There are two things that always happen when people admire pranks: first, they laugh, and second, they assume one has too much time on their hands. I’ve read once that laughter adds years to your lifespan. At this pace, I’m gonna live forever! 🙂

A prank can’t be pulled on just anyone. Some people expect it, so you just never do it to them. It’s the funniest when you find a person with the tiniest amount of sense of humor and try to get ’em to smile. Even if it’s while they’re hating your guts for it, they always smile.

Exhibit A: pink desk of love from the folks at Energy Innovations. It all began with someone taking a vacation and an idea to change the color of their desk to pink. Easy. Fun. Until the desk began to travel throughout the company to everyone taking a vacation. Even our CEO had it. Seen here was my turn at the pink desk of love.

Exhibit B: colorful post-its. Electronic engineers are really smart guys, well, the ones that I’ve worked with so far are. Perhaps it’s due to my good fortune with all of my employers, but everywhere I’ve gone I’ve been surrounded by really smart engineers, with real high IQ’s, …and an almost absent sense of humor. Naturally I do my best to bring out the smiles. In this case a new monitor frame did the job.

Exhibit C: 5S within the office space. We do a very good job of keeping Lean Manufacturing and 5S standards on the production line. Office-wise however it’s not so cut and dry. First S in 5S? Sorting! Alphabetizing a keyboard seemed appropriate. No more searching for them pesky keys throughout the keyboard, all sorted out from now on. And numbers? I believe someone placed the 0 correctly but then messed up on the order. So I renumbered the top row as well with a countdown system. 5S all the way!

You’ll notice that not all keys are correct, that’s because Logitech threw me off with their design and made F and J keys special, so they had to stay.

Missing from the list are SheepShaggers 5000, the universal gloves no sheepherder in the UK should leave their home without. I will update this list once I find the photo in question.

Perhaps I take things too far sometimes, and I apologize. It only took five minutes to return the keyboard to its natural state and the engineer in question almost laughed…almost! I do think more clever pranks would bring out a bigger smile. Higher IQ’s require smarter pranks, so it’s back to the drawing board for a few people I would like to get to smile.

I think a little laughter at work is necessary. And no, it does not mean I have too much time one my hands!