KEY POINTS:
Sideswipe readers have responded to yesterday's call for their greatest pranks. Peter Woodward sounds especially keen: "We had a culture of having fun in the office, doing such things as growing vines down the hallway leading to our offices, taking balls out of mouses, and growing bean sprouts
in people's keyboards while they were on holiday (using old, non-functioning keyboards, of course). The practical jokes grew from there to filling people's offices with boxes, or putting post-it notes over everything in the office, to the effort shown in the photos (which consisted of shrink wrapping the office then shredding paper into it), but the ultimate was when they made my office disappear. Hard to top that one, until we sectioned off the doorway of my boss' office and made it into a toilet cubicle."
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Lynette did her best pranking in her youth. "Fifteen years ago, at 2am before a football final, I went to the home of my friend (a fanatical supporter of the home team) and decorated her house, garden and car in the opposition team colours. She was so incensed that I am still too scared to tell her it was me. It was a very satisfying practical joke, though."
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Jeanette Guttery writes: "Our team leader was always pranking us. One day a workmate got revenge. He went out to the car park on a break and quietly jacked up the team leader's car a few millimetres off the ground - just enough for the wheels to spin. At the end of shift we were all in the car park gossiping and waiting for cars to be moved so we could get out. We watched as the victim got into his car, started it, put it in gear and went ... nowhere. The confused expression on his face was as priceless as his car."
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According to an anonymous tipster, the workers at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare in East Tamaki are under a bit of pressure. But a team of engineers sitting around the lunchroom had a solution for their frustrated colleagues and the concept of a personal stress wall was born. "It's made out off 50mm thick rigid closed cell foam - hard enough to be "therapeutic" but not hard enough to cause injury. The prototype has been undergoing extensive trials in the office today," says the tipster.
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Paul Martin writes: "When I was working in Melbourne a colleague left a note on my desk telling me Liz had called and leaving a London number to phone her back. I knew a Liz in London so called the number, only to find it was for Buckingham Palace! To get her back I unplugged her telephone handset from the phone on the underside so she wouldn't know, and waited for the fallout. Sure enough, the phone would ring but when she picked up the handset but she couldn't hear anything. At one stage she got so frustrated she started bashing the phone with the handset and shouting loudly. She disrupted a meeting next to her office and they went in to see if she was all right. The penny finally dropped when she picked up the phone to throw it across the room and saw the post-it note saying 'Gotcha!' I had taped to the underside of the phone."