Reader Responses January 4, 2004

SURVEY SAYS: What's Your Best/Worst Workplace Prank?

April 1, 2004 (PLANSPONSOR.com) - Today is, of course, April Fool's Day, and this week we asked readers whether they were more likely to be the prankster or the prankstee - and asked them to share the best/worst workplace prank they have been involved with.

Reported by

Nevin E. Adams

The tabulations on this particular survey tended to be as complicated as they were irrelevant. Suffice it to say that respondents were about evenly likely to be either the victim or victimizer of these pranks – and many said they had found themselves on both sides of the issue – sometimes during the same prank.

The most common pranks involved fake resignations and furniture movements, though fake birthdays, engagements, weddings and pregnancies showed up frequently enough to constitute an “honorable mention” of sorts.

For more stories like this, sign up for the PLANSPONSOR NEWSDash daily newsletter. 

One good example of the fake resignation came from the reader who noted, “All the girls in the office rented a limo to come and get them from the office in the morning – they have a lottery pool every week, and when the limo arrived, they all walked into the boss’s office, told him they won the lottery and they were all quitting! They all walked out and got in the limo and drove off! They had the limo driver go around the block and then drop them back off at the office so they could go back in and say “April Fools!”

Backfires

An example of the “backfire” category came from the reader who said, “Several years ago when I was in a position heavily involved with a very large project, I wrote a resignation letter to my boss as an April fools joke. It was a fairly lengthy letter and at the very end it said “April Fools!”. Unfortunately my boss didn’t read the entire letter. Instead he began to panic and called his boss to begin planning for my replacement. Needless to say, this little April fools joke almost backfired on me.”

There’s moving furniture – and then there’s moving furniture with “style”, including the reader who noted, “The next year we completely switched the contents of his office with another manager’s office down the hall. When he came in to the office that morning and questioned what happened to his office, everyone acted like he had obviously lost his mind and reminded him that his office was down the hall.”

Technological “Advances?”

While a number of readers referenced pranks played with the phone (equipment and things like calls to a Mr. Lyon at the local zoo), it is clear that pranks have also made technological “advances.” One reader noted, “A couple April Fools’ Days ago, I came in early and removed the “ball” inside the mouse on each of my staff’s computers. I placed the ball in their coffee cup (for the ones I knew were coffee addicts) or on their keyboard or phone in plain sight. After the third person called the Help Desk, I decided that either my staff wasn’t very observant, or very reliant on our efficient Help Desk. ” And there was the reader who shared this experience, “An attorney I worked with enjoyed playing Solitaire on his PC at lunch. But he seemed skittish about being “caught”. I made a screen shot of a Solitaire game and loaded it onto his PC as his wallpaper while he was out picking up a sandwich. (This was long enough ago to be when we still had Windows 3.1 and little clutter from Desktop icons on our screens.) When he returned, he had a devil of a time trying to exit the game!”

But this week’s Editor’s Choice goes to the reader who shared this tale: “A couple of years ago, a co-worker decided to play an April Fool’s joke on our partners by having staff arrive early and park in all the partner reserved spots. She put up a sign advising partners to park in the “Pit” – the lower level basement parking. Needless to say, a few of them didn’t appreciate the joke. When she came later, she found her office papered with hundreds of pink slips everywhere, and a copy of the Company newsletter was on her desk, announcing that she was leaving the firm. Nearby was a form letter from the HR manager, advising her to turn in her keys, parking pass, and other employee materials by3pm. There was also a 401k distribution forms packet for terminated employees on her desk – with her name on it. (I thought I pulled this together fairly quickly. Her screams were worth it.)”

Thanks to everyone who participated in our survey!

I am more likely to be the prankstee. However, a few years ago a few colleagues and I pulled a good one on our boss. The night of March 31 we invaded his office and moved every single piece of furniture to a nearby conference room. He walked in that morning to an office with nothing but his chair in the middle of a completely empty room. We moved everything - desk, computer, fax, copier, bookshelves, books, even the pictures off the wall.

You had to be there, but it was a great prank. Fortunately, he's was a laid-back guy and got a big kick out of it. Thanks.

The best April Fool's joke that I was involved in at work:

To make a long story as short as possible, there were four women that worked for this guy. He relied very heavily on us and we had become quite a team and worked well together. He would have a very difficult time replacing just one of us (though it could be done); however, what if he had to replace all of us at the same time? So, we each came up with a very believable story as to why we were "quitting" our jobs. In the morning, we went into his office at different times over a one hour period and put in our "notices". You see, the reasons that we gave were all very believable and were things that we had been wanting to do for some time, or needed to do regardless.

