Some of my pranks have been fairly elaborate, but I like to think they are good-natured. My favorite involved a workplace with two managers who were very competitive about showing how classy they were. One form this took was in recruiting competing art collections for display in the lobby and public areas. (We actually had some rather good pieces for a while.) When a coworker and I discovered that the local dime store had actual Velvet Elvis paintings from Tijuana, we knew what we had to do.

We dummied up a wall plaque for it in the style of the other art installations, and announced that we would be having a small presentation after the weekly staff meeting. Everybody trooped out to the lobby where we had hung the painting and covered it with a cloth. We worked up a good speech about how inspiring it was to work in a place with so much art and how we wanted to give something back to the team, and finally we unveiled the Velvet Elvis.

The hardest part was not giving it away to anybody else, but that got a really big reaction at the unveiling. The painting stayed there for several years, though eventually it ended up in the restroom.