Help me prank my PI
November 28, 2012 5:20 AM Subscribe
When I first started my current job as a graduate researcher at a nominally Catholic university as an American in Belgium, my boss played a quick prank on me where he came into my office, plopped down a copy of the New Testament in Flemish, and told me I needed to study up to pass some kind of religious test. The way he did it, it was pretty funny and I’m looking for ways to prank him back.
To be clear, I’m looking for pranks that are not based on a violation of space or that are especially nasty in some way, this is my boss after all. So far I have already emptied out a mayonnaise jar, filled it with yoghurt, and eaten it in front of him while yakking on about how it must be some kind of strange Belgian egg pudding however, while this got everyone else in the lunchroom, he was totally unfazed claiming that we was difficult to shock. This is of course a challenge that I’d like to meet but I am out of ideas.
posted by Blasdelb to human relations (7 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
Buy some agar agar from a Japanese / asian grocery store, dye it with a bit of yellow/red food colouring, and pour yourself some edible agar plates. Ditto agarose gels, with a bit of blue added when it's almost set to be a band of loading dye. Produce and eat in the lunchroom. Gelatin would work instead of agar agar, but probably taste pretty horrifying.
Get some sheets of tinfoil, put some strips of autoclave tape along it, and autoclave to make the tape change colour. When it's cool and dry, wrap it around his laptop (or something he's less attached to) and explain that it had to be autoclaved after an accidental spill.
Make or buy some tiny model cakes (e.g. from a dolls' house supply shop), show him, and ask for permission to start a spin-off company selling cakes cooked in the wells of a PCR machine. (Bonus points: actually bake some tiny cakes in the PCR machine. I've always wanted to try it, but would never trust a PCR machine to actually be clean enough...)
Buy a handful of those plant watering gel ball thingies. Select the colourless ones and inject a tiny volume of black ink into the centre. Mention that you thought you heard a frog in the lab then, a few days later, let him find your home-made frogspawn floating in the water bath.
Use one of the automatic paper generators to come up with something that contains a few keywords tangentially related to your field, and pass it to your boss asking for his comments on its implications for your group's work.
posted by metaBugs at 6:43 AM on November 28, 2012 [6 favorites]