There are few things better than a good practical joke, especially if there are a bunch of people in on it.
We just pulled one off here at Ackermann.
A couple of weeks ago a fellow Ackermaniac,
Matt Seaman, put up a sign on the back of the men’s room door saying “Please Flush.”
That led to Rick Laney of our staff putting up a more formal looking sign, complete with graphics that advised people against flushing for environmental reasons. Good taste rarely stops me from saying things, but details of the Laney sign will be left to your imagination.
It took off from there. First we ginned up a fake e-mail from our building managers giving us the first tenant environmental award, complete with free lunch to thank us for doing our part to save plant Earth.
Then we got Amy Nolan at the Knoxville Business Journal to send an e-mail saying the building owners told her we got an environmental award and could she get details for their monthly “green news” segment. (Thank you, Amy)
From there we told Matt he probably needed to work on the media stuff for the award. He kept getting more and more aggravated since the entire thing was a fake and he is not someone who handles stuff like that well.
Remember, everybody at Ackermann…absolutely everybody…was in on this, from the account staff to Finance. So individually we are all talking to Matt and egging him on. Matt is getting ready to leave Ackermann and basically be a full-time Dad, so he was ripe for the egging. Virtually everyone had seen or heard one of his rants about the whole thing and how bogus it was. Little did he know just how bogus it truly was.
This morning we all gathered to receive the award. We managed it so Matt was the last one in, at which point we basically told him it was all a complete hoax and he was the only one who didn’t know.
It was priceless. He was almost speechless. (Anyone who knows Matt will appreciate how amazing that really is.) He knows now how much he means to us…and that we are easily capable of widespread deceit.
And the sign from the bathroom door? Signed by everyone and framed as a gift to Matt.
It was absolutely great. Oh…clients and prospective clients rest assured we only do this kind of thing to each other.
