from rscottjones

Alex posted about pranks, and here’s my contribution. My favorite pranks came while working at Staples in high school and college.

At some point, if you’re working at a retail location that has lots of shrink wrap, someone’s car will eventually find itself enwrapped, especially if you’re a new employee. I luckily avoided that fake, by redirecting an overzealous prankster to my roommate’s car instead¹. I was sorta proud of myself for pulling off the ruse, only to be stricken with overwhelming guilt when I saw the look on my roommate’s face when noticed his wrapped car when we left for the night. It had been a rough shift for him, ending with a series of bad customers and (iirc) and it had already been a tough week of life in general. My heart sank a bit, and I quickly I offered to remove all the wrap from his car, while he watched in disbelief and resignation. I assume he forever assumed I was at least partially behind it, given how quickly I had offered to make it right.

Fast forward a couple years: I had transferred to a different store. And oh boy, there were many, many pranks at this location. And my guilt level had apparently receded substantially, as things ratcheted up quickly.

The most memorable was the time that I pranked a frenemy coworker by buying an extremely smelly can of sardines from the grocery store next door, removing the lid, and gently placing it under his drivers seat while car was in the direct sun. It was summer, in Phoenix, and that means that it gets approximately 7817ºF inside the vehicle, which acts as an incredibly effective greenhouse. Knowing that he was working a full 9 hour shift, he had cracked his window an inch to help let out some of the hot air, which I was quick to close. And I cannot confirm nor deny this, but I “may” have also “accidentally” left an octopus sprawled out to cook on his dashboard, too. After a few hours the smell was as terrible as you’d imagine, and apparently part of the octopus permanently cooked itself to some of the dashboard trim. Like a smoker’s car, the scent also lingered for many weeks.

He retaliated by “borrowing” my car, and parking it on the far side of the shopping center’s parking lot. Let me be more specific: he parked it at a Wendy’s. Ok, let me be even more specific: he parked it in a Wendy’s drive-thru. Yep, right in front of the ordering menu, effectively blocking the entire drive-thru from being used. He just got out, locked the car, and walked back to our store. I wonder what the Wendy’s folks thought when they saw him get out and walk away. Needless to say, that caused quite the furor at the Wendy’s, who certainly didn’t deserve to see their drive-thru shut down, not to mention the customers who were hungry and wanted some quick food. I mean, why wasn’t this asshole in line not pulling up?

When he got back inside the store, he handed me my car keys and cryptically said “good luck.” I shot out the door, scrambled furiously around the parking lot to locate my vehicle, eventually noticing it (thank goodness for a prominent ASU sticker I had at the top of my windshield). A tow truck had already arrived, with the driver presumably inside talking to the Wendy’s manager about why he had gotten such an urgent call for a tow. I ran up to my car, hopped inside and pulled through, profusely apologizing to the drive-thru staff as I drove away. One of the employees threw something at me, but whatever it was, it missed. Needless to say, my coworker and I agreed to a truce. We both owned old, shitty cars—but we certainly couldn’t afford losing either of them, especially while working such a low paying job.

Most of the pranks at Staples were far more benign. Two times a week, we received a slew of tall pallets filled with products to restock the store. It was often my job to check in these shipments and sort the boxes, placing them on “U-boats” (a special type of narrow utility cart) to wheel out to the various departments in the store so the workers could unbox and restock the shelves. These U-boats would be filled with a variety of cardboard boxes of all sorts and sizes, and restocking was a task that was often interrupted by helping customers, answering phone calls, or helping out at the register. So a common prank I’d pull is cutting out the bottom of one of the cardboard boxes, doing it with enough care so that the missing bottom wasn’t visible. A coworker would grab the box off the cart as they walked by, and the contents would, of course, spill out all over the floor. You’d hear one hundred packs of paperclips fall to the floor from across the store, accompanied with a frustrated “gaaahhh!!!” or “are you fucking kidding me?!!!” and I’d smile and chuckle to myself.