After each person went in there to give him a reason as to why we had to give our notice, he started to get more upset. After he found out about all four of us, about a half hour later we looked into his office and saw him in a blank stare at his computer screen. He couldn't focus at all. He was actually believing us and didn't realize at all that this could possibly be an April Fool's joke. Finally, after about another 15 minutes, we had to break down and tell him; he just looked too depressed about the entire situation. He just didn't know what he would do when everyone was going to be leaving him at once!

We all walked into his office and said "Do you know what today is?" He still couldn't figure it out, we finally told him. Then, to be on the safe side, he even asked each one of us individually if we were actually leaving for the reasons we gave him. It took some convincing, but once we did, you could just see "the world lift off of his shoulders"!

I don't "do" April Fools' Day anymore...In fifth grade, I told my teacher (a nun, my big mistake) that she was wearing two different shoes, when she looked down and then back up, hearing me say "April Fools," she promptly slapped me.

In college, my boyfriend of two months and I decided to get "engaged," complete with a "diamond" ring. All of our friends bought our story, but the joke went awry when one of our friends starting to dwell on his unattached state and became really depressed. He didn't think it was so funny when we revealed the truth a day later. A mutual friend promised "revenge" and I've been nervous ever since. That was 1991.

I guess those aren't funny stories!

PrankSTER of course! The best one I have been involved with was actually played on me as a new supervisor. I had been in the unit a few weeks and guess which day everyone decided to call in sick? Fortunately, they were calling from a few cubes over......

1) I tend to be the prankstee. As an extreme type A, I tend to be so focused on the presumed

task or objective that I can easily miss the rather obvious atmospherics which would tell me

my privates are being yanked.

2) The worst April Fool played on me lasted several months. A new employee was hired who was barely first generation walking erect in terms of intelligence and was seated next to me. The

bank I worked at had a tickler system to remind the staff to perform certain tasks. One task was

an extremely complicated financial computation which needed to be performed once a year on

one of the accounts of my Cro-Magnon co-employee. Well, my "friends" changed the tickler to

come out weekly, instead of annually and I had to gerberize the explanation of the task to

my newly adopted seat mate for months until I could convince him that both of us were being had.

To this day, year's later, I don't think he ever got it.

As tomorrow is my birthday, really no kidding, I have always been the epitome of the prankster. Some of my pranks are tailored to the prankstee. For example, one attorney I worked with one was very uncomfortable with the computer, if he couldn't "point and click" he was useless. Of course the joke on him was to remove the little ball from the mouse to make this task almost impossible.

I suppose the best one of all though was on the guy in the office with the temper. He would get all spun up and slam doors and yell. So on April Fools day I arrived at the office early and "broke" the coffee maker. The one sure thing to spin him up and get him hot. Well the plan worked and he stormed off down the hall to his office where he proceeded to fling the door open .................. only problem was I had pulled the hinge pins.............. he grabbed the knob to FLING the door open and it pulled him right down. His dignity was shattered as half the office saw him go head over heels into his office, making him the object of jokes all day long.

I know these sound very mean spirited - but both these fellows learned the lesson that is it okay to do something silly and laugh at you. Life is too short to take so serious and without laughter what is the point of living.

Happy April Fools Day and Happy New Year!

Several years ago when I was in a position heavily involved with a very large project, I wrote a resignation letter to my boss as an April fools joke. It was a fairly lengthy letter and at the very end it said "April Fools!". Unfortunately my boss didn't read the entire letter. Instead he began to panic and called his boss to begin planning for my replacement. Needless to say, this little April fools joke almost backfired on me. Since then, I learned my lesson about what type of jokes to play...

We had a manager who was a bit of an egotist. One of the staff had his picture taken "for the newsletter" then she took it to a copy store and made 30 color copies. These she glued to paint stir sticks.

Then she called a meeting to "discuss an important issue". All staff were in their chairs with the paper faces before their own. He walks into a room of his own faces.

It got the reaction we desired.

Using a colleague's e-mail address at his computer when he vacated his office for a bathroom break, I sent an obnoxious e-mail to myself. I then went to my machine and replied to my colleague with a "what's up with this" e-mail and added some verbal bashing. Then, I "happened" to walk past his office and further questioned his e-mail actions.

