RE: More Friday pranks

["Jones, Donna" <DJones -at- zebra -dot- com>]

At one place where I worked some 8 years ago, the writing and teaching
contractors were all dumped into one large room that had a T-shaped
partition down the center but no actual cubicles (the room was
affectionately called "The Bullpen"). On our side of the T, there were four
desks that were pushed together into two islands. At each island, two
writers sat facing each other with their computer monitors separating them.
We were all a bunch of loonies, so this close contact made for incredible
silliness on that side of the wall. I remember a couple of the computer
pranks vividly (even though the actions themselves might be somewhat lame)
because we all laughed so hard after they happened.

One day, when Bonnie (the coworker facing me) left the room, I unplugged the
mouse and keyboard from the back of her computer, but I left both items in
place. Bonnie came back from wherever she had been, found that her computer
wasn't responding, and rebooted faster than I could speak up to stop her.
Oops! I figured she'd at least pipe up with, "Darn, my computer locked up!"

Another time, one of the other people in the room switched Bonnie's and my
mice on each other's mouse pads without disconnecting either one from the
original computer. We came back to our desks to find that our mousing and
cursor movements didn't go together. We both quietly rebooted without the
problem being fixed. It took a few minutes for both of us to realize that we
were having the same problem and then to figure out what had happened. We
had to admit that our cow-orker got us good with that one.


This story isn't a prank, but I think it's amusing, so I'll tell it. One day
while I was driving to work, I saw in the distance a strange, moving object.
As I got closer, I realized that the object was a person in a costume in
front of an IHOP. The person was dressed as a pancake dotted with what
appeared to be huge chocolate chips (or maybe it was cantaloupe-sized
blueberries). After that, none of my jobs seemed quite as bad. No matter
what odd job they had me doing, at least I didn't have to stand on the
street getting paid minimum wage for waving at traffic in a POLKA-DOTTED
PANCAKE COSTUME. A picture of a smiling, waving pancake graced the white
board at the entrance to the Bullpen as inspiration. Even so, there were
some days in The Bullpen when we contemplated whether we wanted to continue
struggling with resolving NO TAGs (broken cross-references) in Interleaf 5
or go apply for a job as a pancake. Bonnie was forever mumbling: "Hmm...
Pancake or NO TAGs?" (Boy, do I miss her!)


The moral of all of our stories is never to put a group of creative people
in the same room together without proper adult supervision.  ;-)

Happy Friday!
Donna


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