Thursday, July 10, 2008

Jokes and Such At the Bank

If you’ve been following my posts this week you know that I filed for divorce in 1990, got my first ‘real job’ at a bank and started having fun with my co-workers.

There was a small group of people I worked with that seemed to have the same quirky sense of humor as me. Though we would kid around about some of the regular customers, the real fun started with the jokes and gags we played on each other.

Birthdays there were celebrated with a cake being bought by the bank and shared in the lunchroom. It was nice, but because they did it for everyone it became nothing special. After about a year of this, when one of my friends had a birthday coming up, I decided we needed to spice things up a bit. Her desk was next to mine in the center of the bank’s lobby and I thought it would be fun to decorate it. She was going to be leaving on a cruise the day after her birthday so I went with a tropical theme. I got permission to move the large plants around the lobby next to her desk. We had streamers, balloons, seashells and a small bucket of sand. It was funny to see the customer’s reactions to this decorated desk, but the reaction of my co-worker was better. Not to the streamers and such, but to the gifts we gave her. First I made her a bathing suit for her cruise. Chamois cloth for the bottoms and a coconut cut in half for the top, both being held together by leather cord. Have you ever sawed a coconut in half and drilled holes in it? Not an easy task. We also gave her a gift bag filled with goodies for her trip; suntan lotion, Dramamine, and condoms, in case she got lucky.

Another girl in my department was of small stature at 4’11”. About a month before her birthday, we started cutting the “Munchkin” labels from the boxes of Dunkin Donuts the bank would put out every Saturday for customers. We took the smallest of the labels and taped them to the tabs on all her file folders; the rest we distributed throughout the files in her drawers. The CFO brought in his kid’s booster seat and we put it on her chair. We replaced everything on her desk with miniatures; a tiny desk calendar and mini bank brochures made with the help of the copy machine, a smaller stapler and tape dispenser, and a toy phone. She laughed so hard I thought she would pee her pants. For about a month afterward she would occasionally find a “Munchkin” label she had missed and would get a smile…

Decorating each other’s desks was fun, but a good practical joke was better. My favorite was the blow up doll we got for the CFO. He kept on complaining that he needed his own personal secretary…so we got him one. We dressed it all the way down to the G-string underwear. After that he never complained to us about not having a secretary.

Lastly, I’ll share a time when I was the brunt of the joke. I had wanted to get a resume together but I wasn’t sure how to word it at the time. When I asked the bank president’s secretary for suggestions she offered to type it for me. The next morning the CFO sought me out and warned me about how the president had inadvertently seen my resume on her secretary’s computer screen. I went back to my desk not knowing what to expect. Was I going to be fired? It bothered me all morning. Just after noon the phone rang on my desk and my heart skipped a beat as I answered. I relaxed when I realized it was the secretary that sat directly across the lobby from me, the same one that had typed my resume. When I looked up in her direction I saw about eight other people standing behind her, all of them looking back at me and laughing. On my end you could hear the loud sigh of relief and then the wheels spinning in my head plotting my revenge…

3 comments:

Whitney said...

The munchkin thing cracks me up! Such a good idea! At my old job, three of us girls were ALWAYS playing pranks on eachother....so fun!

Unknown said...

Hi, Linda. Thanks for stopping by my place. I'll save the usual smart-ass, ribald, obscene and/or off-color comments I usually make for later. We don't know each other well enough for that, yet. But I've read back a couple of posts and I like what I've read, so, with your permission, I'll be back. Or without.

Anonymous said...

I am in awe of anyone who can neatly cut coconuts in half. You'd be really handy at a luau.