Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler
I worked with a guy a few years ago who was quite a joker. He was a real riot. I thought it was all fun and games until he crossed the line: He kidnapped my favorite piece of desktop office equipment, my Swingline stapler, and held him for ransom. Here’s the story:
My office is near a small conference room that’s often used by others in the building. For some reason, this conference room’s stapler was always disappearing. When people in a meeting needed something stapled, they would invariably come to my desk and ask to borrow my stapler. I would let them take it back to the conference room with them, but would always make them promise to bring it back at the end of their meeting. If I was away from my office, people would sometimes just take it off my desk and then leave it in the conference room after their meeting was over.
Each morning when I would reach for my stapler to attach the new cover sheet to my TPS reports, it would be missing. I would have to wait until the current meeting was over and then scour the conferece room for my beloved Swingline. The whole time, I put up a pretty vocal fuss about all this (I never threatened to set the building on fire, however.)
So, as I’m going through my normal routine one morning, I discover that my stapler is not on my desk. I trudge over to the conference room to retrieve it, but it’s nowhere to be found there. When I get back to my desk, I find a ransom note sitting on my keyboard. It has also been delivered to my inbox as a Microsoft Word document attachment, sent from one of our anonymous mailboxes we use for testing. Here is a PDF file I created of the ransom note.
With the help of a trusted neutral co-worker, I dissected the Word document and discovered who had actually created it. As soon as he left his desk, I swooped in and took his Intel bunnysuit figure, and created my own ransom note, being careful to create it while logged in with a completely anonymous user name, so it couldn’t be traced back to me. Here is a copy of that ransom note in PDF format.
A trade was arranged, and he got his Intel bunnysuit figure back unharmed, and I got my Swingline stapler back, but he had been roughed up by his captors, and his injuries are evident. Oh the humanity!
He still works flawlessly, and I haven’t missed a TPS report deadline since then.
4 comments May 17th, 2005