Closing time was also a great time for pranks. Many of those cardboard boxes contained those little packets of silica balls. You know, the ones that are always labeled “Do Not Eat” and help absorb unwanted moisture. Well, if you saw or heard your buddy working on the adjacent aisle, you could rip one open and toss its contents high in the air over the aisle and enjoy hearing them rain back down upon your unsuspecting coworker. A bit too risky of a prank to pull off when the store was open, but all bets were off once the front doors closed and the customers were gone.

When some items were returned by customers, we were required to physically damage them beyond use ². If you happened to receive back a glass desktop, or some other similar item, we’d hide the glass portion for a future prank. Then, a week or two later, you’d swipe someone’s car keys and move their car from their normal parking spot to another spot in the parking lot, then break the glass where they had originally parked—simulating a car theft. I never personally pulled this one, but instead talked other coworkers into doing it, knowing that cleaning up the resulting glass shards might not be worth the reaction.

My favorite prank, however, involved a Windows computer that powered an entire aisle’s worth of display monitors and computer speakers, which were connected via a controller switch so that a customer could switch between them to compare the various models. The computer ran some display software that allowed customers to sample some music and image content, but otherwise prevented access to the rest of the computer unless you had the employee password. It was the only internet-enabled computer that employees in the electronics area had access to, so everyone had the password to look up answers to various customer questions.

I ran across a prank app that seemed to run even when this display software was activated, and I loaded it onto the computer. When this app was running, it would—at random times every 2-60 minutes—unmute the system, turn the system volume up loud, and play one of several preloaded farting noises. The app would then return everything to the previously set levels as if absolutely nothing had happened.

The app quietly ran in the background, so it wasn’t obvious that it was running. And even if you checked the background processes, it used an obscure but innocuous sounding name that seemed like part of Windows itself, so no one assumed was the culprit. It also relaunched itself after any system reboot, further cementing its assumed status as part of Windows. Simply put, it was hard for anyone at the store to detect.

The effect of this, of course, was totally irresistible to a prankster. It was nearly too easy. Perhaps even too perfect of a prank.

The first few times the app ran, people reacted as you’d expect. They looked around anxiously, trying to find the culprit, often with a giggle. Sometimes, a stranger in the aisle was blamed for the infraction. Occasionally, an employee would be closest and have to plead their innocence to anyone within earshot.

Other times, the aisle was clear, and the sound was a bit more of a mystery. After enough occurrences, many possible theories as to where it was coming from were proffered. This was the era of audible ringtones—mostly song snippets you purchased from your carrier, but someone would occasionally load some other sound effects (I had a dial up modem connecting as my ringtone for awhile). So an early leading theory was that it was a phone hidden somewhere in the aisle that someone was randomly calling, then hanging up. But several efforts at finding such a phone, by looking behind absolutely every box in the aisle, proved unsuccessful.

Of course, after enough time, a few employees insisted that the farts were coming from the monitor wall. But no one could figure out how that was possible. The department lead gave up looking after an hour or two. Another tried searching through the computer’s background processes, quitting one at a time and waiting an hour or two to see if the noise still happened, which of course took all damn day.

When the coast was clear, I’d occasionally quit the app, restart the app, or change the parameters, which helped to throw people off the path. I left it on during one or two of my days off, but otherwise only allowed it to play when I was working. After awhile, the working assumption was that a customer must had loaded a computer virus, so we eventually “damaged out” that computer and set up a brand new one instead. Of course, I added it to that computer too, though cut way back on the app’s farting frequency. The frustration on the face of the employee who set it up when the first fart returned was…epic.

After a solid month or more of the prank, I finally removed the app—keeping my powder dry for a return visit later in the year, which I thought would be even more funny than letting it continue. I never got the chance to bring it back, though. The app didn’t work with a new version of Windows that was loaded on the display computer, and once I found an updated version, the concept had shifted to displaying computers, not monitors.

I was hoping for a big juicy reveal, but missed out on the opportunity. I told a few coworkers I was close with, but never got the big laugh I had hoped for. Bummer. But still, it was an incredibly fun prank.

Have a good prank story? Let me know.