Playtime at the Copier

So, it’s been far too quiet around my office lately. You know what that means: time to stir things up a bit!

I decided to focus my efforts on the communal office space that houses the office equipment that we all use on a daily basis. To be honest, I first got the idea while my company was going through a remodeling job not to long ago-- putting in computer flooring and a bunch of other cool techie types of things. I dreamed up the idea of having a voice recognition program installed on the office copier.

Of course the real beauty of this particular program is that it doesn’t exist. I had to let the office receptionist in on it, but it was completely worth it.

First, I called on a friend of mine who used to do office repair work. I had him come to the office and pretend to install this new "software" on the copier. It went over pretty well. I had him use the office receptionist to "test it out" in full view of the cube farm, and all seemed to go well. No one in the office even seemed to notice. Then I had the secretary send out an email to the office announcing the new change and attach some instructions I made up.

This prank was aimed at the guy in the cubicle three down from me who’s always acting like he is “Mr. Technology”. My detailed (and completely fake) instructions called for using the swipe card we use to enter the building to log onto the new and improved copier. When swiping for the first time, the instructions called for each employee to loudly state their name in order to activate the program.

This is where the fun began.

It was as if each employee was announcing they had been duped each time they did it. Even better was that the three that did it before everyone caught on actually yelled their names quite loudly (much to my delight)!

The icing on the cake for me was that my pal stuck a little gadget on the side of the copier that was voice activated. When people went up and shouted their names it said something like back like "you're a real idiot" or "did you shower this morning?"

Success!