#45 Office Pranks, What are your favorites?
Aug 5th, 2009 by pfi
A major pastime of accountants is office pranks. While this post can’t do justice to all the great pranks out there, it can serve as a basic primer.
As seen on The Office, office pranks are a daily reality that make the work environment tolerable. It can be argued that more energy goes into planning pranks than getting workpapers done.
Office pranks are especially fitting as everybody can make a great target. Accountants tend to be especially mean to new hires who are eager to help out and make a good first impression. You can tell an accountant has a good working relationship when they pull pranks on their own boss (and vice-versa).
Pranks range from harmless to malicious. An example of a harmless prank would be getting someone to fax you over a whole ream of paper because you “ran out.”
Accountants can turn everyday busy work into great pranks. Having someone foot a schedule that can’t be footed is a great one. This is an especially good prank when the work returns w/o/e and accountants discover they have a ghost ticker on their hands.
The general rule is that the more people involved in a prank, the better the prank. This is due to the strong negative correlation between productivity and enjoyment (i.e. as less work is done, the better time everyone has).
If you’re working with accountants for the first time, you need to be wary. Another tip, if the accountants you work with consistently pull great pranks, you know you’re working with top tier people.
Post your favorite pranks in the comments.
My first busy season job on a public client was me as the only female with six males. The two seniors on the engagement convinced me that seniors had the ability on sametime to see when their staff (or anyone that was connected to the same router) sent a sametime. They involved a team member that was sick as well as other people in the office. When someone from outside the audit room sent me a sametime, I was afraid to respond, but if they were in on the prank and I did respond, they would tell my senior who would in turn look up from his computer and say, Anna, tell so and so to leave you alone. Needless to say I didn’t chat for a whole two weeks and was seriously jaded. They loved it, and even brought the partner in on it.
I heard a story from a co-worker about when she started. The senior on the team asked her to stop by the office and pick up some tickmarks. He told her that she should ask our office managing partner for them since “he has the good ones.” So she shows up at the office and asks him for the good tickmarks. She said she was pretty embarassed when he set her straight and hasn’t forgiven the senior yet.
My first client as an intern at a Big 4 was a real estate company, so, of course, they owned properties. My senior somehow convinced me that a dirt lot next to the client’s office building is owned by the client and we need to know how much space there is so that we can verify how much the dirt lot is worth. The senior gives me a mesuring tape and asks me to go downstairs to the lot and start measuring. So I did, while my senior and rest of the team looked at me from up in the audit room’s window and took pictures of me doing the silliest thing in the whole world.
Another one is of my friend. His team was on the prank as well as the client. His team convinced him that the client is all about Halloween and everyone dresses up for the occasion. To make it sounds legit, his team actually started a “sign up” sheet so everyone writes down what they were going to dress up as for Halloween. So, finally, when the “sign up” sheet circulated to my friend, he signed up that he will dress up as Fred from Flintstones. Needless to say, my friend was the only one that came into the client’s office on Halloween with a costume…as Fred. He wore that for the rest of day at the client.
I used to work for a big 4 firm and the client had a guest book where all guests had to sign in. I asked my senior if we need to sign in and he said no. Later, we got a whole new team. The partner called me in and said we have a big independence issue since I have never signed in and as such appear as a client’s employee or at least want to be one. He even should a few pages from the guest book, where I saw some of the team members sign ins. When I walked out, everyone was laughing.
Turns out, they were signing not to just play a prank but because they thought they had to. The controller player a joke on the new team members. Only the partner and I never signed in and someone noticed that. Since I was new and did something correctly, they decided to get back at me, and partner participated as well
My coworker had to count ladies going in and out of the bathroom to measure ‘bathroom efficiency’.
I was staffed on a project for about 3 months at a client in Redmond, WA. It was about 2 months in and we had become quite the close knit team. At the start of the engagment I was told that the client’s data center was cooled by a stream that flowed through the campus. I thought to myself, “wow that is a pretty cool idea to help them go green”. Little did I know that I would soon be the victim of a prank so hilarious it could only be imagined as something off of ‘Punk’d’. My day had finally come when I would have to measure the the flow of the stream as well as the tempature. This was to ensure that the data center was cooled properly and that everything was tip-top and in shape. So, me being the staff that I was went out and measured the flow with some crazy formula that I was givin. I took the temp of the stream and created a workpaper that I thought was revolutionary. To me this would be my shining moment to prove that I could perform a new type of “green” control. Well to my teams amusement, they took pictures of me in progress as well as pictures afterwards. I thought it was to document how good of a job I did. It was all a joke and my work/pictures were sent to everyone in the office for them to get a good laugh. All in all I even got a good laugh and it has givin me some good ideas to help carry the tourch for this type of prank. If you get me as a senior on an engagment…watch your back!
A partner I work for told me a story of when he started as an intern at a Big 4 firm. They told him to scan some documentation submitted by the client, but that the copier was voice-activated. As he gave the initial command, obviously nothing happens. The senior told him he wasn’t speaking loudly enough and eventually had him yelling commands at the copying machine. Needless to say, he has no quams getting involved in a good office prank.
