I am but lately come to the joys of pranking. During college my silly friends perpetrated many ingenious pranks, most of which involved rappelling off high buildings and stuffed gorillas, but I was never really involved. I don’t have good long-term planning skills, I don’t have much of an eye for design, and I am pretty poor in terms of stealth. I almost always fall down or walk right into the headlights or get recognized by some girls in my French class or something.
What it really boils down to, though, is that I don’t have much vision for a really good prank. I don’t know if I’m just oblivious to how certain types of architecture could be radically improved by the addition of a well placed banana, or if I am just lazy, or if I don’t own enough power tools to make such work feasible, or what, but I haven’t ever been able to do it. Just can’t see it. My life holds few distinctions, prank-wise.
So I was wary when my supervisor told us that she wanted to tinfoil our head honcho’s office. I thought it would be time-consuming and sort of silly, like oh ho HO! April Fool’s! Tee hee! I wasn’t too excited about staying late after work when I could have been returning my shower curtain at Target and listening to my French CDs, as previously planned. But my boss was so excited about the whole thing, and she’d spent a ridiculous amount of money on foil, and I’m not going to be working with these people for very much longer, so I decided to suck it up and be a good sport and play along.
For the record, we weren’t able to be as thorough as the original people who did this prank. We were only able to foil every book, journal, and stack of paper; the computer, CD player, fan, tennis racket, coffee maker, and phone; the desk drawers, floppy disks, arm chairs, watering can, and coffee mug. We foiled every individual piece of paper on the bulletin board, the diplomas, the clock, and the Persian rug. We foiled the pushpins, paper clips, and rubber bands. It took eight people three hours and two industrial sized rolls of Costco aluminum foil, and I don’t hesitate to inform you that it may be the best piece of artwork I have ever contributed to, and I am including the flower bra from Burning Man when I say that, as well as all the marble magnets I made with Sundry.
Foiling, I found, is a perfect combination of heavy industrial aesthetic and fine-tuned detail work. We started off just sort of randomly draping foil over stuff, but as we warmed to our work we started getting more focused and detailed, like wrapping the spokes on the arm chair, and the nameplate outside the door, and the lightswitch. I spent an enjoyable time on the fan, getting the texture of the grille thing just right. I started saying things like, “We really want to present a unified theme here, so we should definitely do the drawer handles.” I developed an ability to distinguish between types of foil, like heavy foil is good for big surfaces like shelves but the thinner stuff is ideal for stuff like post-its. We sustained a couple of foil –related injuries that made it all even more worth the effort.
It got very Zen in there somehow, as if we were little busy elves in a shoemaker’s shop, making sure everything was in place. You’d have thought we’d have been more boisterous than we were, but incredibly enough almost all our conversation was technical: “You’re going to want to smooth that out there.” “Wait! What about the window shade?” “Ooohh, good job capturing the texture on that binder clip.”
After we were done (the last item was the tricky Persian rug) we all went to dinner, and spent the whole time congratulating ourselves for the whole thing. Everything we looked at or touched, somehow, became a vehicle for more foil-related musings. Could we foil a bottle of soy sauce? How about a lighting fixture? An entire car? How much foil would that take?
This morning my boss came in and fired us all, and then went to find a digital camera so that he can put some pictures in the department newsletter. He was so proud. He kept telling us what a great job we did and asking us how much time and foil we spent. He said he likes it so much that he’s only going to unwrap stuff he needs (his computer monitor and schedule book, so far). I really hope that all my future pranks go as nicely as this one has.
