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 ...

People have tooo much time on their hands..

[theirishman]

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.. ?

Bruce Almighty

[tantalus]

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.

Re:Peanuts are better!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

for those who want a link (my conscious tells me to click post anonymously) priceless [do-not-sleep.com]

Re:Time on your hands

[KlaymenDK]

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.

Re:Time on your hands

[Comatose51]

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.

Times are changing

[DeanFox]

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?

Re:Newspapers

[boomer_rehfield]

Hehe. I used to work at a newspaper here in Florida and we had a guy leaving out IT group. As luck would have it he had to take a couple hour trip to a remote site to fix something. Let the fun begin. I spent about three hours individually gift wrapping every single thing in his cubicle for him in newspaper, nice and neatly. It looked like Christmas. Pens, coins, books, chair, monitor, picture of the wife...routers...tacks.. name it... The look on his face was the best. I've got a couple pics but I really don't feel like slashdotting my poor little PII 350 linux server. :)

Re:You Bastard

[ishmaelflood]

No. I just work when I'm at work. Outside of work I play hard.

I don't go to work to be friends, I get that outside of work, what is the hard thing to understand?

A good one.....

[CharlieG]

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

Re:People have tooo much time on their hands..

[taniwha]

we actually did the fill-the-office-with-baloons to the VP of engineering for a company I worked for (almost 20 years ago now ...) - came in on Sunday, worked all day 'till when we pushed on in through the ceiling tiles another would burst - it was a great team building exercise we had a great time.

Monday morning he came in a foul mood (usually he was a really great guy) - which kind of ruined it for us. Walking into his office with a pin was a lot of fun though :-)

Re:Enough.

[ducklord]

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...

Office prankster

[Orion Blastar]

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! :(

Re:Competitive culture

[BlueUnderwear]

(2) Creativity is a core value; breaking expected norms is an expected norm.

With a surprising number of these pranks, the "expected norm" seems to be "fill mark's office with a megazillion of some funny object", be it packing peanuts, post-its, balloons, rubber ducks, bouncy balls, chad, you name it. The only thing creative about it seems the particular choice of "funny object" du jour, but apart from that it looks like the same old joke over and over again... Hey pranksters, next time try breaking this "expected norm", and come up with some truly novel prank, hehe ;)

Re:Competitive culture

[b!arg]

Not work related, but this [blacktable.com] put these balloons and post its to shame.

Re:BSOD screensaver

[JesterXXV]

Or you can take a screenshot of just the desktop, set it as the background, and then turn the desktop icons off by right-clicking the desktop and unchecking Arrange Icons By -> Show Desktop Icons (at least in Windows XP, dunno about others...). My roommate got me with that one, since I didn't even consider that there was such a "feature" in Windows.

Yep, office pranks are good...

[Gruneun]

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.