i’ve been officially sanctioned by my departmental manager to sabotage the office of our returning supervisor (yes, the one who left two months ago — causing me to cry like a baby). the instruction was to do anything which would “take a long time to clean up”.
so… this is where i entreat you, my faithful readers, to help me exact our revenge. i’m thinking vaseline on the door handles, shredded paper in the drawers, dozens of balloons all over the floor.
what would you do if you could do anything to someone’s office… without getting in trouble for it?
I’ve always been a fan of stacking a large number of empty pop cans by the door so that they fall when the person comes in; however, you need an alternate means of exit.
There’s always the old standbys: covering everything in the office in in aluminum foil or filling the office with balloons/packing peanuts/etc..
True story, happened to my coworker next to me at my old job…
She was away on vacation and was due back on a Tuesday. No one ever revealed who did it, but… someone(s) managed (between the end of work Monday and early Tuesday morning) to wrap everything in her office with newspaper. I mean everything. They wrapped the filing cabinets, the walls of the cube, the printer, the fax, the folders, the piles of paper, the writing instruments, the wastebasket, the office chair, the floor mat, every part of the computer… There was even a framed picture of her granddaughter on her computer monitor; they wrapped the frame in newspaper and replaced the picture of the granddaughter with a picture from the newspaper. No surface (except lights, maybe) was left uncovered. We all had a good laugh, it took a LONG time her to get at everything, made a mess of her hands, and hey, it’s recyclable.
Also from my past workplace… If you have those overhead filing cabinets with the doors that swing upwards, you can rig it with packing peanuts and a long piece of cardboard, close the door, slip the cardboard out… then when they open the door, WHOOSH–the peanuts go everywhere.
Not sure how you would work this idea in, but on someone’s “older” birthday, there were TONS of little notes someone made that said, “DAMN, YOU’RE OLD!” and they were all over his cube. That took long enough to clean up. What he didn’t know, however, and what no one told him, was that they were also put in all the reference books and files in his office (randomly) so that over the next year, he was constantly finding these things. It helped immensely that he was the kind of person who would get mildly ticked off every time he found one.
Someone else had a 50th-bday cube decoration that used a TON of glitter pieces, and she complained well into the year of constantly finding the “damn things” all over her cube.
If you need some “bad” examples, well…
1. If you have the kind of office phones that use a magnetic switch between the handle and the base, you can put any small magnet under the base (and out of sight), thereby keeping the connection closed. So, when the phone rings, you can still pickup the handle, but the phone will keep ringing. Hilarious frustration will ensue.
2. The speaker end of an office phone handle usually pops off with little force. In it there is usually a small cavity… it which you might put things… that could potentially smell… like cheese, for example.
3. For someone you don’t particularly enjoy, preferable someone you don’t sit by, take a nice warm Philly cheesesteak sandwich with extra onions and dressing, kept in its wrapper, and duct tape that baby way under the cube counter where no one really looks, anyway. A slow invasion of the olfactory will ensue, and most likely it will keep ensuing b/c no one will think to look there. This also works for dropped-ceiling applications.
I hated the place I used to work at… but the people, they sure were fun.
Nothing, I’d steer clear and keep things professional.
all you have to do is leave one chicken (live) in the room overnite. Believe me, the mess is subtle and very long lasting.
Our jokester boys turned my bosses table upside down and turned her cabinets backwards. We taped things *to* her desk and my favorite…tape a piece of paper over the optical part of the mouse. :)
If you’re *going* to do balloons, how about putting confetti in ’em so that when the pop it goes everywhere? ;)
There was also an Office episode where they put someone’s something in jello. I think.