Back in the day, I loved office pranks. Not just office pranks; my family came to disbelieve anything that happened on April Fools Day. But office pranks were great fun, a way to break up the tedium of the workday.
Some were simple pranks, like typing funny emails to a "safe" group of people when someone left their workstation unlocked (no, never to management or the whole company). A colleague had the habit of removing her shoes and taking a nap each day, so on occasion, I would swipe one shoe (not both) so that she would hobble to my office on one shoe and retrieve the other.
But sometimes the pranks were more elaborate, and that certainly was the case when I pranked a senior manager named J.B.
The back of his office was the back wall for my cubicle. This was a software development environment with false floors; in other words, the floors consisted of removable panels under which ran electrical and computer connection cables. With a special suction cup tool, you could pull up the carpet and remove a panel to reach down to the floor.
I got the idea to place an alarm clock under his office floor that would go off every day at a regular time. But not just any alarm clock: it was a children's alarm clock that accidentally terrorized my kids so much that I had removed it from their room.
The alarm clock looked like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character, including the little tornado that swirled around him. When the alarm sounded, the Tasmanian Devil would make all sorts of grunts and yell "WAKE UP!" for about fifteen seconds. With no volume control, the overly loud alarm would frighten my children (and possibly wake the dead simultaneously), so it became unusable.
Except for a prank where an alarm clock needed to be resounding enough to cut through paneling and carpet to startle the pranked.
I drove to the office on a Saturday to test the alarm. Removing the carpet square and panel, I tied a rope to the sturdy, tornado-shaped alarm clock and rolled it about ten feet to position under J.B.'s chair. I tested the alarm, pulled it back, set the time to 3 p.m., rolled it back to the desired location, and covered up my tracks.
Every day at 3:00, the alarm went off. The sound was just loud enough to be audible and obnoxious but muffled enough to disguise its location. J.B. went on a determined quest to find the alarm. Over time, he checked his desk, his cabinets, even the false ceiling. J.B. suspected that a rascally senior manager next door had something to do with it and even examined his neighbor's office.
On one occasion, J.B.'s boss happened to be in the office for a 3 p.m. meeting. His boss was a Zen master of sorts. I was told by a trusted colleague in the meeting (the only other person who knew what I had done) that when the noise came, the boss displayed a bemused smile of wonderment.
Every now and then, I would retrieve the clock to reset the time, which kept J.B. off guard. After a few months, I felt like the risk of discovery was too great (after all, the rope led back to my cubicle), so I removed and retired the Tasmanian Devil device for good.
Of all office pranks, this was one of my favorites. Aside from my lone partner in crime, no one in the building could ever figure out where the sound was coming from nor who had executed the prank. And the noisy sequence was so strange, no one ever described it as a Tasmanian Devil.
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