This prank on a coworker required a degree of sophistication, preparation, and a little engineering but it came off great. [Target] is in charge of shipping and receiving and works in the warehouse area of our office. [Target] is, I guess you would say, easily spooked, which makes him the perfect candidate.

I rigged up a zip line in the back warehouse, constructed a shape of something resembling a ghost with a wig head and sheet, attached it to the zip line so that it would zoom across the warehouse where it would be captured by our security cameras. I had to put up the zip line for testing and take it down so it wouldn’t be detected during the day.

I finally got it to where Tristan — the name we gave our ghost — would sail across the warehouse at the right speed. The trick was how to get Tristan to release in the middle of the night where he would be captured with a time stamp on our cameras that had night vision. I tied a restraining cord to Tristan and put the other end of the cord in a frozen bottle of water. This way, as the ice turned into water, the string would release and Tristan would complete his journey.

It worked perfectly. So now, we had this video of some unidentified form drifting across the warehouse in the middle of the night on our camera systems.

The next day at work my coworkers [Accomplice #1], [Accomplice #2], and [Target] were in the office chatting. [Accomplice #1] casually mentioned how tired she was because she received a call from our security monitoring company around 4:00 am saying that motion had been detected in our back warehouse.

While they were chatting, [Accomplice #1] began reviewing video footage from the warehouse from the night before. The cameras only record if there is an event, so it wasn’t hard to find the right spot on the footage. Sure enough, at 4:08 am, there was Tristan soaring across the warehouse. The first time they saw it, it was a WTF moment. They ran the footage back.

When [Target] saw it again, there was a momentary pause, then bye! [Target] proceeded to walk back to his area, grab his things, and walk out.

“You tell [Boss] she’s gonna have to get somebody else,” he said, and he proceeded to get in his car and leave. He was gone before anyone had a chance to explain. Finally, after we reached [Target]’s cell phone and explained, he did agree to come back. He was a good sport about it but has sworn revenge on me.

My company recently announced that it was shutting down one of our sister satellite locations. As a result, a few employees they wanted to keep were at my location getting set up so they could transfer over to our office. This required them to move as the satellite location was a couple of hours away.

One of the guys, who honestly was a delight to work with, asked me if I might be interested in hanging out more once he was settled in town. I gave him a noncommittal answer thinking it might be nice if we got to know each other better first. He smiled and said he understood, and we went about our work without any problems.

After his move, though, some very odd things happened. He became very distant, often skirting away from conversations or coming and going without much more than hellos and goodbyes. This was not just with me, but with everyone in the office, so I thought nothing much of it but I did find it odd since I thought he’d been trying to hit on me.

There were rude comments made about him, as well, when it became known that he’d tried to ask me out and I’d turned him down. I didn’t know the guy, though, so I couldn’t defend him, but they were all of the sort saying his behavior was that of a sociopath and that kind of thing. 

I tried to pay no attention to it, but a week later, while I was working out at the gym a walk from my apartment, I saw him walk in and a thought went through my head. “How could someone so nice be stalking me?” And I realized that’s exactly what people think about sociopaths. 

Frightened, I immediately got my stuff and went home, trying to make sure that I was not being followed. I felt relatively safe about it and tried to do things as normal, but later that night as I was taking out the trash, I found him standing at the corner across from my building staring at his phone and the panic set in. I immediately dropped the bag and ran inside and called the cops. 

The cops came, knocked on my door, and talked to me. I told them everything about what had happened and they said they’d seen a man standing on the corner and would go talk to him. They came back in not too long and told me that there was nothing they could do to stop the man. Outraged, I ask if they’d stay while I confronted him as he was my coworker and I didn’t feel safe going to work if he was stalking me. They agreed and I went out and, without getting too close, loudly said his name.

He looked up and sputtered my name in surprise. Not wanting to give him a chance to say anything else, I shouted, rather more loudly than I meant to, “Why are you stalking me?” Panic came across his face, and he started sputtering about how he was not stalking me when I saw the lightbulb go off in his eyes. He turned toward my building, then toward the gym, then down to his phone, and then finally at the police, and he just started laughing.

