Ok so most of these I don’t have photos for as they occurred before I had a smartphone and I didn’t carry a camera with me…but I’ve often done random stuff at work, in corporate offices, to make it a bit more surreal or interesting. I’ve never worked in anywhere groovy or hip, it’s always been full corporate.
The main thing is that office environments don’t have to be sterile. If you have a management who get angry at any of this stuff, that’s really an indication your workplace is terrible and get the fk out of there! Note:
- It’s far easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission
- Most people actually get a kick out of things like this and you will find a lot of people start to do their own random things or play around with yours. Or they just sit back and enjoy it. Offices are boring and you can make them less boring.
- If you can sneak in and do things without being seen, and NEVER mention it was you and NEVER ask about it, that’s best. Eventually they all will know it’s probably you – but it’s more fun to not have them know.
Things to sneakily go and do when no one is around:
- Buy ‘no food and drink’ stickers warnings and put them on the fridge at work.
- Buy the strangest (non-violent, non-adult) niche magazines you can find in your thrift/op-shop and leave them in the lunch room. Most places I’ve worked has a rack of magazines or a pile for people to peruse. Even a home decorating magazine from the early 80s does the trick.
- Really cheap shops tend to sell bulk small plastic toys: buy them and put them all over someone’s desk into little dioramas. (Dinosaurs, Army men, People waiting for trains (for train sets), Farm sets, whales and sea life, Tiny garden Gnomes)
Dinosaurs worship a giant egg
Bulk dinosaur kit and desk
- I found some stickers once that looked official but were not quite right and put them around everywhere. Like ‘No jumping out of window’ on the window (on a 38 floor office), a ‘don’t kick over the water cooler’ one on the water cooler. Do a google search for Prank office stickers. Write your own if you can’t find anything. It has to be something utterly stupid. “do not inhale” on the whiteboard cleaner, etc.
- Find some sort of obsolete pop-star poster and put it up on a wall somewhere. We had an 80’s Billy Idol poster up for a while. The reactions were priceless.
- For somewhat messy that may not be appropriate for some place….fill some sort of opaque object with glitter. When the person opens it, kapow, glitter gets everywhere. This was actually done to me, I opened a small kinder-egg that was on my desk one morning, and ended up entirely covered in glitter, it went everywhere.. And I gathered up the glitter that fell into the puddle in my handbag, put it back in the egg, and put it on someone else’s desk…and kapow! On his pants! And then he gathered up what he could and did it to someone else and everyone really enjoyed this. So. You might end up in trouble with the cleaners and glitter gets literally everywhere forever….but gosh it was funny.
- Get clear bottles or container, fill them with coloured water, label them “Red Water”, “100% Pure Green” or whatever, leave them in the work fridge.
- There was a meeting room with a button that was labelled “Air Supply”. I added two more labels: “Press once if you are all out of love. Press twice if you’re every woman in the world”. Found out later that people loved it. Well, anyone over 40, no one else got it.
- Buy the most revolting or strange second hand mugs in a second hand shop and replace the boring office mugs with them.
- Rewrite signs and notices that are not important and make them go unexpected places. Ie, any sort of notice someone has set up. You can write it in the same font and start it the same way and then someone will read it inevitably and say “HUH?” See this one on wet waste policy.
- Inside toilet cubicles, put up random labels. Like, “No Dogs Allowed”.
- A Hazchem sign on the biscuit jar or tea bag container.
- Write ‘Fresh cow juice’ on milk containers in the fridge.
- For anyone who has left, eg just say Sylvia Brown has gone to another job, label a wall “The Sylvia Brown Memorial Wall”. Try and make it as official looking as possible.
- Take all the forks and spoons and hide them and replace them with bright plastic baby forks and spoons.
- Never leave an empty white-board unmarked. Random song lyrics with “Guess the song without googling it!” – you can start an office tradition this way. My favorite was “Went down to Santa-fe where Renior paints the walls.” Literally no one got that one. And we call ourselves Aussie! Sheesh. The other thing I do will be to draw a little dinosaur saying “RAWR!”, or if someone leaves some form of diagram up, I’ll give it smily faces or draw a little dude skiing down a graph or something.
- Replace someone’s chair with boxes stuck together to resemble a chair.
- You can put sticky tape over someone’s mouse and it stops it working. Or over the ear or mouthpiece of someone’s internal phone. We had one of the managers go a bit…insane…over that. He never looked at his phone until months of getting angry that it randomly worked and randomly didn’t (as his co-worker was taping and untaping the ear/mouthpiece randomly).
- Get a label maker and start to label things, a bit wrongly or else label super obvious things that don’t need labeling. I always like to label the coffee powder “Brown Caffeinated Drink Powder”, for example. Label a door with “Door”. Label “Chair”, “Pen”, “Fridge”, etc.
- Stick googly eyes on random things. Like, on staplers in the office supply cupboard.
- Get a keyboard and fill it with grass seed and sprout it and then replace someone’s keyboard one day.
- At Halloween, Decorate. Those fake cobweb sets are cheap and you can do an entire floor with one packet. Would recommend NOT to put the spiders out as some people are arachnophobic.
- Any random crap you can find second hand and put on people’s desks. The more obvious, the merrier. For example: Twilight the game.
twilight the desk game. the label says it’s missing bits but is still playable. I disagreed it could ever be playable
Twilight the desk game.
- Actually, decorate for everything. Find international pirate day and decorate for that. The randomer the day, the better. Also celebrate non-western events, if you’re in a white-dominated culture. Makes everyone happy.
- Buy a bulk lot of something and put it in a box in the supply cupboard. I did this with little rubix cubes, in a box marked ‘CUBES’. Everyone ran to get them when the word got out. I always meant to take the 5 Worf action toy doubles I had and put them in a box and mark it with “Open in case of outbreak of intersteller war” or something but I never got around to it.
- Get some flavored food that is alarmingly disgusting but doesn’t look like it, leave it on a plate with ‘eat me’. Onion-flavoured cream wafer biscuits from the Chinese supermarket went down REALLY WELL. They looked like strawberry wafer biscuits. THEY DIDN’T TASTE VERY GOOD. Everyone stood buy and watched everyone else eat one and no one warned another person. The problem here is that then people don’t trust you when you offer food to them ever again. It’s a price you have to be prepared to pay.
- Get bulk wind-up toys and leave them on random desks. You will hear little mechanical toys being wound up forever after.
- A nice thing to do if you have a garden: bring in roses in rose season and leave them on desks. People love coming in to find roses!
Things to do face-to face
- Get a ‘busy bee’ stamp or a ‘good work’ stamp and if you have to review anyone’s work, give them a stamp and a rating out of ten as though you’re a teacher. If you don’t stamp items, stamp the back of their hands. Don’t let annoying people grab the stamps and start to stamp all over you though. This is not one
- Get a pen that has a weird shape – like a dinosaur head on it, and take it to official meetings as your pen. Same with clipboards and stuff. And bring your lunch in in kids’ lunchboxes.
- Decorate your desk and make ever-changing dioramas
Darth vader with a jesus pencil topper is workehpped by two Anakins, A troi on megafauna, and two dinosaurs. Just another day in the office.
- If you have weird stuff at home (me!) and you have those meetings where everyone has to pass around an object, bring in a fresh object for every meeting and make them all hold that. Rubber chickens, silver commemorative trowels, crystal skull heads. They all work a treat.
- I made sock monkeys and would deposit them on everyone’s desks, I had a thing where everyone should have one whether they wanted one or not. They started forming dioramas without my help eventually, you would find them in all sorts of places. Hanging from the ceilings, etc.
Sock monkey liked to drink
