Bench Sabotage

There are several clever lab pranksters in our research group. For example, one group member arrived in the lab one morning to find her collection of magnetic stirrer bars stuck to the vent (it always come back to the vent). There have been numerous pranks of this nature, which usually originate from the one source: an evil final year PhD student, which happens to be the same evil lab mate who stuck my hair to a lab stool with a magnet.

It appeared that it was time for some revenge. My prankster colleague and I found the perfect opportunity when this lab mate went away a couple of weeks back to a conference.

Ah...the possiblities were endless. This lab mate caught wind of the fact that his bench may be tampered with when he went away, and so in a fit of paranoia, he turned his lab drawers back to front, so that the handles were now directed towards the back of the bench. He finished it off with a laptop cable and a hefty lock so that the drawers could not be turned back around again by anyone but himself.





However, in our lab, we have two lab benches directly opposite one another. This meant that we were able to pull the drawers out from the other side of his bench and get to his drawers that way. Of course, we had to climb underneath the bench and avoid the 10 cm layer of dust and broken glass below that has probably been there since the 80's but it was worth it. There was a little bit of room to move the cable, and we managed to get to one of his drawers which contained his round bottom collection. It is this particular lab mate who detests B19 glassware, and has none of it in his drawers. So of course, the point of this excersise was to replace his round bottom collection with only B19 stuff. It was pretty funny when he went to get a flask!



For our next prank, we had gained some information that this particular lab mate absolutely hates the song 'angel in the centerfold'. I have to admit that it is quite possibly the worst song ever. If anyone even mentions the song it's pretty funny to see him go mental. With this information, we burnt that awful song onto several CD's which looked exactly like the ones next to the CD player, and then we copied the writing on the CD's. When he came back, I asked him to put some Kanye West on (yes, I enjoy a bit of Kanye), and instead of 'gold digger', out came that filthy song! He proceeded to scratch the shit out of that CD. That was pretty funny. We also masking taped a whole stack of his CD's together.....just for something extra.



Our last prank was very simple. We put our own lock over the top of his hefty lock so that he couldn't get to his drawers anyway when he came back.