My manager and three of my co-workers went off to the SungardHE Summit conference in Las Vegas last week…I was left to fend for myself in the office. Nope. I didn’t go. But I didn’t sit idle! I wrangled up a crew (Al, Casey, Cliff, Tim, Laurianne, and a couple others) and “decorated” their offices.

Firstly was my boss’ office, wrapped up nicely in Tin-Foil. See the full article here.

Tin Foil Used: 1,100 square feet
Time Spent: 3 hours
Continual Manpower: 5
Cost: $30

Secondly was Zach’s office, Wallpapered in Post-It Notes. See the full article here.

Post-It Notes used: 5,300 (248.45 square feet of note surface).
Time Spent: 4 hours
Continual Manpower: 3
Cost: $60.71

Thirdly was Dan’s office, covered in cups, a number partially filled with water. See the full article here.

Cups Used: 575
Time Spent: 45 minutes
Continual Manpower: 4
Cost: $25.99

Lastly was Dee’s office, I stole her monitor then filled her office section with balloons See the full article here.

Balloons Used: 280
Time Spent: 1.5 hours
Continual Manpower: 3
Cost: $12

All work was done after hours or during our lunch break on Friday. No work resources were used (save for half a role of tape and a little bit of electricity). A whole lot of plotting and fun was had by all. In fact, our Administrative God, Colleen, helped formulate a plan to ensure that the 4 prankees remained away from the office until Monday morning that involved buy-in from our CIO and the Plymouth State University Facility Services office. Basically, we told them that the carpets were being steam cleaned all weekend with some serious chemicals. Fun times :)

Following the completion of the first prank, I found myself giving numerous tours of the offices throughout the week as each prank was completed. Overall, a lot of fun! When they come in on Monday, I plan to have 4 video cameras…one in each office…to get their first reactions. Thats the plan and if I succeed, the vids will be going on YouTube.

This was our fourth and final prank of the week. This prank was a two parter…pretty fun and easy.

The participants in this prank was: me, Al, Casey, Tim, and Laurianne.

Part 1: Stealing Dee‘s monitor. Why do this? Well, leading up to her trip to Vegas, Dee has continually (jokingly) expressed her worry that she’d return and her monitor (the sexiest monitor in ITS, Hyde Hall) would be gone. We didn’t want her worries to go away so Al and I stole her monitor and hid it in one of our DBA’s office (this done without his knowledge either). Of course…this part was super fast.

Part 2: Ballooning the Office. We used 280 12 inch latex balloons provided by Laurianne, blowing them up with an electric pump (thank god) provided by Al. Over lunch, work began on blowing up balloons, tying them, and tossing them into Dee’s office area. Because Dee and Laurianne share an office, I used plastic wrap and tape to separate the two sections and hold in the balloons! We had a nice system going for balloon blowing/tying and banged through this prank pretty quickly! This prank was a fun one that left the balloon tying people’s fingers a bit sore.

Check out the full gallery of both prank parts!