Every office has one person who keeps morale alive through carefully calibrated nonsense. This list is their training manual. It circulated through cubicle farms for years as a beloved email forward, and we preserve it here as both comedy and cautionary tale. GreetingGrams reminds you that your HR department has no sense of humor, and that this page is a greeting card, not legal advice.
The Manual
- Page yourself over the intercom. Don't disguise your voice.
- Find out where your boss shops and buy exactly the same outfits. Wear them one day after your boss does. This is especially effective if your boss is of a different gender than you.
- Make up nicknames for all your coworkers and refer to them only by these names. “That's a good point, Sparky.” “No, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with you there, Cha-cha.”
- Send email to the rest of the company telling them exactly what you're doing. For example: “If anyone needs me, I'll be in the bathroom.”
- Highlight your shoes with a fluorescent marker. Tell people you haven't lost them as much since you did this.
- While sitting at your desk, soak your fingers in dish soap. Call everyone Madge.
- Every time someone asks you to do something - anything - ask them if they want fries with that.
- Hang mosquito netting around your cubicle. When you emerge to get coffee or a printout, slap yourself randomly the whole way.
- Put a chair facing a printer. Sit there all day and tell people you're waiting for your document.
- Send email back and forth to yourself, engaging yourself in an intellectual debate. Forward the thread to a coworker and ask her to settle the disagreement.
- Put decaf in the coffee maker for three weeks. Once everyone has withdrawn from caffeine addiction, switch to espresso.
- Put your trash can on your desk. Label it “IN.”
- Feign an unnatural and hysterical fear of staplers.
- Send email messages saying there's free pizza or donuts or cake in the lunchroom. When people drift back to work complaining that they found none, lean back, pat your stomach and say, “Oh, you've got to be faster than that.”
- Encourage your colleagues to join you in a little synchronized chair-dancing.
Field Notes
Connoisseurs agree that numbers 9 and 12 are the masterpieces: completely silent, infinitely sustainable, and impossible to complain about with a straight face. Number 11 - the decaf switcheroo - is the only entry on the list that qualifies as an actual war crime under break-room conventions, and should be deployed only against deserving targets. The whole list is a sibling of our other office classics: the Sick Leave Policy memo and the immortal Prison vs. Work comparison.
Interoffice Distribution
This page travels well: send the link to your most mischievous colleague and deny everything later. For further professional development, see the rest of the jokes collection, or visit the fun pages to pull pranks that don't require a shared office.