And it’s always fun to have the new staff ask the client for a list of their unrecorded liabilities…
We got my boss this year for April 1st by telling him our entire database had been totally erased. “WE LOST EVERYTHING!” said our technical support team “AND NO ONE CAN ACCESS THEIR INFORMATION!!!”
Of course, we claimed that the backups had also been destroyed and it was hopeless.
While we risked giving our CEO a heart attack, it was totally worth it. FINALLY, after THREE YEARS of April Fool’s pranks we got him.
Yay!
When I started with Deloitte (back in the early 80’s), the random start number for samples was selected by using the serial number off a dollar bill. Several new hires lost cash after being told by their senior that they had to staple the actual bill to the work paper to prove they weren’t using the same “random” number over and over.
*I* never did that when I got to be a senior. I waited until I was a manager….
A simple one is hitting CTRL+ALT+the down key when someone leaves the room. It flips the screen upside down. Our firm has started installing Vista on our laptops so when an associate had it newly installed, we flipped his screen while he was gone and blamed Vista for the new malfunction.
FYI CTRL+ALT+up key flips it back.
This Big 4 prank-gone-bad became a legend. When a staff thought it would be funny to include a jpeg picture of David Hasselhoff in an Excel workpaper, he counted on one of the many review levels to find it and remove it. It was never found….. until the PCAOB did their review.
It always helps to have an accomplice that nobody would ever suspect of pulling pranks. We had a manager in my office who was notorious for pranks, so one time he enlisted the help of a girl who was really sweet and nobody ever thought she would do something like a prank. The manager sent an email out to the entire audit department with a file which when installed on a computer would cause the computer to beep incessantly and it was almost impossible to get it to stop. He disguised it by saying the file was some sort of patch that would help with something. Coworkers were suspicious when they got the email, but then this girl sent a reply-all email saying “Thanks for the patch. It helped so much!” So then everybody thought it was legit and went ahead and downloaded the file. The beeping was pretty embarassing for those people working out at the client.
I once had a new hire test the reasonableness of employee compensation expense by performing several analytics, including the computation of average pay per employee. I then told him that he could not rely on the number of employees given to him by the client and had to test the reasonableness of this number by counting cars in the parking lot. Of course the rest of the team watched him and took pictures while he performed his “test”.
Some favs:
– When a staff is out of the room and forgets to lock their computer, take a screenshot, and then set it as the background. Make sure to remember to minimize the task bar at the bottom. They will think their laptop’s totally frozen.
– Tell the staff that we need to do a search for unrecorded shareholders. Give them a phone book, and have them make random calls to ask if the family owns any shares.
– Tell the staff that they need to record the make and model of cars in the parking lot, to make sure that their car is appropriate for their level of comp.
This one’s pretty low tech, but always a classic. Every time I left the audit room and forgot to lock my laptop, my coworkers would immediately jump on my PC and start sending IM’s and emails. They would always leave them open for me to read when I returned.
My favorite was when my senior manager got on my computer and started IMing all of my female contacts asking if they wanted to see a movie with me on Friday night.
When somebody is waiting for a fax to come into their RightFax, I’ll get some random papers laying around then have the last one say something to the effect of, “WAAAAAH! This isn’t a confirm. XOXO”
my cube mate printed out his state BAR profile and taped it to his file cabinent. We thought it was really weird. when he was on PTO, we re-created the attorney search, used PDF advanced editing features to make him disbarred. it took him a solid month or so to realize that he was disbarred in the state for impersonating a street mime!
We had a client that sold fertizer. The new junior on the job was always assigned to count inventory. Out the window you could see an enormous manure pile, at least ten feet high (which, although I suppose fertizer of a sort, really had nothing to do with the client’s business of selling chemicals – it belonged to the farm next door). Of course the junior did not know this – in fact they might have been told it was human waste the client was using to develop new products. The manager on the job (OK, me) handed the junior a steel pole with a flag on top, a pair of hip waders and told him to go to the top of the pile so that we could measure the depth for inventory purposes. Made him famous.
Back in the paper days the staff and senior thought it would be funny to put a Playboy centerfold in the workpapers for the Manager. He did think it was funny but forgot to pull it and delivered the files to the Partner. All three desperately tried to retrieve the files but the Partner had already begun his review. They received a review note “What audit evidence does this workpaper provide.”
Well, as for me, accounting services are all quite complicated and as we all know businesses are just very skeptic when it comes to looking for the right accountant that would perfectly suit their needs.
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Wait a minute – “as seen in The Office?” You’re taking that as an indication that accountants do pranks in the office? Sounds like they do, from the comments, but I’m not sure I’d use “The Office” as an example.
Just so you know, “The Office” really isn’t a reality show.
The faux conference call is always good. Two people pretend they are talking to a client on a conference call, then we bring in the victim. We tell them that “so and so” is on the phone and wants to know the answer to a difficult nonsensical technical question. They try to answer the question and after a while they catch on that no one is on the phone
I love to do prank at office, recently i switch job here i am not doing nay prank, but will do as time going on.
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