It’s been a while hasn’t it? The idea for this came about almost a year ago when we moved into our new offices. We have these little padded cabinets that double over as little seats for people who come around and need to talk. (yes, i misspelled pedestal).

They’re supposed to encourage collaboration and they’re extremely mobile. They’re also begging to be swapped. So I did it!

What I did:

• swapped 30+ coworker’s cabinets. (only people I knew personally.)
• only swapped individuals so that person A got person B’s and person B got person A’s. No random swapping so that if someone really needed to find their own they could return it quickly.
• left a name card of the original owner in the cabinet so it could be quickly returned if necessary.
• left a small post it note on each cabinet to remind myself whose I’d moved
• avoided upper management and people who I wasn’t sure would laugh*

What I DIDN’T do…and would have been more mean:

• could have not left a name card and made everyone figure out whose was whose.
• could have moved all 30 cabinets into a large conference room and made a sea of cabinets
• could have moved them all into the male and female bathrooms.

I actually work on a different floor from my department coworkers so I didn’t get to see everyone’s reaction in the morning.

You can click here to see my other pranks at the office: link

The Aftermath: Responses

*I made 1 mistake. Misread the name plates and that caused some confusion when people were returning their desk. I apologized to her. Thought I was taking someone else’s. so close.

J’s a great guy. Ultimate frisbee enthusiast and great teammate.

A few months ago when J left for a vacation, my team decided to hook up a mouse to a really long extension to his computer. One of my coworkers made sure we didn’t use a wireless because those have register devices pop ups every once in a while (apparently he’s done this before). J and I have a half wall separating us and after J came back from his trip I wiggled the mouse. He got really tripped out and called one of the guys (who was in on it) over to see if he was seeing things at which point I stopped moving the mouse and our team had a good laugh.

Except we sort of didn’t tell him what was really happening and sort of forgot the mouse was still connected. A few days later I grabbed the wrong mouse and heard a  “what the…” followed by a “bang bang bang” as he slammed his mouse a few times on the desk. Should have stopped there…but we sort of didn’t.

It’s been a few months now, we’ve had a dozens of opportunities to stop. J’s leaving for greener pastures so as a farewell gift we revealed our mischief.

Now that we think about it, is he leaving because of us?! Oh man, we hope not. Gonna miss you J!