Of course, he was aghast, claimed that someone must have used his e-mail address, and apologized profusely. I rejected his explanation and "questioned our professional and personal relationship" and walked away...thinking I would come back in a couple of minutes to own up to the prank. When I came back, he was gone....gone to the head of the business and Chief Technology Officer to look into the matter. When I caught up with him 15 minutes later, he called all concerned with a "cease and desist" order but we all had a good laugh...and my colleague rarely left his computer exposed again.

Over the years, I have been the giver and receiver of numerous April Fool's pranks. I can't think of any that stand out as especially unusual or hilarious - except maybe the time I told my boss that a DOL examiner was in my office. I got to watch the boss have one of his customary fits before telling him, "April Fool!" However, this year I see an alarming trend emerging in the prank department. The younger crowd (twenty-somethings) at work think it would be funny to tee-pee a co-worker's workspace. Even worse, yesterday they were talking about taking those little chads from the paper punch or the shredder and dumping them in a co-worker's desk drawers! I don't think that is particularly amusing. Am I just an old fuddy-duddy?

More likely to be the prankster.

A couple of years ago, a co-worker decided to play an April Fool's joke on our partners by having staff arrive early and park in all the partner reserved spots. She put up a sign advising partners to park in the "Pit" - the lower level basement parking. Needless to say, a few of them didn't appreciate the joke. When she came later, she found her office papered with hundreds of pink slips everywhere, and a copy of the Company newsletter was on her desk, announcing that she was leaving the firm. Nearby was a form letter from the HR manager, advising her to turn in her keys, parking pass and other employee materials by 3pm. There was also a 401k distribution forms packet for terminated employees on her desk - with her name on it. (I thought I pulled this together fairly quickly. Her screams were worth it.)

1) I tend to be the prankstee. As an extreme type A, I tend to be so focused on the presumed

task or objective that I can easily miss the rather obvious atmospherics which would tell me

my privates are being yanked.

2) The worst April Fool played on me lasted several months. A new employee was hired who was barely first generation walking erect in terms of intelligence and was seated next to me. The bank I worked at had a tickler system to remind the staff to perform certain tasks. One task was an extremely complicated financial computation which needed to be performed once a year on one of the accounts of my Cro-Magnon co-employee. Well, my "friends" changed the tickler to come out weekly, instead of annually and I had to gerberize the explanation of the task to my newly adopted seat mate for months until I could convince him that both of us were being had.

To this day, year's later, I don't think he ever got it.

Happy April Fools Day and Happy New Year!

Then she called a meeting to "discuss an important issue". All staff were in their chairs with the paper faces before their own. He walks into a room of his own faces.

It got the reaction we desired.

More likely to be the prankster.

OK, this prank took place a loooong time ago, the parties involved no longer work here and my reputation is now such that my coworker would be quite surprised at my involvement in any kind of pranks.

Early in the days of this firm, when the full time staff numbered three, I was the ringleader the following:

Our office was a small Victorian two story house with an open porch out front. All our chairs were on wheels and on this fine spring day, Mary and I, armed with yards of telephone wire and various computer cables tied our co-worker C**** to his chair. (Since there was no struggle, I'm thinking that he was quite happy with that arrangement!) He enjoyed the ride around the office, but was less thrilled when we wheeled him out onto the porch, facing the street - and left him there for a while. (In a perfect world, we would have worked in a large office building and C**** would have been sent up and down in the elevator.) Of course our boss was out of town....

Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

An attorney I worked with enjoyed playing Solitaire on his PC at lunch. But he seemed skittish about being "caught". I made a screen shot of a Solitaire game and loaded it onto his PC as his wallpaper while he was out picking up a sandwich. (This was long enough ago to be when we still had Windows 3.1 and little clutter from Desktop icons on our screens.) When he returned, he had a devil of a time trying to exit the game!

I've been both on the same day. Last year, I called one of our vendors and told our contact that they had to pull all of our information off of their website immediately because our compliance department finally saw the content and had significant issues with it. Our contact starts to stutter and tells me that we have to talk directly with the President of the company. I called the President and got him to play along for awhile. Eventually, our contact figured out that it was an April Fools joke. He got me back, though. I received a beautiful bunch of flowers later that day which would have made my wife jealous. The card read "Last night was wonderful. Love, Bob". Needless to say, my co-workers were rather amused.

