There are generally two camps when it comes to pranks. Those who view them as harmelss fun and those who think they are akin to torture. I will tell you upfront that I am in the latter camp.
Today is Aprils’ Fools Day (yesterday by the time you read this). I have never understood the appeal of this day, quite frankly. I have playefd one prank in my life that was pretty epic, but then I felt gulity about it afterwards. It was when I was a first-year student in college. I got a bunch of friends to help me with it because there was no way I could have done it on my own. We took all the furniture from a friend’s room and recreated it in the study lounge, down to every last detail. It was amazing, quite frankly, but it was very intrusive. I would not have taken kindly if someone had done it to me because i do not like people touching my stuff without my permission.
This is my issue. Don’t. Touch. My. Stuff. I will say that putting googly eyes on stuff is a harmless prank that most people can enjoy. At the very least, it doesn’t do any harm. If someone doesn’t like it, they can roll their own eyes and just keep it pushing.
For the other office-related pranks, though, even the ones considered mild, I would not appreciate them at all. At Ask A Manager, this is such a contentious topic. Alison herself is on the pro-prank side (which surprises me) as long as everybody is on-board with the prank. Which, I mean, it’s not easy to always be sure that people are on the same page.
The things that people call harmless pranks such as putting tape on the underside of someone’s mouse and switching around the letters on someone’s keyboard are big no-nos for me. The latter wouldn’t bother me because I use the Dvorak system and touch-type. I only care about the very rarely-used keys such as the brackets.
People who talked about doing this were all, “Hahahahahah this is so funny!”, but I did not get it at all. The premise is, “I’m going to do somtehing to your stuff that you don’t know about and then I’m going to laugh at how gullible you are to fall for it even though there’s no way you could have known about.”
That’s the thing that doesn’t make sense to me. How is that a prank? How is that funny to the person who’s getting pranked? Alison emphhasized that the prank had to be funny for everyone, not just the person/people doing the prank. Anything that has to do with messing with someone’s computer just doesn’t seem funny to me. Even if you don’t think it’s offensive or wrong, why is it funny?