Tag: Pranks (Page 2 of 2)

The Office Hijinks Series – Part 5: The Christmas House

In December of 2011, I went out of town for a week of skiing out in the Rockies of Colorado.  Upon my return, I was greet with something strange…something beautiful…

While I was out of town, my coworkers turned my office into a giant Christmas house.  Complete with a snowy roof, wood walls, window, doors, and glittery snow everywhere.  Quite a piece of craftsmanship!  I need to go on vacation more often.

I left the house up for as long as I could, though unfortunately, it started to fall apart after about a month or so.  It’s a bit tricky to work when your roof is starting to collapse.  They don’t make ’em like they used to!

The Office Hijinks Series – Part 3: Tequila Bot

Welcome to the next installment of our Office Hijinks Series.  In this week’s episode, we meet Tequila Bot, built in August of 2010.

A co-worker, Robert, was out of town for the week.  This time, rather than making his office look like a little girl’s room or filling it with balloons, I decided what better than to replace him with a robot!

I’m not sure where the original idea to do Tequila Bot came from — an off the wall link at the time.  Anybody can build Futurama’s “Bender,” so this seemed a bit more original.  Tequila Bot is based off of one of those low-budget commercials which pop up on YouTube from time to time.

Tequila Bot was built from old cardboard boxes, duct tape, silver spray paint, and other assorted items from the hardware store.  We set him up in Robert’s office, gave him a chair and some credentials on the wall and we we had our new technician!  All in all, I think I got him pretty close to the original inspiration (minus the walking!)

Upon Robert’s return, Tequila Bot lurked around the office for some time until sadly, he was eventually disassembled.

The Office Hijinks Series – Part 2: The My Little Pony Prank

Welcome to the first in the series of office hijinks and pranks featured on this blog.  Our first prank comes to you from the summer of 2009.

For our first prank, we weren’t really sure what we wanted to do.  We had an idea of whose office we wanted to prank (as he was on vacation for a week), but we weren’t sure what exactly we wanted to do.

Ultimately, we decided the name “Eric” was similar enough to the name “Erica” that we were going to turn his office into a little girl’s room, featuring My Little Pony.

At the time, My Little Pony had not yet come back into mainstream popularity (wow, that’s weird to say), so we didn’t have a lot of resources at our disposal.  We got creative though, fired up Google Image Search and the color printer, and got to work!

The Office Hijinks Series – Part 1:  Introduction

It’s pretty easy to get caught up in the technical hustle and bustle of all work all the time.  While hard work and professionalism are of course very important (especially for a technical blog visible to the entire Internet) it’s also important to have a little fun and express some good-natured creativity.

A number of years ago, I pioneered a series of good-natured office pranks as a means of introducing some additional fun into the office.  While it may seem at first glance to be silly, there were actually some very good benefits from integrating some office pranks into our workplace:

• Increased morale and team building — when you say to your co-workers “hey, let’s fill Eric’s office with balloons while he’s out for the week” and the entire team is participating and laughing, you know you’re doing a good thing.
• Increased employee retention — having a fun environment in which you never know what the next big prank will be, it’s hard to give that up in favor of something else.
• Marketing – inevitably, when we take pictures of an office prank and post them on Facebook, we get tons of comments to the tune of “wow, cool, I wish I worked there!!”
• A great outlet for creativity — when you spend the majority of the day repairing issues and fixing problems, its nice to be able to exercise some creativity and build something unique.