New Hire Frogs, Breaking News Gods, and the Wall of Same

October 24, 2023 10:39 AM

In another set of Stories From The Readership at Ask A Manager, site owner Alison Green asked for tales of odd office traditions, resulting in tales of office blankets, epic snack battles, and the monthly Office Space printer scene re-enactment. (SLAsk A Manager)
posted by NoxAeternum (21 comments total)

In my job before this one, we got a letter from the public that mentioned a person being a 'copyright hedgehog' and everyone spent months debating what, exactly, that might mean.[*] After that, every time we had an employee event, hedgehog themed things would show up. Hedgehog plushies in the gift exchange, hedgehog cheeseballs at the potluck, hedgehog chocolates at team meetings, etc.

Eventually someone with a humanities degree showed up and told us about the Hedgehog and the Fox.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:04 AM on October 24, 2023 [13 favorites]

This is not my story, it's a friend's, but I love it so I hope he won't mind my sharing. He was working as a senior Art Director at a creative ad agency. A good friend of his joined as a new hire, so he set up a prank: When the new guy first arrived, an assistant showed him to a large empty office and told him that it would be his, and that there would be a $7500 budget for office furniture - ideally he wouldn't go that high, but if he could justify it, they'd probably okay it. She also said that his lunches would be comped, and she would bring him a special menu book to choose from (this was before cell phones). Now to the relevant bit. After he had some time settling in to his new office, he started seeing a couple of people walking past his office door in leopard print robes. Eventually my friend and another worker came in, wearing the robes. They told him they were the agency's "Creative Robes." which creatives wore when they were concepting, so the rest of the agency would know to give them space to think without being interrupted. They called to the assistant to bring him one, since there was about to be a creative briefing. They did, and he put it on. Then they went to the meeting. A few minutes before it started, my friend left the room. Then the other creative guy who was with him, leaving the new hire guy alone in the meeting with the rest of the team, and the only one wearing a robe. Just before the meeting started, the CCO came in, took one look at the new guy wearing a leopard print bathrobe over his clothes and said, "What the hell are you wearing?" At which point my friend came in and revealed the joke. Or at least the robe part of the joke.

It took the rest of the day for him to realize that no, he wasn't getting an office, and there was no furniture budget, and he had to get his own lunches. But the robes, which had actually been leftover props from a shoot, still surfaced in his cubicle from time to time before a big meeting.
posted by Mchelly at 11:19 AM on October 24, 2023 [9 favorites]

I worked at a place years ago where most ( all?) of the members of one particular department kept tarantulas on their desks. Not stuffed ones, live ones. In little tanks and all that. I'm a live-and-let-live sort of person as regards critters, but I'm not a huge fan of tarantulas and mentioned this to my manager in passing one day. He told me something like "you'd better not let anyone know you don't like them, or they'll find a way to get one on your desk." (we worked in a different department, but I had to transit the tarantula area semi-regularly). I told him that if I found any trace of tarantula on or near my desk, I'd be coming back the next day with a can of Raid.

I didn't stay at that gig terribly long - only a few months at the height of the first dot-com boom in the 00s. Even so, that's not even the weirdest thing about that particular place. My mind still boggles at it tbh.
posted by jquinby at 1:10 PM on October 24, 2023 [5 favorites]

I am afraid my workplace or at least my department doesn't quite have enough psychological safety to be silly with each other en masse, but I hope to be there someday. I've at least shared this article to our Teams. Our registrar's office is the shining exemplar of this--for example they go all out for Halloween and decorate their basement office according to a secret theme every year, only to be revealed the day of, and have candy and hot dogs for all visitors. Though I heard this year the Natural Sciences department is also decorating!
posted by Tesseractive at 1:37 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I loved the yarn example in this one. It was heartening.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:44 PM on October 24, 2023 [6 favorites]

Our office's weird white elephant thing for about 15 years were the Fur Earrings! Literally the ugliest things, they were essentially domed plastic with a lush fur covering, about an inch across...so horrid, yet hilarious every year.
posted by tristeza at 2:18 PM on October 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

At a former workplace, there were always work drinks from 4pm on a Friday, and in the interests of being responsible, drinks came with snacks. We started baking bread for Beer O'Clock, organised through an IRC channel called #bakery. In those pre-cloud days, the server room was a nice warm place for dough to rise. This practice lasted several years, long after the first person to do it had moved on.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:47 PM on October 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

A team I used to manage had a smurf stuffed toy that got taken on the road whenever someone was going somewhere unusual or noteworthy or just because nobody else was taking him anywhere at the time. Photos of the smurf on the road were required and posted to the team Intranet on return. Another team in a different office decided that was a good idea and got themselves a stuffed wombat (I think) to do the same thing. Unsurprisingly, this turned into people from either team trying to kidnap the other's mascot whenever they were in the other team's office (offices were all in different states) and then taking both mascots on various adventures where the kidnapped mascot was photographed in embarrassing positions/places and appropriate ransom notes were posted on the Intranet.

