I was one of a handful of student workers for my university's IT department while I was in college. My boss at the time was truly excellent, a super chill guy, easy to get along with, never talked down to us or acted like he was above doing grunt work, someone willing to go to bat for us and step in when we needed help with something. The kind of manager that doesn't need to command respect, because they've earned it; just an all around pleasure to work for. He also gave us the latitude to goof off as long as work got done and we kept on top of the ticket queue.

On a particularly slow afternoon, my coworkers and I opted to do a bit of organization and inventory so we borrowed the office folks label maker so that all our spare cables and supplies had a home. We may have gone a little drunk with power (as one does with a label maker), and got the bright idea that "really, everything should have a home. A place for everything and everything in its place, right?" So we proceeded to label nearly everything else in the little closet we called an office. The phone, the stapler, the door, the wall, all fair game; all properly labeled. I can only imagine that it looked like we were all learning English for the first time. If I recall correctly, our boss came up as we were wrapping up, he just shook his head, chuckled, and left us to it.

A week or two later our boss happened to take a Friday off and we decided that I'd be an excellent idea to label his desk in a similar fashion, but opted to prefix every with "Boss". So Monday rolls around and our boss comes in to sit down at his "Boss Desk" in his "Boss Chair" and answer his "Boss Phone". All in good fun, I don't think our boss was remotely surprised, but we got another chuckle out of him. A few years later, our boss got a job offer he couldn't refuse, so the student workers all pooled together to buy him a going away gift: a pocket knife with "Boss Knife" inscribed on the blade (he was always borrowing mine to open boxes or pop the air bubbles the new computers came packaged in) and a coffee mug that said "🏆 Word's Best Ex-Boss". I swear, we nearly made the grown man cry.

All this is merely a preamble (or more likely, just ramble) for what is probably the greatest harmless prank I've ever pulled. The student workers were all friends, we all had each other's phone numbers, hung out outside of work, and we still talk long after we've all graduated. One such coworker, is from out of town and asked me to take care of his cats while he went back to visit his family for a few days, which is when I saw the perfect opportunity for some harmless fun. By that time, I was no longer a broke college kid and could afford my very own label maker, but I didn't want to just label everything, it's been done before and it'd be far too obvious. So, I proceeded to print off precisely two labels: the first of which was for "[coworker]'s door" which I placed on the hinge side of the door to his office so that it'd be hidden by the door jamb. The second was for "[coworker]'s desk" which went on the lip of his desk, between the desk and the wall.

My coworker returned from his trip and I went about my life: work, student loans, video games I suddenly had time to play without feeling guilty for procrastinating on homework or studying, almost entirely forgetting about the ticking time bomb I'd left for my coworker.

Two whole months passed and I thought nothing of it, then I got a text from my coworker with a picture of the [coworker]'s door label and the message "this fell off the door. I spent over an hour looking, and all I found was the one behind my desk. Are there more?" I died laughing for a good ten minutes. There aren't many times in my life where I can say I full-on cackled, but this was unequivocally one of them. When I could see through the tears in my eyes, I texted my coworker back to assure him it was just those two and there weren't anymore to find. His completely understandable disbelief just made the whole thing funnier. Sometimes less is more.