Ice Balls - 1. Story Ice Balls

PT Prompt #37 – Creative

You’re known as the office prankster and April Fools’ Day is your time to shine. Your co-workers admire your creativity and look forward to the silly pranks you pull every April first. This year, though, your prank goes horribly wrong. What was the prank, and what are the consequences?

Everything began with a few silly pranks on April first; nothing extensive or even sophisticated: salt in the sugar bowl, toothpaste Oreos, vegetable oil in the soap dispenser, fake calls from our boss, and suddenly I was the official office prankster. Then one year, it turned into a competition. I pranked my colleagues; they tried to prank me back. I had to watch everything. Does my chair look funny, and does the coffee smell weird? I only touched the phone with gloves after someone smeared pine resin on the receiver. It was a zoo.

And then there were those people who suggested pranks they didn’t dare to play. “Hey, Rob, did you know Jim never locks the door of his bathroom stall because he’s claustrophobic?” Frank waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Wouldn’t it be a cool idea to....” Or... “Gio’s intern never wears a bra, what if you sprayed her with....”

What’s wrong with these people? I realized it was time to end this.

One more. I got the idea when I found an flamingo mug identical to the one my new colleague Laurie used. It’s a rite of passage to prank the newbie, right?

Anyway, I carefully broke its handle off and glued it back again with temporary glue. I was sure nothing severe would happen to him as he always drank this nasty cold brew crap.

And it would have worked perfectly had he not ignored our boss’ one cardinal rule and carried his coffee to his desk. It was strictly forbidden, announced by multiple signs with large red letters all over the room, even on the inside of the door, to take any food or beverage outside the breakroom. On one hand, because of the expensive electronics we had in the lab, and secondly, more importantly, to avoid the chance of possible ingestion of hazardous substances.

Ice cubes clinked merrily against the wall of his mug, where heat-sensitive color turned pink flamingos into purple ones. Watching the effect, he bumped straight into Dr. Walker, a.k.a. the boss. In the process, he pushed him into a nearby chair, where the man landed heavily. I’ll never forget Laurie’s expression when he noticed he only held a pink handle between his fingers. The rest happened seemingly in slow motion. The handleless pot dropped onto the man’s shoulder and rolled into his lap, where ice-cold brown liquid spread rapidly, and dripped on light brown, probably very expensive, suede Chelsea boots.

To avoid an official reprimand, I ‘volunteered’ to organize dusty documents and files and digitize them, a long overdue task, according to Dr. Walker.

I spent four weeks in the lovely basement of the building. The mottled grey walls were lined with beige metal file cabinets. Daylight would have come through the small barred windows if it had been daytime. As I was working after my normal working hours, it was dark outside. Everything was dusty. Spiderwebs with dead insects sticking to them decorated the corners of the room and its ceiling. The only new and shiny objects in the room were a long table, a computer, and two different scanners. And a chair.

The documents hadn’t been touched for years or even decades. After a while, I began to wear a Covid mask to avoid coughing fits whenever I pulled out the files. Feeling sorry for myself, I found different kinds of mold, an abandoned nest of mice, and lots of things I didn’t even want to know what they once were.

When I heard a creak and looked up, I saw Laurie standing in the room wringing his hands.

“Hey, uh R-Rob.”

I dropped a stack of papers I had just pulled from a particularly grimy cabinet on the table. “Hi, Laurie. Are you here to visit the delinquent?” I waved my hand to dissipate the dust cloud.

He shifted about briefly then came closer. When he stood right in front of me, he reached out and plucked something from my hair.

I backed away a step. “What?”

Then I saw he held part of a spider web, including its wriggling builder, in his hand.

I made a face. “Gods, I hate them even though I know without them we’d be overrun by insects.”

He grinned. “Want some help?”

“I don’t know....”

“Look, if I hadn’t ignored the signs and wandered about with my coffee, nothing serious would have come from your awesome prank.”

“Awesome prank?”

“Yeah, it was a brilliant idea using temporary glue. And I should’ve known better, signs or no signs, to consume something in a lab.”

I shrugged. “Probably, but I had it coming. I’ve been warned before. I swear it was the last prank in my entire life.”

“Uh-huh.”

He clearly didn’t believe me. “I mean it. Dr. Walker had ice cubes melting over his crotch for fuck’s sake!”

Laurie snorted. “Anyway, I cleared it with him. I’m here to help you. It was my fault too, if not more.”

I pulled another Covid mask from my back pocket and gave it to him. “Deal.”

We worked out a great system that sped up the entire ordeal enormously.

After the last document was scanned and stored, we sent Dr. Walker the link, went home to shower, and met again at my favorite Indian food place to celebrate.

On the following Monday, the boss called us to his office.

“Sit down, gentlemen.” He gestured in the direction of a sofa. “I wanted to thank you. I don’t think we could have ever accomplished this long overdue task any time soon with all the budget cuts.”

Laurie and I looked at each other awkwardly. “Um...you’re welcome?”

Dr. Walker laughed. “What do you suggest we do with all this free space? A gym perhaps?”

Laurie frowned. “But didn’t you just mention budget cuts?”

“Investing in preserving the health and ability to work of our employees might be a good selling point to the higher-ups.”

I scoffed. “And providing and making information available is not?”

He sat down on the edge of his desk. “That, dear Robert, we call politics.”

A few months later, we got a brand new gym, including a sauna and jacuzzi.

Politics.