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For the last year and a half, I've been working for an Internet startup, which I recently left to pursue ZUG full-time. (I heard the economy is great, and it's the perfect time to go out on your own.)
When I told my co-workers I was going to pursue a full-time career as a prankster, they decided it would be a good idea to make my last two weeks of work a living hell, by pranking me continually and repeatedly until I was driven to the brink of insanity.
It started with a FedEx box I received late one evening. It was one of the huge boxes, not an envelope, and I opened it to find a giant wad of bubble wrap. I carefully unspooled this to find my headphones. These were my $2.99 Radio Shack headphones that I noticed had gone missing from my desk earlier in the week.
Later they sent me this photo proving that my headphones had also been dipped in toilet water.
It's funny how the mind rationalizes things it can't explain. When I noticed they were missing, I said, "That's queer, I must have taken my headphones home." Then when they ended up in a FedEx box on my desk, I said, "That's queer, another co-worker must have been visiting from out of town, picked up my headphones by accident, then mailed them back to me from their home office." I had convinced myself on this "visiting coworker theory."
The next day I was sitting at my desk, when I suddenly heard a loud, powerful fart blast out of the cube next to mine. No one sits in that cube, and I thought to myself, "That's queer, I must be hearing things." Throughout the day, I continued to hear things -- notably, a high-pitched whine that was just below the upper threshold of human hearing. It sounded like a dentist's drill operating on a dog whistle. I kept thinking, "That's queer, my monitor must be shorting out."
The farting and squealing went on for several days, but was soon accompanied by more FedEx packages -- each one with a new item swiped from my desk and mailed back to me at great expense. One morning I came into the office and was served a realistic-looking subpoena for a co-worker who had tried the GigaCleanse diet and suffered a near-fatal bowel seizure. "Queer that," I thought, "I didn't even know she was dieting."
On my desk I had a little electronic picture frame that cycled photos of my wife, children, and loved ones. Occasionally I would gaze at it during the workday to center myself and fill my mind with thoughts of love and peace. Imagine my reaction when I looked over one day to see this photo:
This was just one of many reprehensible photos that they had loaded onto my digital picture frame. I was like, "Queer, I don't remember doing that on my vacation."
The piece de resistance actually came the following evening, when I went out to my car at the end of a long workday. It was about 7:00 pm, and the parking lot was nearly deserted. I walked right up to my car, where once again my brain attempted to rationalize the alternate reality I was living in. "Smear the queer, someone must have just had a new car delivered," I thought, searching for my Honda Civic. "But I'm sure I parked right here..."
One of my co-workers caught my eye. He was sitting in his car, waiting for me. Silently he pointed to my Honda Civic, which was sitting right in front of me -- completely encased in plastic wrap.
I don't know what's worse: the pranks, or the crappy cameraphone video footage they gave me as a souvenir.
The finished prank.
They finally succeeding in shattering my sanity a few days later, when I was talking with a co-worker who was sitting in my cube. His chair was moaning -- literally, moaning -- my digital picture frame was flipping me the bird, and then I suddenly realized that everything on my cube walls was 5 degrees crooked. "WHY!?" I finally yelled. "WHY THE 5-DEGREE SKEW?!"
He began cracking up. "I have no idea what you're talking about!" he said, as his seat groaned and the ceiling farted.
The moral of the story: if you're going to do Prankapalooza, it helps to mix it up. Do the big pranks, but don't neglect the details. It's the little things that finally drive your victims mad.
I have to admit they got me pretty good. But I couldn't just let my corporate career end there: I had to go out in style. Stay tuned for my last day at the office.
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