High Jinx - Dismantling Office Furniture
Sometimes it really doesn't hurt to go back to
basics when it comes to "office jokes".
Sure now that we have computers on our desks
we can bring jokes up to date be that super-imposing your bosses
face onto the body of a gorilla or sending an e-mail on behalf
of a work colleague apologising about their recent bad temper
and it's all because they are "confused about their sexuality"
is all well and good but it lacks style.
It lacks the "Slap-Stick" comedy we all love
deep down and sometimes going back to "old school" jokes are the
best and this is best done with a screwdriver.
Chairs
Chairs used to be a very simply affair. A few
screws out and suddenly you had converted an innocent chair into
a "clowns dream".
All it would take would be for your work
colleague to take a seat. The seat would of course collapse and
your work colleague would be sat there on the floor with a
"broken" chair under them and there would be fits of laughter
around the department.
I seem to remember this being especially good if
the "victim" was also carrying a nice glass of water or a mug of hot coffee.
Yes, yes hot coffee can be dangerous but does
a clown worry about paper cuts when he throws a bucket of
shredded paper over the audience? I think not.
Alas chairs a lot more difficult now. There
are less screws involved and they clip together. The
possibilities are really no longer there and so we need to move
forward to larger things.
Desks
There is a very fine art to desk dismantling.
You may think it is a simply job of removing a
few screws and then letting gravity do the work for you.
To a degree you are right, however you cannot
rush into a joke like this. If you remove all of the screws in
one go then the desk will collapse immediately and the only
"fool" is you as you'll have to get the bloody thing rebuilt
before the owner returns.
I will not go into too much detail here - it
has been a long time since I've been involved in such a "prank"
and the method has since been lost on me. Basically you need to
keep a few screws in place so that although the desk is about to
collapse and usually a coffee mug is enough to do it, the whole
desk pivots on the few remaining screws as it collapses.
The end result is a desk that has totally
collapsed in on itself. Unfortunately there are quite often
innocent victims here. You need to remember that the monitor is
going to fall and if the computer is stored under the desk it is
going to take a bit of a beating.
However the end result should be someone sat on
their chair with a look of complete amazement as their whole
desk has collapsed in front of them the second they put any kind
of weight on it. Combine this with a chair dismantlement as well
and trust me you have a "joke" that will go down in history!
A word of warning however, you must choose
your victim carefully and you must make sure they are "in the
mood" for such a prank.
Remember "John" from the Post-It Note story?
Well he was the victim of one of my desk
dismantlement "pranks". However he really wasn't in the mood for
such jokes - this was my first mistake.
The second mistake was that "John" was my direct
boss and it was me that had to sit there reassembling the desk
and also me having to explain to the general manager why we
needed one new computer for the technical support department.
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