[unclebilly]

I’ve been known to play a few office pranks and have had a few played on me too.

Things I orchestrated...

1. Switched the page and voicemail buttons on a guy’s phone. The entire day, we would hear ‘bing... hello? Hello? What the...’

2. Filled my mentors office with packing peanuts. We had a Chinese bucket brigade and a ladder. We popped a ceiling tile on either side of his door.

3. Painted a co-worker’s office pink and put up numerous framed pictures of the queen. He was British and was returning from a trip to the UK the next day.

4. Signed a couple coworkers up for subscriptions to Country Singles magazine. This is the monthly singles magazine sold at truck stops and rest areas in the mid west... the last page was dedicated to incarcerated singles looking for love.

5. Lowered the ceiling in my protégés office to about 5’10”. He was short. This involved removing the door from his office. The base manager was really mad about this one until I showed him that the original drop ceiling was still there and we just suspended the new ceiling from it. Lewis put up with it for 2 weeks. He popped out a tile above the work space on his desk and when you turned on the light, you got this really nice rectangular lit space on his desk. He also has a window seat so lots of natural light.

6. There were 2 coworkers that had a 30 year HATE for one another. We will call them D and J. One yea, J (my former boss who I have no love for either) left and bought another company. Every year at Christmas, J would send over hats, pens, and calendars... I would bundle this all up and send it to an accomplice at our head office who would strategically place them in D’s office each morning... the stuff would disappear and nothing was ever said. Then one morning, the ‘straw’ broke the camel’s back... ALL of the stuff had been tossed out into the hallway outside the hater’s office.

My accomplice, who was never suspected, was the recipient of a 35 minute J themed monologue. “If J wants to keep sending me this graft, let him. He’s only wasting his own money!”

7. We removed the door from my coworker’s office (ceiling tile guy) and replaced it with a sheet of plywood. Before mounting the plywood, we had our receptionist lay on it and we traced her body and sawed out the shape. To enter this office, you had to contort to the shape of Jenny.

8. Lots of pranks in the field but those need another post...

Done to me...

1. We had mice in one of our plants. It wasn’t that bad but there were mouse droppings on some of the desks. I was really mad about this.

The guys got chocolate sprinkles and were putting out ‘mouse droppings’ all around my desk.

I brought in my own mouse traps and set up a trap line. One of the guys lived on a farm and he caught some real dear mice and either put them in my traps or just replaced my traps with the ones he used to catch these mice. Deer mice can have hantavirus...

I reacted badly.

2. I asked my team if they knew anyone who had a nasty old shag carpet as I wanted to recarpet someone’s office... when I came back from vacation, my office had been recarpeted with a nasty old red shag carpet that stunk. They left the space heater on in my office for at least a week... every time I went in there, my eyes would water. At the end of the week, I removed it (it wasn’t easy because it was under all of my furniture and heavy shelves). It was nasty. They knew it bugged me because it was my idea used on me.

Revenge for the carpet...

A friend and fellow pelican came a cross a bunch of free taxidermy and asked if I wanted it... the carpet bandits all got animal heads hung in their offices. The carpet proprietor got a massive elk mounted right above his desk. It was hard for him to sit at his computer because it had to be mounted so low due to the size of the horns.

Bottom line, I’ve spent my entire career working with creative people in creative environments and this type of behaviour was allowed. We had strong team dynamics and my teams were the envy of the company. We work hard, we play hard, and no day goes by without a laugh.