Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog

Today everybody has a network connection in the office. And the majority of people are quite heavily dependent on their connections during the day. In other words if their connection is down they get quite frustrated quite fast.

My colleague was one of these people and he got very upset very fast. I always dreamt of situation were my network connection was working and his was not. So… One day when he had already left the office I took the cable from his docking station and gently cut the cable vertically with a razor and chopped the green wire. Be sure to cut the cable from a spot that is under the table or otherwise out of sight. Then I put just two drops of instant clue to the inside of the covering and gently closed the covering.

The next day he spent half a day cursing his connection and calling to the help-desk. One might automatically thought that the rational thing is to check the cable, but who would assume that the cable just breaks down by itself one day… Well I had quite an amusing morning listening his cursing and swearing the it-department… After a couple hours he finally checked the cable in enough detail to discover the cut =)

I was recently subjected to a practical joke that nearly made me lose my nerves. Me and my dear colleague shared a common workroom in which we worked. One day he had a nice idea and he brought a remotely controllable socket and connected my display to it.

When ever he was in the room he cut off the power once in every hour. Then when he left for a couple of days’ trip, he gave remote control to our assistant, who was in the next room, and told her to do the same. This continued for two weeks, before I found the remotely controllable socket under my table…

I have to say that before the joke was unravelled, I nearly lost my nerves a couple of times. One day I even left work at 1200 because I was so furious because my display kept on shutting down every 15 minutes. If you have a colleague that will appreciate the joke it’s worthwhile to test it =)

In many offices they have some PC- and IT-magazines delivered to the coffee room. If you know that your colleague is interested in some specific magazine, wait for the next issue, and do the following…

Use the stapler to staple all the sheets of the magazine together and then write a post-it as follows: “John, really interested article in page 6. Reg Mike” and place it on the cover page on the top of the rivet and leave the magazine to your colleagues chair…

If you happen to have a troller full of old pc’s waiting in the office to be collected and further disposed, you can still utilize them. For example you can cheer up your collegues by carrying the old pc’s and place them onto your collegues room or a cubicle.

You should do this when your collegue is in a meeting. Do remember to connect all wires =)

Then ask your your collegues boss to wait until your collegue comes to his or hers room/cubicle and then the boss to instruct your collegue that any additional pc’s require a permit…