With April 1 just past, I became sentimental about some past pranks. A grade school favorite was to pour ground black pepper into my hand, tempt somebody to come closer to me, then throw the pepper into their face. Pure comedy gold.
Eventually, another opportunity came with the Vancouver Opera Society. They had an ad campaign for their production of Don Giovanni where the poster art of Don looked exactly like porn legend Ron Jeremy. My friend, Jerry, crafted a beautiful letter criticizing the VOS’s decision to actually cast Mr. Jeremy as Don in the production. This letter was mailed off to the VOS, newspapers, opera magazines, international opera houses and a local music store that was a supporter of the VOS. We wanted other defenders of culture to denounce this travesty of high art being tainted with the stench of porn. A class action suit was also hinted at. We received a few bewildered responses and a great correspondence with the owner of the local music store who got the joke. However, we could have pushed this one and didn’t. This was my first real prank on an outside target, so it suffered a bit from lack of experience and faulty execution.
Oddly enough, my most successful prank happened at work. I individually shrink wrapped everything on a coworker’s desk while she was on vacation. The response was great – a big yell of surprise when she realized what had happened, with coworkers crowding around the desk with astonished looks and giving their own theories of what happened. I walked past her desk to use the fax machine, poked my head through the crowd and said “Wow, that’s odd. Anybody see a fax for me?” before heading back to my desk. The IT guy had replaced the wallpaper on her computer with a picture of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence from Bad Boys as a calling card. When she saw the picture, the IT guy was blamed and I kicked up my feet to enjoy the festivities.
A funny aside, I shrink wrapped everything in plain view of others in the office, nodding and chitchatting to coworkers as I stood at her desk. However, at the reveal, these same coworkers were genuinely surprised and concluded that it was someone who worked the weekend shift (the prank came to a head on a Monday). The IT guy worked on the weekend (plus the new wallpaper) so all fingers pointed to him. He was cool with it as he achieved some notoriety.
Now, there is one I’ve been itching to do, but circumstances might make it too risky (I mean kinda dangerous!) at the moment. More later.
2 comments:
You got a shrink wrapping machine at work? And the thing with pranks is sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, but I always think of them like an iceberg, the good ones are 90 percent underwater... so much more to them than what appears on the surface....
Every workplace should have a shrink wrapping machine! I work in a large college bookstore so there's a need for one. Which comes in handy sometimes ...
I guess that's true about pranks. You want the big payoff, but the real success is how it proliferates and resonates "under the surface" so to speak.
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