It's Friday
7.21.7
I love a good practical joke. For some reason, I've always loved playing pranks on my co-workers the most...especially bosses. The beauty of a friendly prank is that it's all in good fun. The best pranks don't even necessarily have to be "successes" in order to be worth the effort. They're just supposed to be entertaining for everyone involved. They should give the perpetrators a good laugh...as well as the victims.
When Josh (the new guy at work) asked me what day it was last Thursday, I immediately jumped into action. "It's Friday," I told him. Obviously, he didn't believe me...but that wasn't the point. He had given me an opening that I absolutely refused to pass up.
Now...I try not to do things half-assed in life. Simply telling him the wrong day wasn't going to cut it. I started formulating a plan immediately. The first step was to inform Greg and Jeremy of the plan so they could play along. Next, I had to go to the front desk and tell the receptionist. It would be her job to explain why the usual Friday morning breakfast hadn't arrived yet. She would also need to give Ed the heads up on his way in. It really added to the credibility of the story when Ed finally walked in yelling, "Thank God it's Friday!" That was truly a classic moment.
I think the real turning point, though, was when I found our Executive Operations Manager talking to Greg in the warehouse. I figured she could appreciate something like this, so I asked if she'd like to join the cause. She said she'd help us out, and went right to asking Josh how his Friday morning was going.
It was at this point that Josh pulled his phone out to check what day it really was. He then declared to us, "It's Thursday. My phone says it's Thursday." Honestly, I think that reaction, in and of itself, made this prank a success. I wasn't gonna let that stop me from following through with my plans, though.
The immediate question was this: How could I explain his phone? Breakfast was easy...maybe our corporate headquarters decided the bagels were getting too expensive each week. His personal cell phone, though? How...?
Suddenly, it came to me. I whipped something up real quick, uploaded it, and sent out an e-mail that said, "Hey guys. I just ran across this article on CNN. I thought I'd pass it along so everyone knows what's going on with their phones..." I sent the following link along with it:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TOPSTORIES/07/19/time_failure/
I had completely fabricated an Associated Press article about how "The Timekeeper's Association" had experienced a massive failure at the "International Time Station" which caused the signal sent out to cell phones around the world to jump backwards exactly 24 hours and 1 minute. Sure...the idea was ridiculous, but I personally think the article was well-written enough to give it an air of plausibility.
The rest of the afternoon, I made it my duty to talk to everyone he'd be in contact with throughout the day. The person who brings him the orders? Check. His smoking buddy? Check. Hell...I even snuck out the side door to ask a random UPS guy if he would do me a favor and pretend it was Friday. Everything was going great.
The final problem I ran across was the fact that this Friday would have been payday. The lack of checks was seriously throwing off the realism of the joke. (At this point I wasn't even really trying to convince him...I just wanted to see how far I could take it.) To solve this problem, I told him that the checks had been delayed and that he would receive his money on Monday. He didn't believe me of course...so I asked the bookkeeper to tell him the same story a few minutes later.
Problem solved.
Thinking back on the day...the closer we got to 5:00, the more pissed off he seemed. It wasn't until Friday morning, though, that our Executive Operations Manager confirmed for me that the joke had gotten his knickers all in a twist. Apparently, he had even gone as far as to storm into the bookkeeper's office to bitch about not getting his check on time. Apparently, he didn't piece that together as being part of the ongoing joke.
When I finally asked him about everything on "real Friday," he told me that the only reason he had gotten so mad was because the joke "got old."
A little back story: I've been trying very hard to stay away from cigarettes. For quite some time, though, I've been cheating and bumming smokes off of Autumn and my coworkers. For over a year, though, I haven't been in possession of a single pack of my own. Despite this fact, Josh is constantly asking me if I have a cigarette. The answer is always no, but without exaggeration, I would estimate that he's asked me at least 100 times.
"Do you have a cigarette?" "Do you have a cigarette?" "Do you have a cigarette?" "Do you have a cigarette?" This was the type of repetitive joke I could expect to hear almost every single day.
To be told by him that my joke "got old" just irritates me to no end. I absolutely can't understand why someone wouldn't just enjoy the humor of a stupid little joke for one day. I put a lot of effort into that shit, and it almost offends me that he would throw such a hissyfit about it. I made him a fake CNN article for Christ's sake! The least he could have done was show some appreciation.
In any case...as I mentioned, practical jokes are not meant to be mean-spirited. They're supposed to be a friendly little game between two people. I guess I made a mistake in assuming he could handle that.
I won't make that mistake again.