While working in a Fortune 500 Legal Department years ago, I collaborated with a fellow employee and wrote a memo from the company president that the company was going from a bi-monthly payroll to once a month with the first month's pay to be delayed for one month. We gave the memo only to the junior attorneys and thought the plan so outrageous that it would be obvious it was an April Fools prank. One of the attorneys immediately got on the phone to borrow money from mom & dad bemoaning the new payroll policy. We were then told that one of the other attorneys told the General Counsel who then called the head of Marketing to see what kind of reaction he was receiving from his group. At this point we thought the prank had been turned around on us and it took some convincing from the attorneys that they truly believed it. Panic then set in and after much explaining and retrieving copies of the memo which had taken on a life of its own, we decide the next year just to lay low.

One year my coworkers and I filled our manager's office approximately 2 feet deep in Styrofoam packing peanuts. As they tend to have static cling, every time he tried to clean up, a few of the peanuts would just move and stick on something else. When he emerged from his office about an hour later, he was covered head to toe in peanuts.

The next year we completely switched the contents of his office with another manager's office down the hall. When he came in to the office that morning and questioned what happened to his office, everyone acted like he had obviously lost his mind and reminded him that his office was down the hall.

The best prank is having a best friend and brother in-law how both have birthdays tomorrow....see they are "b*tt" of the joke.

I always like to tell my husband....honey I am pregnant!

The best prank I've every seen was pulled off by the office where my best friend works. All the girls in the office rented a limo to come and get them from the office in the morning - they have a lottery pool every week, and when the limo arrived, they all walked into the boss's office, told him they won the lottery and they were all quitting! They all walked out and got in the limo and drove off! They had the limo driver go around the block and then drop them back off at the office so they could go back in and say "April Fools!" He was in such a panic he hadn't even called his supervisor yet!!

You should not have asked about April Fool's pranks! I have pretty much always been the 'prankstee.' This was no more apparent than what my now almost 30 year old daughter did to me when she was 13 years old.

It was 'Doctor Day.' The one day every year when I took a day off from work and took the kids out of school for the day and we hit all the doctors and dentists and orthodontist all in one day! Oh...the kids loved it! As it turned out...this particular year...it was April 1st and it was a Monday.

We were at the Pediatrician's office...a great guy...the kids loved him. After giving my daughter her check-up the Dr. asked (as he always did) was there anything she wanted to talk about...privately? I started to leave the room. She said...well...maybe Mom should stay. Then, her lips started quivering and her eyes welled up and she asked very quietly, "What do we do if I'm pregnant?"

Well! I'm not sure what happened first...but I do remember thinking to myself...Oh My God!! She has just come back from a Leadership Training Week through the auspices of the School System and she had spent all that time with all these other kids and OH MY GOD!!!! OH MY GOD!! OH MY GOD!!!

So, she's crying...the Dr. is stone still and I am trying to stand up! Then she says: April Fool!!

(Personally, I have no doubt that any jury in the land would have considered any act I did as justifiable...even HOMICIDE!)

Well...the Dr. and I finally started to breathe and realized she had PLAYED us! I don't think I spoke to my daughter the rest of the day...but we have since put it behind us.

For all these years (almost 17 years!), I have been threatening to get back at her. I have not been able to come up with anything...but I think I have it this year!

My daughter is living with my now...trying to save for a house. She knows that 9 of us at work play the MD Lottery every week. I told her that if I win, I would give her $$ for her downpayment.

Of course, being almost 30 years old, and living w/Mom is not exactly where she wanted to be at this point in her life...so she is hoping I win and she can get out!

I'm tempted to tell her we won!! Then...April Fools!! Do you think this is too cruel???

1. Bringing in a cakepan (with a lid on it) and only having an "April Fools" note on the inside of the pan. 2. Taping down the disconnect button of someone's telephone so when they pick up a call, the phone still rings.

We had a salesman who always polished his shoes in his office before making a sales call. He got black stains all over his new carpeting. I prepared a memo from "facilities management" chastising him for the stains and suggested that they would have to seal his office and use toxic chemicals to remove the stains. If that didn't work they would have to recarpet the entire office. I left the memo for him one night taped to this computer monitor. The next morning, needless to say, I got the reaction I was hoping for.

