Reputation is based on reliability, trust, diligence and dedication. I’ve worked long and hard to achieve just such a base foundation at work, making friends with coworkers, helping out whenever possible, staying late, a constant reinforcment of dependability— just to be able to commit the best of all work sins. The office prank.
After all, who would suspect the somewhat shy, responsible project manager of anything dastardly?
Typical office pranks involve toilet papering a cube, or post-its and one time I came back from vacation to find garbage in my cube. That’s right, garbage. Awesome for cleaning up once you get back all relaxed. But what I wanted for April Fool’s day a couple years ago was something smarter.
Two things that were helpful in the plot:
- I have a coworker’s birthday that is on April 1st, who was in on the joke.
- I have another coworker that works in the gift card division of our company. They always have sample inactive cards that have no value on them for testing of paper quality.
I carefully crafted a casual birthday party on April Fools. During lunch I pulled out fake $60 giftcards to distribute to the birthday girl. The other coworkers pleaded as they also wanted free gifts, when lo and behold I have extras in my purse. The rest of lunch was spent happily talking about what they would buy with their new found wealth. Going back to their desks, they instantly ripped apart the packaging and eagerly typed in the codes. I am temporarily “unreachable” then eventually saunter over and yell “April Fools”.
Me: What’d you do with the cards? They are still collectables because they are smaller than the ones we actually sell, since they are used to test the paper quality, etc.
Coworker: They are in the circular file, just like our friendship.
