We all know them...the people who just LOVE to play pranks on others. And, I have not been spared from their antics. I, on the other hand, like to save my pranks on others for those who deserve them most (the pranksters) and for strategic times. So, when I do one, no one suspects it was me.
Years ago (my goodness, it has to be 15 or more), a coworker, Jon Denny, who has since moved on to bigger and better things in the agency we work for, used to be quite the trickster. One evening (it was a pay night), I had to hand sort the paychecks and give them to the respective employees. (Nowadays they are mailed out instead.) Anyway, it had been my task to do. Jon Denny was working that night. In the office I work next to the shredder (which was about the size and height of a stackable washing machine), was a tall skinny file cabinet. After handing Jon his paycheck he had laid his on the top of this small cabinet. Previously that night, he had pulled a prank on another coworker and I thought this would be the time to get him back really well for all the jokes he played on others and on me. I was standing near the cabinet and shredder. Jon and some of the other guys were standing around "shootin' the shit". I had to shred some paperwork and I discreetly took Jon's paycheck off the cabinet and hid it nearby. But I pretended to take other paperwork off the cabinet to shred and accidentally drop his paycheck in the shredder. "OH NO!" this little prankster yelled "Jon, I just accidentally dropped your check in the shredder" The look on his face was priceless and everyone in the room was holding their breath! After I let him suffer a few seconds, I produced the hidden paycheck and the room roared with laughter! Jon never pranked me again.
Well, the evening before last the "stealth prankster" had to come out of hiding again! Sean Finn, which seems to be the reincarnated prankster that was Jon, loves to pick on me and others at work. About a year and a half ago I had one of my binders of handouts from one of my classes laying open on the surface of my workstation. I had gotten up to use another nearby computer and Sean sat in the chair at my workstation. I had to get up and go in another room down the other end of the building. When I got back Sean was still sitting in my spot and I went back to the computer I had just been at. While I was sitting there. He asks me "Shelly, do you want me to highlight this for you!" I said without looking, "No Finn!" (we rarely call him by his first name). "No, Shelly, I'll do it for you...I don't mind," he continues. So I look over and he has a thick BLACK magic mark in his hand and he is "highlighting" my page with it! I screamed at him "FINN, YOU ASSHOLE...THAT'S MY HOMEWORK!" as I stepped over to him and smacked him on the side of the face (not too hard but hard enough). His wife, who worked with us then, was standing watching the whole thing and just burst out laughing!
Well, what he had done was, while I was down the hallway, he had made a photocopy of the page of my homework my binder was opened to and punched holes in it and in a blank piece of paper (so the black marker wouldn't bleed through to my homework) and put them on top of my copies. So, my homework was unblemished and he got the laugh of his life. As they say...Payback is a bitch. I waited for just the right moment.
Two days ago, Finn had left his winter gloves behind and one of our other coworkers who works in another building brought them to our building and gave them to me to give to Finn. Now, the standard prank among our coworkers would have been to cocoon them in evidence tape. Well, that sometimes leaves a residual stickiness and they were leather gloves, after all. I didn't want to damage them. So, instead, I took 2 whole boxes of rubberbands, rolled the gloves into a ball and made an grapefruit-sized rubber band ball out of them. Two of our coworkers were witness to the event, and I swore them to secrecy. And I must say I am impressed by their fortitude to keep the secret, especially Ron Whittington's.
Finn and Ron were standing in the hall outside my office, which has windows all around it. Apparently, Finn was convinced that Ron was the one to make the rubberband ball out of his gloves. While the two are standing their, Finn says to those of us in the room, how Ron thinks he (Sean) was going to spray him with his pepper spray, but that he wasn't. Then he DID! So Ron sprayed back. They both got it in the face. Now, most people may not know this, but that stuff hangs in the air and has a large radius it affects (probably a good 10-15 feet) and when it is sprayed in a hallway it is condensed and very potent! Now, mind you, these were literally, one-second bursts of spray each. So, the hallway was saturated with the spray particles, which spilled into the patrol room, the communications office (mine), all up and down the hallway. And when someone walks through it their motion pulls it along in the direction they walk. So despite the fact that we closed the door next to which Finn and Ron were standing when they sprayed each other AND opened the window in the room, in a matter of minutes we were all hacking and gagging and had teary eyes and runny noses. But, we were also dying with laughter! THANK GOD it was 5 minutes to 11p, and I flew out of there at 11 on the dot.
So, Ron had taken one for the team (well, for me, since I was the one who actually did the prank). And STILL he didn't tell Finn, I think I must owe him cookies or a beer or something for that.
