We spend the majority of our waking hours at work, and the day-in-day-out routine can get pretty monotonous at times. Get up, get ready, drive to work, sit at desk, eat lunch, sit at desk, drive home… do it again the next day. There is one thing that can help to make work more enjoyable… pranks.
One of my favorite office pranks came about rather accidentally. We had a new employee start and he was seated in a desk opposite to me. The department manager was giving him orientation, about an hour into the day I noticed that he was having a problem with his chair. It just wouldn’t roll. He was picking it up and shuffling it closer to his desk to reach his computer, which was quite a sight – I must add. Upon closer inspection, the center support of the chair was pushed all the way to the floor past the rollers. Being his first day, he was trying deal with the chair rather than call attention to himself and ask for a new one. It was pretty funny. I took the offending chair and put it into a spare office, replacing it with an unbroken chair. I didn’t know it at the time, but this coworker was to become my partner-in-crime in the fine art of office pranks.
A couple months later, we remembered the broken chair and were chuckling over his first day’s experience. Then it occurred to us that it was just sitting in that office waiting for us to make good use of it. We waited until the office was relatively empty. Our timing was perfect as we carried the broken chair through the halls and into our office, preparing for the switch – no one was yet the wiser. We waited and our victim soon left her office unprotected as she took a brief break. One of us carried the broken chair into her office while the other rolled her chair back to our office. Within seconds the deed was done – undetected. Then we waited…
Our victim soon returned to her office and we listened quietly for her reaction. We heard a scuffing sound as she tried to roll her chair to her desk… a pause… then a second scuffing sound… followed by an exclamation. We were snickering and barely holding back our glee. It didn’t help, she immediately knew that we were the cause of her misfortune. I walked over to her office chuckling and was soon laughing almost hysterically as I watched her trying to adjust the chair’s knobs to fix it! I went back to my office with tears streaming down my face. She followed me to see my partner-in-crime leaning casually against her real chair. She immediately figured out what we had done. Her chair was returned and the offending chair was “tabled” – perhaps to return another day!
It was fun and harmless, and helped with the comradeship of the office.