I am more likely to be the prankster. Many years ago I worked at a branch of a small savings and loan, the manager of which was, by my diagnosis, afflicted by an obsessive compulsive disorder. He had a routine of coming out of his office at 4:45 each day, looking at the clock on the lobby wall and stating the obvious fact that we should make preparations for closing at 5:00. He would then return exactly 15 minutes later, look at the clock on the lobby wall (on his way to the door) and lock the front door, officially closing the branch for the day. One April Fool's Day, we set the time up 15 minutes on the lobby clock and waited for the predictable results. The manager came out of his office, looked at the clock and came completely unglued . . . rushed to the door with that "deer in the headlights" look on his face, all the while exclaiming how he just couldn't understand how he could be so off schedule! Of course, at that point, we admitted to our trick and he was a very good sport about it. We were just lucky that a customer wasn't present at the time!

I am often taken too seriously at work so I am especially well suited to be the prankster. Nobody suspects me, except those who have been past victims. The KISS principle always rules when it comes to pranks. I first find the number to the local zoo. I then craft a unique message for my target. Last year my administrative assistant was asked to set up a conference call with Mr. Lyon at 555-ZOOO. Embellish the request with particulars to make it seem real, like "you must contact him today before noon since he will be leaving town... avoid setting it up for late in the day Friday." Then sit back and keep an ear open. She calls, asks for Mr. Lyon, then a pause and I form a grinch-like smile as I imagine the receptionist informing her that she is calling the zoo and asking for Mr. Lyon. I then hear, "Oh my G*D, I can't believe...." The zoo prank works real well for business development and sales types just form it into a potential business contact or lead....

A couple April Fools' Days ago, I came in early and removed the "ball" inside the mouse on each of my staff's computers. I placed the ball in their coffee cup (for the ones I knew were coffee addicts) or on their keyboard or phone in plain sight. After the third person called the Help Desk, I decided that either my staff wasn't very observant, or very reliant on our efficient Help Desk. I have stopped playing office pranks - some people just don't have a sense of humor anymore.

I'm equally prankster and prankstee. The best April Fool's prank occurred when I was teaching in a jr. high school. When I opened the door and entered my home room, I discovered that my home room students had placed my desk on top of a 10 foot high cabinet/closet that was built into a front corner of the room. I simply sat in the chair that had been left as if nothing had happened and after a few minutes started laughing along with the kids!

Our April fool's pranks were played on our boss. Six of us all report to the same manager of benefits.

At the same exact time on April 1st, all 6 of us sent separate e-mails to our boss asking to take the same block of vacation days.

Pretty lame for a bunch of pension nerds.

Thanks for making the daily Plan Sponsor articles so interesting and informative. It is usually the first e-mail I open each work day! It goes well with my morning cup of coffee!

I'm definitely the prankster! The best (might should be defined as the worst) April Fool's Day prank I have played was when I put signs up everywhere in the 12 story building we worked in that said it was my boss's birthday (which it wasn't) and stated he was about five years older than he really was. The signs told everyone to stop by the office and wish him happy birthday. He had many well wishers come by that day, some even with gifts! With a smile, he threatened to fire me.

I would say I tend to be the prankster. Last year, we had several people leave in the first few months of the year, which had left our department considerably short-staffed. As a joke, a co-worker and I typed up a resignation letter from both of us and gave it to our boss first thing in the morning. My co-worker and I gave Oscar performances and our boss totally took us serious, to the point that she was shaking and her eyes were watering. At that point, we thought it best that we let her know it was an April Fool's joke. After she calmed down, our boss said that she wished she had remembered that it was April Fool's day and accepted our resignation, so that the joke would have been on us 🙂

I am more likely to be the prankster, in fact I have a reputation for it, which got me into some trouble. The best prank in my office was when two co-workers "kidnapped" a very ugly stuffed flamingo from another co-worker. The flamingo was a gift from a white-elephant party with a colorful history. The kidnappers sent ransom notes with pictures showing the flamingo blind-folded and tied to a radiator, another with the flamingo about to be run down by a car, etc. The anguished owner of the flamingo was very sure I was the perpetrator of this practical joke. She was so sure that she arranged for a police officer friend to come to our office and interrogate me! The flamingo was eventually released unharmed.

Many years ago I worked for a brokerage firm. When a new broker was hired on he or she had to make certain new account goals by their six month anniversary or they would be terminated.

This one new trainee had been struggling. But on March 31st he opened up the final account to reach (he thought) his goal and left early that day to celebrate.

Well, since the stars had lined up so propitiously and this new trainee's anniversary just happened to be April 2nd we thought, hey, just in time…

And of course, this was the same guy that fell for the phone message slip asking him to call "Mr. Lyon" and had the number for our local zoo.

