Category — Office Culture

Cartoon by Polyp

I am always delighted to come across a well executed office prank, and this one certainly fits the bill. Well done sir!!

via Nick Scipio

The last few days at my office have been dreadfully slow, and as usual when that happens I have been lurking around the office looking for ideal candidates to pull pranks on. When it comes to office pranks, there are the old harmless classics like taking a screenshot of someones computer desktop and hiding all of their icons, or gluing someones pencaps to their pens, but in today’s high tech work environment these classics often don’t get the desired effect.

Luckily I found a great list of high tech pranks that are sure to provide you with the perfect prank for your situation. Here are some of the pranks I pulled over the last couple days.

The Restart Remap: The first one i pulled is rather evil, so I made care to do it to a person I didn’t like all that much. My victim was a guy who sits in the cubicle next to me who: 1. constantly makes personal phone calls, and 2. has a massively obnoxious voice. Simply right-click the Firefox shortcut icon, select Properties, go to the Shortcut tab, and change the Target to “%windir%\system32\shutdown.exe -r -t 00″. Then watch as your co-worker pull their hair out as their computer keeps restarting every time they try to open up Firefox. Brilliant!

Crazy Keys: A man called August Dvorak once created an alternate keyboard layout which is considered helpful for people who type with one hand or finger. While his keyboard layout is mostly useless for those of us adept at using the QWERTY layout, it is perfect for driving a co-worker insane by remapping his keyboard. To learn how to remap the keyboard click here.

The Poltergeist: Lastly, I had been dying to try out a program called The Office Poltergeist. By installing it as a Firefox extension on someones computer, you can remotely take over their computer and play random sounds, turn their monitors on and off, shake their windows, and send pop-up alert messages.

To learn about more awesome pranks you can pull at work head over to TechCult for the list of The 25 Best High-Tech Pranks.

And just for fun, here’s a clip of some of the pranks pulled on Dwight from The Office.

If you happen to work at Yahoo right now, the whole Microsoft buy-out thing has probably been quite stressful lately. Apparently a handful of execs recently hit the road, and that’s usually a pretty bad sign, so chances are the thought of quitting has crossed your mind at least once.

Well if the only thing holding you back is writing that dreaded resignation letter, Mathew Honan, a contributing editor over at Wired, has taken most of the pain out of it for you by creating a simple, easy to use, Resignation Letter Generator.

Following a Mad-Libs format, you can create your own custom letter in under 1 minute.

Here are a few examples from the generator:

It is with great
sadness glee self-interest

that I ask you to accept this letter as my official resignation from Yahoo!

My last day here will be
two weeks from today tomorrow the best day of my life you fucking incompetent nincompoops

As you know, for some time now I have been desiring
more time with my family a more challenging position you guys quit destroying all my net worth

and thus I feel the time has finally arrived for me to
move on take a new direction tell you to go fuck yourself

I can’t even explain how badly I want one of these nerf office wars to happen at my work.

http://view.break.com/521743 - Watch more free videos

Gas prices are steadily rising to record prices, which is sad sad news for commuters like myself. As if taking two hours to get to work wasn’t bad enough, now I have to pay almost double as well? Luckily there are several innovations on the horizon that could potentially solve America’s dependency on fuel.

Take for example this group of mad scientists experts who claim to have created genetically modified bacteria that feeds on agricultural waste such as woodchips, and excretes crude oil. No joke. They actually made bugs that shit malleable oil!

The company behind it (LS9) claims the process is carbon-negative, which means the “carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made”, and that barrels could run as low as $50!!

Sounds pretty amazing to me, read more about it HERE

via engadget

Need a day off but already wasted all your vacation time?  Well the new marketing scheme by Mikes Hard Lemonade aims to assist you in getting some ‘quality BBQ time’ by letting you create a personalized news clip video about a tragic incident that recently befell you, which you can then send to your boss as proof of your inability to come in to work.

The resulting video is hosted on a web-page made to look like a real news site (sort of), and is all sorts of hilarious.  It probably won’t fool your boss, but it might put him in the mood to give you that day off anyway.

Try making your own news clip video HERE

If you are in need of a quick laugh, then check out these hilarious stories about office weirdos.

Office Weirdos: They’re Worse Than You

According to a survey done by Salary.com in 2007, the average worker wastes 1.7 hours on a typical 8.5 hour workday, of which 34.7% is spent surfing the internet, 20.3% socializing with co-workers, 17% handling personal business, and the remainder being divided between things like making phone calls, and taking long breaks. Notice how reading a book was not included? Well obviously, because you would probably get fired a lot quicker than you would checking your personal email…up until now that is.

In what can only be described as sheer genius, the website ReadAtWork.com uses flash to disguise your web browser as a Windows XP desktop running a PowerPoint presentation, only the slides are made up of a book of your choice, complete with pie charts, line graphs, and pictures of people who look busy. Although the selection is rather limited at this point, you can still choose from classics like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, or Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, or if you prefer there’s also poetry and short stories.