The divisional director (my boss's boss's boss)
sent a memo to everyone, in the typical "write it in Word, attach it to an email" style. At the bottom was a high-quality scanned image of his signature.

"That'll come in handy," I thought, and saved it to disk.

Two years later, on a slow Friday afternoon, I stumbled across that saved file again. It was the work of a moment to knock up and print a convincing-looking memo.

The memo said "You smell", and (just in case it wasn't obvious enough that it wasn't real) I put "P.S. Tee hee hee" after the signature.

I thought it best to send it to Bob, cos though I knew him well enough to know he had a good enough sense of humour, we weren't such close friends that I'd be the first culprit he'd think of as being behind the prank. Also he now worked on a different floor, so he'd probably be guessing for a good half an hour before he tracked it back to me.

I put the memo in an internal mail envelope, wrote Bob's name on it in disguised hand-writing and sent it.

"That'll brighten a dull Friday," I thought. How wrong I was.

Car-Sharing Steve told me Bob's reaction on the journey home. Unbeknownst to me, Bob had recently got quite chummy with said Divisional Director (he was just a man in the sky to most of us plebs), cos they were simultaneously buying property in France and so had plenty of tips to share.

On receiving the memo, Bob had walked straight to the DD's office and asked, "Did you send this?"

An investigation was launched; I came clean to Steve and Bob, who were good enough to cover for me. Had a pretty tense week though.
( teedyay, Thu 9 Aug 2007, 15:01, Reply)