Pranks In The Office

The last job I had before I became a full-time butt wiper and floor mopper was at a telecommunication company. The job itself was actually quite boring, but there were two perks. The first was my business cards which listed my title as "Sales Engineer". Pretty sweet, huh? It sounds all important, but really all I did was design flow charts for 800 numbers. I was one of the annoying people who made it impossible for you to talk to a live person.

You're welcome.

The other perk was working with my uncle. He is just nine years older than me and has always been like an older brother to me.

We got to carpool to work most of the time - him and I. I think that must be where it all started. One evening on the way home from work I got distracted while I was driving and came within about twenty feet of plowing my little Ford Aspire into a cement barrier and killing us both. After my uncle, David, finished crapping his pants, we laughed pretty hard. And that started the prank war.

Several mornings after I nearly killed David, he decided to pay me back. It was early in the morning and he was driving us to work this time. (Wonder why?...) I broke the first rule of carpool etiquette by dozing off, and David decided this was the perfect opportunity to give me a taste of my own medicine. He slammed his foot on the brakes and screamed as loud as he could.

It took me only a nano second to wake up, acknowledge that I was going to die, scream, wet myself, hear David laughing, realize it was a joke, and slug him in the shoulder.

Retaliation - when we got to work, I waited for David to leave his desk and then I took a Hostess powdered doughnut and crumbled it into a million pieces in his pencil drawer. He had to borrow a shop-vac from the custodian and remove all his pens, paper clips, post-its and extra staples before he could vacuum up the mess.

He got my back by putting lotion on the earpiece of my phone while I was busy at the vending machines. As soon as I got back to my desk he called me and I stuck the phone between my ear and shoulder, but only made it halfway through my greeting before I realized I had a mystery ooze running down my ear canal.

Shudder...

This kind of thing went on for months. And then one day, David quit that stinking job and we had to have a going away party for him.

It wasn't so much a party, really, as it was just chocolate milk and eclairs before we all pretended to get serious about doing our work. David laughed it up all that day, rubbing it in that the rest of us schmucks had to keep reporting to our sadistic boss and dealing with heathen clients.

The following Monday came and I arrived at work all alone and sad that I would be there without anyone sane to keep me company. The second I sat down at my desk my boss came to peer over my cubicle wall and inquire as to whether I could smell anything funny.

I took a deep whiff, and boy, could I! It was the stench of death and rot.

We hunted for the source of the smell all morning long. It began to take over the entire tenth floor, and as the day wore on the smell became completely unbearable. Maintenance came in to check the vents for dead mice, all the trash cans were emptied, the refrigerator in the break room was meticulously inspected - we could not find the source of the smell anywhere.

Just as the building manager was looking up the number for a local carpet cleaner, it hit me.

David!

I called him at his new office and said, "What did you do? You wouldn't believe the smell here!"

Half an hour later, when David had quit laughing, he managed to tell me to look behind a co-worker's computer monitor.

Sure enough, behind a woman's monitor, tucked almost invisibly in the corner of her cubicle, there was a plastic cup of solidified chocolate milk from the going away party.

Have you ever smelled four-day-old milk that's been warming near a humming piece of electronic equipment? It's really quite unpleasant.

But David's little good-bye token warmed my heart because it told me that he would miss me and that he wished me luck in surviving life with all the whack-jobs he had left me alone with.

He also taught me that the best pranks are the ones that present themselves to us like a momentary gift of pure genius. They are simple. They are smelly. And you commit these acts when you won't be around to take the blame.

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