Go home, bunny!

June 1, 2009 1:35 PM

How do I send this bunny home?

Long story short, a friend of mine and I have been passing a small stuffed bunny toy back and forth for a few years now. He often returns the bunny by hiding it somewhere in my apartment when he visits. I just found the bunny a few days ago and I think it might've been here for a few months this time.

Now it's time for me to return the bunny and I need to come up with a funny way of doing so. I've seen this question about the lobster, but there are a few restrictions that rule out most of the ideas listed there. First, I don't have access to my friend's apartment and we rarely go over there. So, my options for returning the bunny are either to come up with an elaborate way to put it on his doorstep or in the bed of his pick-up truck. Second, I don't want to escalate things so much the he retaliates by, say, leaving a bunny on fire on my doorstep.

So, any suggestions for how to best return this bunny?

posted by shesbookish to grab bag (18 comments total)

Mail it certified / return receipt. He will have to sign for it to get it. Get an official looking box, with no sign of your name on it.
posted by Flood at 1:54 PM on June 1 [2 favorites]

Does he leave his truck unlocked? If so, go buy an old/cheap infant car seat at a thrift store and buckle up the bunny as a passenger in his truck.
posted by amyms at 2:01 PM on June 1 [1 favorite]

Hire a process server to "serve" him the bunny as if it were a summons.
posted by hamsterdam at 2:02 PM on June 1 [3 favorites]

We need more information. Do you two live close together? Do you socialize often? Do you visit each others' homes?

If you do live closely, keep the bunny in your purse or bag and excuse yourself to the bathroom. Take your purse with you like you would if you needed a tampon or something. Slip the bunny from your purse into the medicine cabinet or cabinet beneath the sink.
posted by onhazier at 2:02 PM on June 1

Buy a larger stuffed animal. Stuff the bunny inside of it.
posted by filmgeek at 2:07 PM on June 1 [10 favorites]

Mail it certified / return receipt. He will have to sign for it to get it. Get an official looking box, with no sign of your name on it.

This. But put a spring under the bunny so it pops out when he opens the box.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 2:16 PM on June 1 [2 favorites]

If you know his family, arrange to have an elder relative 'find' a mysterious box that was ment for him since before he was born.

Going off the excellent process server suggestion, there are lots of wacky message delivery places - clowns, burlesque, gorilla, maybe even the hot cops.
posted by anti social order at 2:17 PM on June 1 [3 favorites]

Compress it as much as possible, then wrap it in a brown paper bag and tie a ribbon to it and leave it hanging from his doorknob.

If that isn't elaborate enough, cover the paper bag package in duct tape.
posted by Night_owl at 2:17 PM on June 1

Enlist the nearest friendly neighbor to distract him for 30 seconds to urgently, I dunno, check to see if his ceiling is leaking. Plenty of time to stash the thing.
posted by zennie at 2:24 PM on June 1

If you can, put a costume on it of some sort. An inexpensive doll outfit / costume would make it... unique.
posted by GJSchaller at 2:26 PM on June 1

...Slip the bunny from your purse into [his] medicine cabinet or cabinet beneath the sink.

Or put it in a water-tight Ziploc bag and hide it in the tank area of his toilet.
posted by applemeat at 2:34 PM on June 1 [1 favorite]

Would his workplace be an option? Even enlisting someone to help?

With the truck... if the main idea is to have it go unnoticed for as long as possible, would there be a way of inconspicuously securing it to the truck so that it wouldn't be found until it next gets serviced / runs out of oil? (in a heat-resistant bag/container as appropriate).

Alternatively, could you deliver a clue to the whereabouts of the bunny to his apartment? One that may take him a while to figure out?
posted by ClarissaWAM at 3:30 PM on June 1

Attach it to the window of his truck's cab so that it is looking through the window at him when he looks into the rearview mirror.

I also like the idea of mailing it with a spring attached to the box so that it jumps out at him like a jack-in-the-box.

The car seat idea is funny but you'd have to have access to the inside of his truck cab and it doesn't sound like you do.

Attach it to the front grill of his truck so that it looks like he hit it.

Leave it on his porch in a basket like an abandoned infant. (include a tear stained and detailed note regarding care of bunny)

Hang it from a noose on his front porch. (might freak out the neighbors)

Beat him to the burning bunny gig.

You could make an elaborate treasure hunt complete with clues the bunnies location, with the first clue attached to his front door.

Ransom it!
posted by dchrssyr at 3:45 PM on June 1 [2 favorites]

Contrive to cook dinner at his apartment. Make something that uses a carrot or two, leaving the rest of the bag in the veggie crisper. When he's not looking, take out the rest of the carrots (or better, leave just a bit at the stem end of each) and leave the bunny, passed out next to the empty bag. Leave him grasping an opened package of antacids too, repenting for his carrot bender.
posted by dr. boludo at 3:55 PM on June 1 [3 favorites]

Follow up: does the bunny have a name? Once you've made the pass, you could send the bunny housewarming presents at his new home, to arrive in his name: Amazon.com gifts of appropriate literature (Watership Down, the Velveteen Rabbit), subscriptions to seed catalogs or gardening magazines...

also, bunnies breed like...bunnies. If you could somehow find an identical bunny to be its mate, next time drop them both, and follow a day later by a dozen or so tiny plastic bunnies.
posted by dr. boludo at 3:59 PM on June 1 [1 favorite]

If the apartment is not on the ground floor, find a way to attach the bunny to a window of his unit that is not easily accessible. I did something similar by going to the roof of a building and suspending a "passed back and forth" object outside of the office window of my recipient. I had to calculate the distance from the roof to the window and lower the object down so that it hovered just outside the window.

If the apartment is on the ground floor, I like the suggestion made earlier of a mysterious package that your friend has inherited. There'd need to be some fake legal mumbo jumbo (the more complex the better).

Perhaps renting a storage unit and putting several boxes within, one of which has the bunny. The storage unit calls saying that the contents of the unit was willed to him by a mysterious anonymous benefactor.

You could take the friend out to dinner and pre-arrange to have the waitress bring him the bunny under a dome dish thing... "You simply must try the rabbit."

You could, using, say, bungie cords or similar, suspend the bunny at face height in his apartments doorway so that the next morning as he is leaving he is confronted by bunniness.
posted by bz at 5:56 PM on June 1

I love these games - we had one going for years with a can of vienna sausages. It only ended when the can began to puff out and someone that had worked in the health department pointed out that if it split the person who cleaned it up could die from botulism. The best can pass happened when my roommate visited our can-pass-friend's place, and moved the can and his webcam into a bucket hidden in his apartment. He found it when he went online and looked at the webcam image, and was all "what the hell is that?"

other good hiding places - at the bottom of a sock drawer, in a little used pot in a cupboard, in the pocket of a winter coat during summer... but for all of these you'll need to get into his place, or get an accomplice who can stash it for you.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 12:21 AM on June 2

I think the idea I'm going to go with is the process server one. We actually have a family friend who is a private investigator/ security guard. He should know a guy in a suit who can intimidate the heck out of my friend before returning the bunny. Thanks for all the fun ideas everyone!
posted by shesbookish at 9:33 AM on June 2