Daft office pranks (part 1)

Childish tomfoolery around the office.

A prank involving the 'Auto Correct' feature found in Word.

I'm a big fan of funny pranks and tricks, and in fact devious tricks and deceptions feature in many of my books and short stories. Some of these fictional tricks takes place on a galactic scale, but other deceptions take place on a much smaller scale.

This week though, I'm going to highlight a real prank that I used to play when I worked in an office. It's a fairly straight forward prank which anyone with a basic level of proficiency in Microsoft Word will be able to play.

Anyway, one day a girl in the office had to leave her desk for a few moments, so I took quick advantage of her absence to set up the prank. For the purposes of the example I’ll call her Lisa, but that wasn’t her real name. (Her real name was Lesley). Anyway, while 'Lisa' was away I quickly went into Word on her PC and opened up the ‘Auto Correct’ feature (found in the ‘Tools’ tab).

For the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know, the Auto Correct feature is actually quite a useful tool in Word, whereby say for example if you type ‘yuo’ it will automatically correct this to ‘you’. Word comes preloaded with hundreds of the most common typing and spelling errors but if you make other typing errors on a regular basis then you can also add your own Auto Correct entries.

Anyway, while Lisa was away I quickly added a new Auto Correct entry so that from then on whenever Lisa typed the word ‘the’, Word would correct this to ‘Charles Fudgemuffin is really cool and I’m so jealous of him for being so much cooler than I am. This is definitely true, signed Lisa.’ *

* Please note, I didn’t actually type 'Charles Fudgemuffin' because I didn’t have a pen name at that stage. I actually typed my real name, which is Henry Floppybobble for anyone who’s interested.

Then the next time Lisa wrote a letter to an employee a look of confused bafflement appeared on her face as she noticed her letter read something along the lines of:

‘Dear Sir/Madam

Would you please complete and return - Charles Fudgemuffin is really cool and I’m so jealous of him for being so much cooler than I am. This is definitely true, signed Lisa - enclosed form to this office at your earliest convenience.

Yours Faithfully

Lisa’

Lisa obviously immediately realised that I must have had something to do with it, but that was okay because that was the whole point of the prank. When you play a joke on someone, it's just meant to be a laugh. You’re not meant to get anyone into trouble.

Bins, pictured yesterday.

For example, if I had fixed it so that every time she typed the word ‘the’, Auto Correct amended it to, ‘Hey, man! Do you think I care if your bins haven’t been collected for six weeks? I’m surprised you can even notice in any case, what with the usual stink that comes from your house!’ then that would no longer qualify as a funny prank. In those circumstances if Lisa hadn’t noticed the sneaky change and had sent the letter out then in those circumstances she could get into a lot of trouble so that would upgrade it from being a ‘funny prank’ to a ‘totally sly trick’.

Anyway, if you work in an office and you’re looking for pranks to play on your co-workers, then the Auto Correct feature found in Word is a useful tool worth knowing about to help you play a sneaky prank on someone. However, once again it should only ever be used for good natured tomfoolery, and never used in a way which could potentially cause upset or trouble.

You can find more office pranks at the links below:

Daft office pranks (part 2)

Daft office pranks (part 3)