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I used to work in the email admin area at the BBC. This meant that I had access to do whatever I wanted to with the internal address list and create anything_i_like@bbc.co.uk So ... I did! One day for fun 'Elvis Presley' appear on the internal address list, with a hidden pointer so that if any did email it, it got forwarded to my own mailbox. It also had the address 'elvis.presley@bbc.co.uk' so that it could be emailed from the outside. For about three months - nothing happened, until one day out of the blue I suddenly got an email saying "Elvis .. is that really you? Alive and well at the BBC?". Someone had seen it! And sent in an amusing email. Well I responded (naturally), usually along the lines of "Well uhhu ... I just popped out to get me a cheeseburger, and was a hellava queue .. well uhu...", and dropping in the occasional Elvis song title. Whoever the person was, obviously told their colleagues, as over the next couple of days I had similar conversations with several people, until on the third day one of them emailed me saying "Elvis - I think you should go and check out the diary column in today's Guardian newspaper". So I went and bought a copy to discover that someone obviously had a friend who worked on the Diary column as Elvis had been mentioned! So I managed to make the national press ... RFK - The Values There was a manager in my old office, who didn't directly manage me - but did 'manage' some colleagues/friends that I worked with. I won't name names, because the initials 'RFK' are enough to identify him. Anyway, he's left now, so it would be far to say that he was the most disliked person at work that I knew. Everyone that worked under him, even those that worked with him at a fellow management level found him to be smarmy, annoying and a shite shite manager. I know it's a cliche, but he was a crap manager, and everyone hated him. One thing he used to do was make us endure a weekly meeting every Friday afternoon (terrible time for a weekly meeting!), so to make it more enjoyable one week - I recorded him! I plugged in my mini disc with a microphone and hid it near to where he would be standing in the office - and got lucky ... as this was the week that he waffled on about 'The Values' at work - the latest corporate strategy nonsense that we were being sold to make us feel better about our jobs. So I got about an hours worth of him waffling on, took it up, edited up - and put it to the 'Big Brother' theme tune music (it just seemed to work well). The result? A pisstake of the manager sounding stupid forever and ever and guaranteed to bring a smile to your poor tortured colleagues that had to work under him. And thus ...
I admit I got this idea from the Dilbert book The Joy of Work. If fact, if you're into your pranks then get hold of a copy of it, as it lists a whole bunch of things that you can do if you've really got the time, energy and inclination. I got a telephone plug wall socket, some wire, and glued it inside the toilet. I then hid the wire into a hole to make it look like it was going somewhere meaningful. I then nicked a pukka facilities management sign off of the lifts informing us of lift maintenance, scanned it in and changed the text so that it said:
I then stuck it up above the cistern in the main toilet that everyone used just down the corridor from my office. It looked like this:
Bananapost - see separate part of this site Switching labels There's nothing better that confusing people by swapping labels round on something to confuse them. We once had a new water cooler installed, that not only cool/chilled water, but also now gave out hot water as well. So instead of one button to dispense cold water, it had two buttons - a blue coloured one for cold, and a red coloured one for hot. Make sense? Of course ... until I did the simple thing of getting the labeling machine and putting a sticker that said 'cold' on the hot button, and one that said 'hot' on the cold button. Result? People would come up with a mug and a tea bag .. and fill it up with cold water!! It caught out about five or six people until some killjoy let on and the labels got removed! Who nicked Steve's biro? My colleague Steve that I used to work with always used to complain about having his Bic Biro stolen from his desk. We didn't do it deliberately, but it would seem that his desk was in the ideal location in the office for people to pinch a pen from when they needed one. "Where's my pen gone again?" he would regularly moan each morning, to find once again his desk devoid of a writing implement. So we initially had some fun with him, by making sure that we did deliberately pinch his pens, until I came up with the idea one day of doing the complete reverse : Making sure that he would never ever run out of pens ever again. I got most of the twelve other people in the office to contribute a pound to my fund, put in a fiver myself and with the money went out and bought about 200 bic biros. We waited until Steve went home that night, and then we stuck them EVERYWHERE all over his area: On his desk, keyboard, monitor, mouse, mousepad, lamp, chair. We stuck them together like ammunition chains and draped them from the light fitting above, we marked out the words "Hello Steve" in pens on the window next to him .. he couldn't move the next morning for pens all over his desk! Suffice to say, Steve never ran out of pens again, and unfortunately I never took a photo of it.
Now I admit that I stole this idea from someone else, but as someone said oin my office "Only you would actually go through with it and do it ... " You get a pack of post-it notes (or several packs), wait until your target/colleague has gone home for the night, and then cover their desk, chair, drawers, in-trays with post it notes (you don't even really habe to write on them), and then make sure you leave one right in the middle of their computer monitor that simply says: "We've run out of post-it notes, can you order some more?" This was the scene when I did it to my old boss Julian at the BBC, shortly before he left (so he never got a chance for retribution) Sweepstakes Never under estimate the power of an 'office sweepstake' to get people excited and bonded and talking about the same thing. Quite often I would run them at all the usual times - The Grand National horse race, whenever the World Cup or European football championships were taking place, but you can adapt these and have 'stakes on other things. When my accident-prone boss (Julian, post-it man, above!) went on holiday to South Africa for three weeks, we all had a bet as to what mishap would happen to him first. Shark bites, mugged, lost wallet, sun-burn, etc.. we all put in a £1, and the winner was the person who correctly guess that he would break his digital camera. I had one running on what date the Queen Mother would die, buy my favourite was on when the second Gulf War (in 2003) would start. Yes it's a sick thing to do, but if that's the case, why did over 50 people participate? We used to have one for when the pope was going to die, but since his demise in early 2005, we've moved onto Nelson Mandela instead who we think will be the big next name to 'go'. |
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more post-it notes