It started with pirates..
One of the weirder things about the office supply business is the grimy underworld of office supply scammers. My first pranks targeted “Toner Pirates.” Toner for copiers is pretty expensive stuff and companies get it from well known office supply stores like Office Mix. Toner pirates call companies pretending to be the regular supplier. The idea is to get some unwitting employee to give them the model number of the copier, ship a bunch of toner, and then bill them for a crazy high price. Lots of companies just pay invoices like these without question as long they look sort of legitimate. I don’t know if they qualify as criminals but they are definitely just this side of robo-callers on the vermin spectrum
I worked at a small company where I was in charge of ordering office supplies from a local supplier, we’ll call them “Office Mix”, and their service rep “Amanda” came by weekly. Amanda was a sweet, smart, and beautiful young woman whom everyone knew and liked.
Pirates would call us all the time. I never fell for the scam and got to where I’d pick on them within a few seconds of listening to their scam pitch. Eventually we started playing games with them. We’d see how long we could keep them on the phone, transferring their call over and over.
A favorite ploy was to pretend I couldn’t find the model number, instead reading them the labels, markings, displayed error codes… everything that wasn’t the model. The point was, you could say or do almost anything over the phone to these people with no consequence and the game was to see how much of their time you could waste.
One of my coworkers (we’ll call him Flip) had a penchant for subjecting female pirates to pretty vile talk. Still to this day I’m shocked at some of the disturbing things I heard him say. I mean he really seemed to pride himself on his ability to come up with the freakiest, most bizarre, most disgusting harangues imaginable. Dirty talk has never been one of my kinks but it’s a pretty funny fixation if you think about it. So I thought about it, and I thought about Flip.
For my best and really cruelest prank, I drafted another co-worker (we’ll call her Kim) who really didn’t like Flip. I had her call my office and I answered while Flip was nearby. After a few seconds I turned to him and say, “Hey Flip, I got a juicy pirate chick on the line.. you want her?” That familiar look of delight washes over his face and he nods, practically salivating. I put Kim on hold and say, “Line two is all yours Flip, go get her!”
I can’t paraphrase what I heard him say next. It’s really impossible to convey the masterpiece of sleaze that was conceived in his brain, birthed from his mouth, and has since settled in my mind like the memory of an infant vomiting a full meal of strained peas. It basically went some thing like this…use the worst parts of your imagination here.
“Hey sweet---, I’d really love to ---- your ----- while you ----- your big ----- ----- monkey.”
There was a long, very pregnant pause during which I imagined Kim struggling to process what was just said to her. We didn’t really plan what to do at this point… she was improvising from here on. She did well…
“What the hell was that!? This is Amanda from Office Mix you moron and I recognize your voice FLIP! Put your manager on the phone now!"
Flip turned and looked at me with pure, naked terror in his eyes. His mouth moved but he said nothing. A couple of seconds ticked by. He stood up, threw the phone handset to me and literally fled the room. I hear Kim on the phone, “Flip?? Flip?? Don’t you dare hang up on me!!!” as Flip runs out the door into the parking lot.
I saw he left his car keys so I felt fairly sure he wouldn’t jump in his IROC and drive off the nearest cliff. Frankly, I hadn't thought about what I’d do at this point. So I put the phone to my ear and tell Kim, “He freaked out pretty badly and ran out the door, could you go find him and let him off the hook?” The phone went dead but I could hear her laughing down the hallway.
I didn’t see Flip for good half-hour. Eventually, he came back into our office and sat down at his desk near mine. He didn’t look at me, he said nothing, we’ve never spoken of it since.
