I have a mile wide conventional streak.  I am never sure if it is the last thing people see in me or the first.  I have broken my fair share of rules but breaking them is something I do with thought, not carelessly.  At school I was definately a nerd, a good girl.  Not a Clown.  In fact I can barely tell a joke.  My Husband finds it hilarious, just how badly I can tell them….

It has taken me a long time but I have finally learnt the value of a good prank.  Sometimes you have to have something to stir up the energy.  A game does it too…  I don’t like anything that will upset people, or damage their property.  It has to be something they will enjoy too.  And they can not happen too frequently.

It can be easy for things to become stagnant.  In our jobs there is a large amount of repitition and we spend a lot of time together.  Some times things are stressful and our spirits are low, we need a little something something to get thigns going.

It has been a tough week following on from a tough month.  We lost colleagues, but not the work those colleagues did.  We miss them.  Things are so busy and there is so much overtime for everyone because we are stretched right to the edge.  And so is everyone else…  Other people in other departments are trying to pick things apart, producing figures that show we can do more, without checking those figures are right for instance.  So by this afternoon, we were all well and truly ready for the weekend. 

So sat at my desk, I looked around and decided it was time for something to stir things up a little.  Thinking of something can be a challenge…  First I choose my person.  A young zombie freak, who loves everything zombie….  I printed off a sheet saying ‘They are coming.  They will get YOU.’ with a picture of some zombies beneath and hid it in a pile of papers on his desk which he will use first thing Monday.  Then I printed a load of different little zombie pictures off and cut them up and hid them.  Under his mug, in his stapler, behind papers on his clipboard, in his high-vis…  Everywhere!

This is not the first prank played within my team, we have had some great ones…  I once took a Kylie calendar, photocopied it and then grafittied the copies to make pirate Kylie, Angel Kylie etc and then blue tacked them onto the calendar.  We have a calendar of some rather attractive young men and one month, one of them ended up with a pair of dungarees stuck on him.  One of my work mates has a thing with some squirrels, they eat his bird food and nothing he does seems to discourage them.  One time, millions of pictures of squirrels appeared everywhere.  He kept the one on the back of his clipboard and everytime I see it, it makes me smile. 

Another colleague is a Man U supporter and he had a fixtures list with a photo of a couple of players pinned up.  One of the players is nicknamed Shrek.  I found a picture of Shrek and Princess Fiona and stuck their heads on the players.  I managed to get it just right and it looks pretty good.  My colleague has kept the doctored copy and didn’t want the original back…

I think the best one though is this…  Some time ago, my Boss decided to stick a post box outside for paperwork.  As it happened it went out of use and very rarely got checked.  One of my colleagues found an old birds nest and put it in the mailbox with some chocolate mini eggs.  My Boss did not check it for a very long time and my colleague had to take the chocolate eggs out because they melted…  He replaced them with chicken eggs which had had the yolk blown out and he added little blue biro dots to them.  When my Boss did eventually find it…… *laugh*

It doesn’t have to be a prank,sometimes a game does it as well.  We have run the occasional Sweepstake, I did one for GB Olympic medals and a colleague does football scratch cards for a local team.  Another time I had a dream that we were doing a quiz to think of as many bands and artists beginning with B as we could and we had got 150 I think it was.  The next day we did it in work and it was fun, made a dull day go much quicker…  We beat the total in my dream too!

I love these sorts of things…..  Not too much….  Just often enough….