We have already posted a blog on office furniture pranks, at last somebody seems to be taking us seriously! Comedy Central, who are broadcasting The Office, have recently conducted a survey on fun in the workplace and found these rather surprising results:

Comeday Central

• office laughter levels have dropped by 50%

• 1 in 2 of us are too scared to share jokes for fear of recrimination from the boss

• 1 in 5 say they never crack a smile during a working day

• 14% have stopped talking to colleagues for fear of being thought of as lazy

• Practical jokes have dropped by 66%

It seems that the effects of the credit crunch are more far-reaching than we first thought.

To counter this misery in the workplace, Comedy Central have launched a competition with an Ipod Touch as a prize - but don’t use it at your desk!; they have decided to hold the first ever Flashprank Friday. On 22nd May they are asking you to inject a bit of fun back to your workplace by playing practical jokes on your co-workers for a chance to win an iPod Touch! But, of course, they don’t want you to do anything that could get you fired or arrested. Full details of the competition can be found on their Facebook group.

All you have to do is post a still or video on the group and you stand a chance to win the Ipod Touch. There are plenty of examples on their site, many of them taken from The Office,

The Office

and we have some examples ourselves on our office furniture blog posts.

This reminds me of the days was I was an IT Manager. Every 1^st April we used to send a spoof email around the office, you would be surprised how many people fell for it. One I remember particularly well was as follows:

“We have just been informed by the local electricity company that we will be working on reduced voltage for most of the day. Would you please ensure that you hit your keyboard keys hard enough to ensure that the data gets carried around the network”. The sound of clattering keyboards was quite deafening.

Another - which backfired on the IT department - was to change the login screens to say “Errors have been detected on your hard drive, do you wish to re-format it, press Y for yes or N for no”. Whatever key they pressed, a message popped up saying “Drive C:\ formatting in progress”. What we hadn’t counted on was the number of people who simply switched off their PCs as soon as they saw the message. As you may know, pulling the plug on a Windows PC can sometimes have dramatic effects and we actually ended up with quite a few wrecked hard drives and the IT department had to work through the night fixing them all. It ended up being quite a serious disciplinary situation because of the lost productivity and cost of repairs – so beware, think through the consequences of your prank!