ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE…
Or, On the Lost Art of Office Pranks
A few weeks ago, a short interlude in a long, silent Friday afternoon in a normally ‘buzzing’ editorial department got me reminiscing.
Boredom had clearly got the better of Tom and Parisa, two of our young editors, and they had crafted their own internal ‘landline’, two brown paper cups attached by a ten-metre length of string, down which they were relaying important messages: ‘Parisa to Tom, do you read me? Kettle’s boiling. Over and out.’ I had a go too, and tried to link up an extension, but the physics of the string didn’t work when you tried it from my office round the corner.
Oh, how we laughed. And yes, I suppose you had to be there. And there wasn’t much else going on. At least not until the apparatus had to be dismantled after Dan Franklin had a health and safety moment when he tripped on the string.
When I worked as a young publicity manager at Victor Gollancz in the late eighties, all we ever seemed to do was to get up to tricks. Office pranks of no little complexity were our main entertainment.
First there was the office ‘merkin’ – a most unpleasant object in the shape of a false beard and moustache combo. It used to hang from the corner of Mark Hutchinson’s partition, and gosh, what japes we had with that horrid smelly, hairy, gingery thing, me, Mark, our boss, the inimitable Adrienne Maguire and Sue Gilkes who was the department assistant. Then there was the dirty old mac, also housed around Mark’s desk.
The best ever was when Mark, bored obviously, donned said merkin and mac, along with a big woollen scarf and hat of some kind, exited from the back entrance of the building on to Maiden Lane, strolled round to the main reception on Henrietta Street and announced to the doughty receptionist, Levancia, that he was some Mr Carmichael, say, a visiting Gollancz children’s author, whom we knew no one in history had ever laid eyes on, since communicating with him, as we did in those days, was only ever by letter. Oh, how we cried with laughter when fifteen minutes later, Chris Kloet, the children’s publisher brought the heavily disguised Mr Carmichael in to the department looking for Mark in order to make their introduction…
Yes, the merkin came in handy, and when worn helped us to get through interminable calls to irate or difficult authors. I seem to remember that Mark liked to wear it when he rang Terry Pratchett, not because Sir Terry was difficult or irate, but just because it made Mark and the rest of us smile.
My particular talent was mimicry. I did an excellent Maris Ross, Book Reviewer on Publishing News, and an almost pitch perfect Barbara Large, director of the Southampton Writers Festival. Barbara’s defining phrase, when inviting authors to Southampton, was, ‘We’d so love Nina/Terry/Lionel to come join our little family.’ It was always amusing to ring Sue up from another office and plague her with complicated requests from Maris or Barbara.
But my pièce de resistance was Wilma Paterson, the Scottish author of Salmon and Women. If I say so myself, it was almost as though I could channel Wilma, getting every nuance of her linguistic tics and phrases. I still give a little internal chuckle as I remember the time I rang up Michael Goff, the Gollancz sales director, and we, Wilma and I, berated him for a good 20 minutes about the lack of copies in the Perth branch of WH Smith! And how he was sweating and red-faced when I casually dropped by his desk a few minutes later to tell him I had just had Wilma on the phone, and enquired whether he, perchance, had heard from her also…
Later, when working at Bloomsbury, I remember the classic ‘Rosenberg vs Hawking’ incident. The design boys, William Webb and Nathan Burton (aka The Buron) along with Colin Midson, had discovered that if you put the Mac on some kind of speech function, the voice it spoke in was a pretty good approximation of Stephen Hawking.
Bill Swainson had just published a book with the title A Brief History of Tomorrow, and Anya Rosenberg was handling the publicity. So, they rang her up, and got the computer to tell her that it was Stephen Hawking calling, and he was really very upset at this blatant passing-off of his brand and title, that he had instructed his lawyers on the matter and that Bloomsbury and Anya would be hearing from them within two hours. Brilliant. Almost everyone in Bloomsbury management was at a conference of some kind, so it was quite cruel really, and Anya’s boss Katie was primed for her panicked call. The moment when Webb, Buron and Midson finally ‘fessed up to her that it was a prank was horribly, horribly funny. I can’t remember if anyone was hit...
(An aside, another tear-inducing moment: listening as Anya rang up the postroom and asked them ‘to take away this really ugly big white box under my desk. I keep hitting my legs on it.’ We explained to her that the big white box was her hard drive.)
Aaaah. The good old days. Vive le office prank!
Please comment and tell us about your greatest and worst office pranks! The most laugh out loud prank will win two hilarious (and useful) Square Peg books - The Hungover Cookbook and Texts from Last Night. Check in to the blog at noon on Friday 24th September when the winner will be announced.