When I worked in financial services, my boss Roger was surprisingly cool. He, the bond guy Pat, Robbie the receptionist, and I were a round-robin of pranksters.
My all-time best was the day I removed the little musical chip from a singing greeting card, wrapped it in cotton batting, and taped it to the top of a ceiling tile in Roger’s office. He was on the phone trading a lot of the day, so he couldn’t hear it until that afternoon, sporadically. All afternoon, I got, “Hey Juana, come in here and take a listen.” I’d enter his office, listen intently for a few seconds, then say, “Nope, can’t hear anything but Pat and Doug on their speaker phones.” That lasted several hours, until the office quieted down enough for Roger to ID the song and locate the source. (Perhaps I should have picked a card that wasn’t playing “Happy Birthday.”)
Another time, Carole the office manager and I cooked up a great one on Robbie. In this office, when you had to leave, you let Robbie know. We divided the office up and called everyone at home the night before to tell them to have a reason to be out of the office tomorrow at noon, and be sure Robbie knew. So the next morning, all of us told Robbie at various times what our lunch plans were - doctor’s appointment, workout, lunch date with former co-worker, that sort of thing. At about 10:30, she called Carole in a huff, saying she just figured out that all but two of us were gonna be gone during lunch and she had no idea how this could possibly happen, given our coverage requirements, and went on and on until Carole said, “Hey Robbie, do you realize what day today is?” Robbie said, “Of course, it’s April first ... oh.” She got quiet for a few seconds, then laughed so hard we could hear her all over the office.
But Robbie had her revenge on us all. She made up a fake message slip and took it to Roger right after he was done with a meeting, telling him the SEC (the U.S. body that governs financial services companies) was coming in for our seven-year audit the next day. You have NEVER seen such chaos as all of us running around at Roger’s direction, pulling files together and straightening things for the auditors and making sure everything was where it needed to be. Robbie let this go on for the better part of two hours before she ‘fessed up.
So to get her back, and include me and Carole in the deal, Roger waited a few months, until the day before Good Friday (when stock and bond markets are closed). He told the office that day that he’d just found out the bond market would be open a half-day on Good Friday, so he’d need half of us to come in. Hilarity ensued, with those of us who lacked travel plans extorting concessions from co-workers who had planes to catch. Roger let us go crazy for a couple hours, then walked down the hall laughing at us all, which sorta clued us in.
Then I embarked on a series of mini-pranks on Pat the bond guy. We had no PC security back then, so you could install whatever you wanted on your PC. I found several little apps that I thoughtfully put on Pat’s PC when he wasn’t looking. One of them, when you tried to click on an icon on your desktop, caused the icons to zoom all around the screen evading the cursor. Another, when you shut down your PC, made the icons swirl around the screen and go down a drain in the lower corner. My favorite was one that when you didn’t move the mouse for a minute or so, your right-hand speaker would snore gently, as if the mouse had gone to sleep.
You’d have thought Pat woulda fingered me, the IT girl, for the source, but he kept asking me for help on how to fix it. Oh, the naivete of some bond guys.
Good times, good times.
LOL
Got a link?
Those are some great pranks!
The pranks in the maintenance shop were always a little more serious. Cars got shrink-wrapped. Tool boxes got placed in the ceiling by forklift, welded shut or were wired to an outlet. There was the high pressure hot water hose incident that almost got a few people fired, as well as the locker that got filled with instafoam through the vent. Unfortunately there was a nice leather jacket inside that took several hours to free.
Oh, and one very tempermental possum locked in the security truck on the late shift.