So we dummied up what looked like a wired message from the home office, dated April 1 naturally (this was in the days way, way before e-mail.)

It basically said, "we checked our records and you're one short and today"s the deadline and we're very concerned, yaada, yada, yada..." Then we just stuck it in his mailbox and waited for the next morning.

We did let him off the hook by mid-morning, but not before we all had a chance to stop by while he was rummaging through all his records trying to figure it out.

Looking back on it, it was probably kind of mean, but hey, those were the frat house days in the brokerage business.

As employees of a large Clinic/Hospital we park several blocks away and are shuttled to and from our offices by a bus. Several years ago I received a telephone call and the gentlemen on the other end identified himself as hospital security. They asked me if I drove a 2001 white Bonneville and recited the license number to me - which I responded "yes". They asked me to "not be alarmed, but they would need me car keys down at the parking lot as soon as possible". Seems a vagrant, and his dog, chose my car to take a nap in and was sound asleep with the doors locked. They were at my car and needing to get in. I quickly grabbed my keys and headed to the shuttle bus for the parking lot. Half way there it dawned on me what day it was - and of course, my car was empty.

Several years ago my wife talked one of my employees into unscrewing the mouth piece on my office phone, insert a slice of onion, and replace the mouth piece. Then she phoned me stating "your breath is really bad!!" and after some mental gymnastics on my part, she said "April fools" and proudly explained what she had orchestrated. We're still married, but this was only one of many pranks she has played on me, and I often sleep with one eye open.

I used to work an evening shift many years ago and thought it would be brilliant to swap the men's and ladies bathroom keys. You should have seen the looks on their faces.

I'm more likely to be the prankster. However, I have been on the end of a prank that was even better than the prankster thought it would be. This is one of those things that gets more embarrassing with time because of what I now do for a living...

I went to school in Washington DC, moved home to Pennsylvania, then subsequently moved to Florida. While in Pennsylvania I enrolled in a 401k plan for the first time. At that point I had no experience with any type of DC or DB plan and did not know anything about how they operated. When I moved to Florida I had only been contributing for a few months so I had a very low balance. However, since I was broke that money seemed like a million dollars. So in October of the year I moved I cashed out my balance.

I subsequently started working as an assistant in a retirement plans department for a company in Florida. This is when I started learning about the ins and outs of DC plans. One thing I noticed at year end was a lot of activity involving 1099 forms which were a novelty to me at that time. I really had no idea what they were for, I just knew we were sending them out.

Come late January of the following year I gathered my W-2s and filed my taxes via Telefile just as I had always done. About 2 weeks later I received a 1099-R in the mail which I hadn't been expecting since till that point I still had no concept that cashing out my 401k balance would mean that I'd be getting one.

Over the next few weeks I spent at least 12 hours calling the IRS "help" line trying to get someone to tell me how to amend a return that was filed over the phone. No one was able to help me.

Not knowing any of this, a friend of mine from DC called me at work. I should say that although he had a reputation for jokes I had no idea he had my work number. He left me a message saying that he was so-and-so from the IRS and he had some serious concerns about my return. The number he left had a DC area code. To say that I started having a panic attack was an understatement. I had visions of audits dancing in my head. It wasn't until I called the number back and the receptionist at his law firm answered that I figured out who it really was. The poor guy - he thought he was just being silly and he almost sent me to the hospital!

My poor brother had the misfortune of being born on April 1. The best prank ever played on him was when my mother turned over a cake pan and frosted it and presented it as his birthday cake. He was on his way to get the hacksaw when she stopped him!

The best workplace prank I ever encountered was not on April Fool's. I used to work at a firm where one individual always came and went by the back door, thinking that no one else every noticed that he came in late and left early. One year, a manager prepared a memo to his boss suggesting that everyone be given Columbus Day off, which had never before been a company holiday. The boss wrote his approval on it and everyone else initialed it as if it had been circulated throughout the office. Before the individual in question came in on Columbus Day, the memo with all the initials was left in his in basket. When he arrived (late, as usual) he read the memo and stormed into his manager's office demanding to know why he was not informed of the holiday in a timely manner, failing to notice that his manager and everyone else were hard at work on a "holiday".

Over the next few weeks I spent at least 12 hours calling the IRS "help" line trying to get someone to tell me how to amend a return that was filed over the phone. No one was able to help me.