Unfiltered Story #290417

We once stayed and chatted together. A coworcer loudly laughed after we had reminiced about the past year and exclaimed: ‘Well of course I remember! That was quite a good prank!
The newest temp had just entered the room so she hadn’t heared anything of the conversation but that last remark and just lost it.
She came on him and accused him out of nothing with all kinds of weird stuff. That he was an evil bully, that all pranks were mean and depended only on the victim being miserable, where alway hurtful and cruel and completely useless and if he ever played a prank on her she would have him fo harrasment!
After an almost ten minutes tirade she ended with:
And how has that poor victim of your funny prank reacted? Huh? Has she cried? Did you feel quite big for yourself? Who was it?
He looked at her.
I was the ‘victim’. And I felt great. The office pranked me and it was funny.
She huffed and stormed out.
The whole week she didn’t talk to anybody and gave him stinkeye whenever they met. We tried to smooth things over and our colleague pretended nothing ever happened but she couldn’t accept that she was premature and desperately tried to ‘prove’ that he was a bully.
In the end, everyone was happy she left after her temporary contract ended.
We where a small, tight knot office and it wasn’t so much her jumping to conclusions that estranged us, we get it: there are bad pranks out there and some people have bad experiences, but she just couldn’t get over it. She pricked and nagged at everybody to have us agree that on principle she was right even when she clearly wasn’t. She didn’t even let us tell her about the prank!
And what was the prank we played on our coworker anyways?

When he was the new hire and his temp contract would run out soon, we played the little prank. He was already asked if he would like a full contract and told what the details would be if he’d get an offering and he has also already agreed that he’d be thrilled to take it if the offer came sometime during the next month. But he was warned that it all depended on the renewal of our business contracts and if we would need him permanently or not.
Then one day our supervisor told him that one of our executives would come to the office today and the management wanted to do a little something to celebrate a new contract. She told him our executive was meeting with a new customer to hopefully close a good deal and if it went smoothly, he might even get his contract after that.
So she gave our coworker a list of what to get and the keys to our shared car for business errands and had him gather some snacks from the deli, drinks from a store across town and a pre-ordered cake from the bakery. Then she had him putting on a little buffet in one of our meeting rooms.
In fact, she let him rush back and forth to get everything done which he did without complaint although usually we all would share the unusually added work.
When the executive arrived, she told the coworker to get the cake from the fridge and putting it on a plate in the meeting room.
When he opened the box with the cake at the buffet-table, while the whole team followed our supervisor into the room, the cake read: welcome to the team dear Coworker!
And so he found out that he would get his full contract and that the reason our executive had visited the office was to sign it with him.
We then had a nice little supper together before we all went back to work. Everybody had a good time, especially our coworker who couldn’t whipe his grin off all day.
And yes, we did that to all new full-time coworkers! Not that we had many chances to celebrate new team members since we rarely hire new people because our turnover is almost non-existent.

What an evil prank indeed. How dare we!