As it turned out, by sheer chance, he had moved into the same apartment complex as me, albeit on the other side. Because of that and us working in the same place with identical hours, running into him at the gym was bound to happen. He was standing outside at the corner because, as he showed me on his phone, he was playing Pokemon Go and there was a gym there. Having never played, I never knew.

He had never even noticed me around, but acknowledged how it must have seemed. As for why he seemed distant all of a sudden? His cat had not taken well to the move or the new environment and he was worried about it. He was “distant” because he was trying to find time to call vets to get an appointment to bring him in ASAP. 

The whole thing just kind of washed over after that. We had a good laugh and agreed to be friends and workout buddies. I did meet his cat shortly after this, and it did seem to be coming back from being worse for wear. I don’t know if I’ll ever really take him up on an actual date, but maybe if I can stop feeling so embarrassed by this, I might!

Every month, all the employees in my small office meet at a local restaurant to discuss business over lunch. We have an agreement with the restaurant that we preorder our meals several days in advance so that the food will be ready soon after we arrive. I am the person who collects the orders each month to send to the restaurant, and just about every month this happens.

Coworker: “This is not what I ordered!”

Server: “I am so sorry, ma’am. Are you not—”

The server reads my coworker’s name from the preorder sheet.

Coworker: “That’s me, but I didn’t order this! I wanted a chicken Caesar salad!”

I bring up the preorder sheet on the phone.

Me: “[Coworker], you ordered a quesadilla, remember? I have it right here.”

Coworker: “No, I didn’t. You wrote it down wrong! I’ll prove it!”

She starts scrolling through sent messages in her phone.

Server: “Would you like me to get you a salad, instead, ma’am? I can take this back.”

Coworker: “No, I guess it’s fine. It’s not what I ordered. But it’s fine. I guess I’ll just eat it…”

She continues scrolling and grumbling.

Coworker: “I can’t find the email, but I know this isn’t what I wanted.”

Server: “Are you sure you don’t want me to—”

Coworker: *Snaps* “No, no, I’ll eat it anyway. It’ll have to do.”

Me: *Mouthing to the server* “I’m so sorry.”

I pull up the original email on my phone.

Me: “[Coworker], here’s the exact email you sent to me. See? ‘I would like to order the quesadilla with a side of chips.’ But if you’ve changed your mind, the server can absolutely bring you something else.”

Coworker: “No, no, no. I didn’t write that! Maybe it was autocorrect. Or if I did, that’s not what I meant. You should know. But it’s here now and I’m not waiting anymore for food.”

Me: *To server* “Thank you so much for everything. We’re all set.”

The coworker will then continue to grumble for the rest of the meal about not getting what they wanted. Every. Single. Month!

([Coworker #1] and I have an ongoing game where we ask each other “would you rather” questions. Usually, we ask a question in passing and no one else is around. It starts off with “Would you rather live in the shirt pocket of a sweaty giant or in his shower drain?” and “Would you rather be a parasitic tick or a bloodsucking leech?”

It has progressed to weirder and weirder questions. Today we are sitting in the lunch room together and I don’t realise that [Coworker #2] has just walked into the room.)

Coworker #1: “Would you rather eat someone else’s eyes from their head or have your eyes gouged out with forks?”

Me: *answers* “Would you rather be shoved up someone else’s a** or have someone shoved up yours?”

Coworker #2: “Nope. No lunch for me today.” *walks out*

I’m a fairly new office administrator for a pest control company and am still in-training. I work with two other admins who have been with the company for more than ten years, as well as the manager who has been around for more than twenty years. [Admin #1] has several adult children but is otherwise happy and healthy, [Admin #2] has a chronic health condition, and [Manager]’s wife has terminal cancer. This concludes my stage-setting for one of the worst phone calls of my life.

I’m happily snoozing away when I’m awoken by my phone. It’s [Admin #1]. I answer with the expected amount of attentive grogginess and am told something to the effect of:

“Sorry to wake you. [Manager]’s wife just died, [Admin #2] is in the hospital, and my son was just in a car accident. You need to come in… fifteen minutes ago.”

And that’s the first and worst time I solo’d running an office forty employees strong: through a trial-by-fire while my coworkers handled their life-altering events where they were most needed. No one had a good time that day, but I think I got off the easiest.