Who, Me? Welcome to Christmas week at The Register, an occasion we’ll celebrate with another installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of workplace mistakes and mischief.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Clint" who told us he once worked as a consultant for a major Italian entertainment company.
"A very unwelcome reorganization brought us a new boss," Clint told Who, Me? "Although he was utterly incompetent, he had a complete faith in technology, and a fetish for physical security."
Clint said the new boss took less than a month to "antagonize the whole office."
"I remember him at lunchtime, locking up his office door, and ambling through the open plan section of the office with a telephone and a personal digital assistant both hanging from his belt," he told Who, Me? "He thought he looked like a real pistolero," Clint wrote, but his colleagues thought he looked like a twit who mistakenly thought two kilograms of tech bouncing around his waist was cool.
The new boss liked to swagger out of the office at 3pm on Fridays, and when he did so Clint and his colleagues were ready.
“We opened his office and pasted his mouse on his desk with epoxy resin,” he told Who, Me?
"The next Monday, he entered his office, powered up his computer and tried to move the mouse: The entire desk trembled and shook, but the pointer on the screen didn't move at all."
Clint said that after two or three attempts, the boss closed his office door and rang tech support.
"We could hear him screaming on the phone, and we promptly and cowardly left the open plan area."
Clint later learned that the boss told the company's support team his mouse was faulty.
Have you used tech to prank colleagues, and gotten away with it? If so, click here to send email to Who, Me? We're straight shooters who will give your story the treatment it deserves. ®
Source: The register