This was a carefully thought out prank/revenge that took careful planning and took several days to implement. Now pay attention! Our office was manned by l0 secretaries, 5 attorneys, and I, being the only mature married woman was casually put in charge of seeing that the secretaries behaved in a professional way, didn’t gossip, dressed appropriately, etc. It was also a time long before sexual misconduct in the workplace had even been heard of. The men in the office felt they could banter and say anything that came into their minds. On a Monday morning I came to work and there was a buzz going on in the office. One of those “did you hear about” mornings. Every secretary was whispering so I called a meeting. It appeared that there had been a bachelor party over the weekend which had included ladies of the evening. And it appeared that as the liquor flowed telephone calls were made right and left with descriptions of what was going on. Every woman in the group was incensed and angry. What could they do? If they complained they would be fired. To subdue the anger I said I had a way we could get even but we would have to wait about a week. We started gathering our ammunition. We copied the header our County’s stationery onto plain sheets and copied envelopes the same way. We typed a form letter which stated that the County of XXXX was requiring all parties who had attended the bachelor party to report to the health department and call for an appointment. We carefully addressed each envelope to each attorney and slipped them into the morning mail. Before the 10 a.m. break they would come out to our desks and stand in front of each one and sort through the mail and leave the discards on our desks. On this morning their faces paled as most opened the “health department” letters. There was a general meeting called in the Senior Partner’s office. Then each one went back to his office and voila, the phones were lighting up all over the place. We were never discovered and our revenge was sweet.

We once made a “sponge cake” for a co-worker for his birthday. It really was a sponge! It was beautifully decorated and looked delicious. When he picked up the knife and tried to cut the cake, we could all see his smile kind of freeze as he put more and more pressure on the knife, doing his best to cut a slice. He got more and more agressive, but you just can’t cut a sponge with a butter knife. Finally we asked what the problem was and he admitted he couldn’t cut it. By then we were all laughing and admitted what we had done. He said he thought I had made the cake (I was the youngest in the office) and didn’t want to hurt my feelings so he just kept on trying to cut a slice.

I have worked in several offices and places were practical jokes were the norm. Once, in a twisted triangle of pranks, a fellow coworker called Al Anon and told them that one of the girls husband was an alchoholic and she needed someone to talk with and forwarded the call, we retaliated by having 300 watermelons delivered to his condo at 6 am, COD. He came in on Monday, officially bowing to us and telling us that we had won! Victory was ours! At the grocery store we would make the newbies shake the salad dressings every hour, we told them that management didn’t like the italian dressings to separate. I am really good at impressions and disguising my voice so at most of my offices I have been the one to leave annonymous messages on voice mails that would have the recipient running scared and the rest of the office crying tears of laughter. Slightly twisted? You bet!

I used to work in a male-dominated industry: an electrical utility. The jokes they played were hardcore. I had to get really nasty to get even and gain respect in that arena. Soooo uncharacteristic of me. We had utility vans…bread trucks, if you will. There were lots of storage bins, shelves, cubby holes and drawers. It was summertime. At the end of the day, on a Friday, right before a long holiday weekend, I hid in one of the trucks…a large piece of Limberger cheese in a sock. I stuck it in the toe of some hip waders that belonged to one of the cable splicers. By Tuesday, it was beyond rank. They looked for 2 days for the origin of the stank. They really wanted to beat me, but the 2 cable splicers I worked with were my loyal protectors. It was grand. Many more pranks followed, and some really dirty tricks, but that was the first…I was so proud.

Ages ago when I worked on a help desk with about a dozen other people and a receptionist who took the incoming calls and transferred them to us. She was talking one day about how slow the phones were, so we arranged to all call her at the same time and ask for the help desk. Once she put one of us on hold, we’d hang up and call back. After about three minutes, she came back to our area and said, “I don’t know what’s going on, but the phones are going berzerk all the sudden!” We all started laughing, and she realized it was us.

Back in the middle school, we had a teacher who was obsessed with food, to the extent that he used to go to the teacher’s lounge and STEAL other people’s lunches. He never stole the entire lunch; he only stole the best parts of as many lunches as he could safely pilfer before someone else came into the room. Nothing was safe from him. We’d go to the lounge refrigerator to get a birthday cake or a pitch-in pie, or a bowl of potato salad, etc, only to find a piece or a huge helping of it gone. Someone would open his/her lunch bag to find half of the sandwich missing, or the cupcake gone. Finally, in frustration, the men in our building got together and decided to lay a trap for him. They made a HUGE pan of pecan-studded brownies, using Ex-Lax instead of chocolate, covered it with foil, labeled it “Please don’t touch - this is for the Spelling Bee after-party” and put it in the ‘fridge. At lunch time, we took out the pan and discovered about a third of it missing. And speaking of “missing,” our thieving food-obsessed colleague missed almost a week of school. It seems he had some major digestive problems. He behaved himself for a few months but eventually he was back to his old tricks. Honestly? I’ve never known a person so absolutely obsessed with food as this man was. He would tremble with anticipation and his mouth would water so that he had to use a napkin, at the very mention of food. He was disgusting. We finally had to put a combination-code lock on the teacher’s lounge doors, and he was NOT given the code. What a jerk he was.

I taught for a good many years in a small rural school. April Fool’s Day was our day to shine. One year I took my kindergarten class to one of the 2nd grade rooms and we “borrowed” all of the chairs in the room while the class and teacher were out for recess/lunch. The kids loved it. Another year I saw a friend of mine, who taught 1st grade, rush by my room to the office for some reason. I went down to her room and brought all of her kids back to my room before she got back. She got right into the game by going through the halls crying that her class had disappeard. Again, the kids loved it.

I enjoy a good practical joke, ones that aren’t malicious, or hurtful such as hiding someone’s cell phone if they leave it out in plain sight. A co-worker of mine has a habit of kicking off her shoes, when she is sitting at her desk. As I was walking by her desk one day on the way back from the fax machine, her shoes were sitting out in the aisle. (She had kicked them off and someone else had put them in the aisle.) She has a hutch cabinet on her desk so she couldn’t see me come by. I picked up her shoes and hid them behind a trash can under an empty desk. I am one of the older women in the office and usually not considered to be a suspect when a practical joke is being played. She got up from her desk and started looking for her shoes. She was blaming a couple of other co-workers for taking them and when I couldn’t keep a straight face when questioned, did they then suspect me. It just made it funnier when the person they least suspected to do it actually hid her shoes.