The same workplace did have a deep divide over the issue of Christmas decorations and battle lines were drawn yearly between Christmas pods and 'bah humbug' pods. While there was general agreement that decorations were not to exceed the boundaries of any pod and were under no circumstances to stray into any other pod, this agreement regularly needed to be supplemented with lines of masking tape on the carpet and a pair of scissors to trim back any excess decorations. Decorating and enforcing of decoration limits were all done well outside work hours and never when anyone else was present. This part was never discussed, it just evolved.
posted by dg at 8:06 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Up until the early 2000's my school had a frozen margarita machine in the teacher's lounge. It sat empty except for payday Fridays when each team would take turns buying a bottle and some mix and the teachers would enjoy a margarita in the courtyard after the kids had gone home. Something something state law something something risk management and it no longer exists.
posted by nestor_makhno at 9:19 PM on October 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

When I worked in England, there was a tradition / competition of sending the office the most boring holiday postcard.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:43 AM on October 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

At one of my former workplaces there was the standard coffee station with a pot of regular coffee a pot of decaf and a little rack on the side with sugar, stirrers and packets of hot chocolate (the machine could also dispense plain old hot water.) There was no refrigerator so the only lightener was some awful generic artificial creamer powder. I took to using the hot chocolate powder to make "mocha" but a whole packet was too much. I hated the waste but also did not want to look like I was leaving trash around, so I started folding the remaining half-packets, closing them with a small binder clip, and leaving them neatly by the rack so I could use the rest on my next coffee break. Apparently, some other people picked up the habit and I would often either find a packet I left gone and the binder clip on the side of the sugar rack or a half-packet left precisely folded and clipped when I knew I had not left one. I'm not aware that there was ever any actual conversation, it just became an understood ritual of How Sharing Half Packets of Hot Chocolate Powder Is Done.
posted by Karmakaze at 5:49 AM on October 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

We used to have a Yankee swap at our annual holiday party. The company bought all the gifts, which was awesome. To make it more fun, no one could unwrap anything until all the swapping had been performed. This allowed for all sorts of fun subterfuge. Members of the admin team, who purchased and wrapped all the gifts, would deliberately disguise things--i.e. an obvious looking "bottle" might be a bottle-shaped package of candy while a nondescript box might be weighted down with rocks. People picking gifts off the table might pretend that an object was heavier or lighter than the shape of the package implied, and everyone would give off so many fake tells when someone was surveying the room for what to swap for.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:04 AM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

The parrots for peace lady
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:13 AM on October 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

As an intern I once had some fun with a brand-new color office laser printer. To cut costs, the company had gotten rid of the weekly Poland Springs delivery. They replaced it with a water cooler that hooked up to the tap and was otherwise indistinguishable from a normal water cooler. As there were very vocal complaints about this, I took it upon myself to hastily put together a logo for a fake springwater company, printed it out, and stuck it on the bottle. Rather coincidentally, the complaints about the water stopped.

I was told months after I left that the company had trouble finding invoices for "All Natural Quabbin Spring Water"
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:03 AM on October 25, 2023 [10 favorites]

Nothing has ever made me gladder to have worked exclusively from home lo these past 13ish years
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:21 AM on October 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

In grad school (does that count as a workplace? This feels like a workplace story) a bunch of us would have brown-bag lunch together after seminar. For a group eating on a pretty minimal budget, most of us knew our way around a kitchen and ate pretty well. Lots of homemade leftovers, spicy global peasant food, that sort of thing. Inevitably, no matter what you made, you'd end up coveting something somebody else had. Bites were shared, and occasionally meals were entirely swapped. Food just tastes better when it's a surprise and someone else made it. Thus, Secret Sandwich was born: like Secret Santa, but for lunch. Once a week we'd draw a name, and make a lunch (sandwich or otherwise) for that person. We made a list of likes, dislikes, allergies, and would try to make them happy.

It got competitive, and started escalating. Lunches soon involved multiple courses. Most of us put more thought and effort into making Secret Sandwich than any other meal we'd make all week, despite not planning to eat any of it ourselves. I once brought a camp stove and a bottle of rum to campus so I could flambé the bananas for my recipient's Bananas Foster dessert course. This was all very good and normal and nobody complained. Come to think of it, maybe grad school isn't that much like a workplace.
posted by dr. boludo at 7:42 AM on October 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

At my last job, I started my own tradition - I got the job offer the day before I was going to be heading to New Orleans for my 50th Birthday (same day as Mardi Gras), so I said I would start upon my return and got to enjoy my vacation with a very light heart. On each Mardi Gras after that I personally threw and paid for my own Mardi Gras observance to share with the staff; I'd decorate the door to my office and bring in a crapton of beads to toss around to everyone, I'd play zydeco music, and I'd order a couple of Gambino's King Cakes for the staff, and also got a couple of fun tchochkes to give out to the people who got the baby.

...I was laid off in July and I'm gonna miss that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:48 AM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Comment and response removed. Let's avoid sharing the pranks that purposely caused someone to violate the tenets of their religion
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:55 AM on October 25, 2023

This almost makes me nostalgic for working in an office. Anywho.. off to nap before the All Hands
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 11:56 AM on October 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mchelly: I'm sorry, but that's cruel and demeaning. What in the world possessed these people to do that to a new person? A workplace, a place where you're contractually obliged to stay at least 8h per workday, should not be a place for pranks.
posted by gakiko at 5:25 AM on October 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Totally get that, but this was a good friend and they had / have a history of pranking each other. He'd never do it with a regular hire. Advertising creative departments at the time could be a little like preschool.
posted by Mchelly at 7:36 AM on October 26, 2023