IM from my coworker (we'll call him Francis). Francis wrote: "You picked a good day to work from home. They just laid off two people." I (of course) took his bait and his hook and swallowed them immediately. The IMs continued and a couple more people were let go when suddenly Francis said he had to go because he was being called into the HR manager's office. At that point, my other coworker (we'll call her Gladys), took up the story and told me how pale Francis looked and how awkward the office was. They're all in the office giggling like a bunch of school girls, and I'm at home sweating buckets wondering if I'm next. Suddenly, my computer screen fills up with IMs from everyone involved, saying "GOTCHA!" It's probably good they didn't keep it going all afternoon, or they probably would have had to talk me down off a ledge.

Fast forward a couple weeks.

I was in a particularly long meeting (of my own making ... for explanation, see the title of this blog), and when I came out, Gladys and another coworker (who we'll name Cletus) had done a bunch of little things to my desk (i.e. covering the optical sensor on my mouse so I would think my computer had frozen). What I didn't know is that all of these things were to conceal the fact that they had removed one of the wheels off my chair. Gladys and Cletus couldn't have planned it better because as soon as I finished fixing all the junk around my desk, I plopped down in my chair like a walrus doing a cannon ball. With one wheel missing, it launched me into my cubicle wall. Did I mention our office is quiet? I mean QUIET. I can hear people chewing gum on the other side of the room. Me hitting the cubicle wall didn't do any other damage than bruising my pride, but it sounded so loud that our HR manager came out of her office wondering if someone was hurt. We all had a good laugh over that one.

So, here is the moral of the story. A good person would take these experiences and learn from them. Maybe ... I don't know ... bake cookies instead of filling their cubicle with balloons.

Me? I can't wait until Cletus and Gladys go on vacation ...