Recently, a coworker went out of town for a week. This isn’t a particularly special occurrence considering how much vacation one can accumulate working at a place that offers vacation time as their one and only benefit. It sometimes happens that people go on vacation for a week and no one realizes that they haven’t been seen since Friday until Thursday.

But when the office prankster leaves town, everyone notices.

So how do you pull off the best prank in your office’s history?

Plan ahead

The trick to good prank is planning. While everyone will have a good chuckle at bubble wrap getting stuck in the pneumatic tube system (every office needs one) or the plumber turning the water off only for the lady’s room to flood completely, these bad days carry nearly no long term impact. You need something big.

But if you are considering swapping office furniture and with a bedroom suite, you may want to consider who has keys to make said swap and how upset the owners of said swapped furniture would be to discover this kind of nonsense went down (corporate ruins everything). Fire the moving crew, and stop revamping your resume, your prank needs to be harmless. No one can get hurt, or fired, or fired for hurting the person who pulled the prank.

Set a budget. You will probably get carried away in the midst of your prank. A sick elation will vibrate through the group and all of a sudden due to this excitement you’ve spent your rent on glitter, car batteries, and balloons.

Loop in the important figures

There are certain people who need to know what’s going on, bosses, good humored clients, and probably the cleaning people.

You need everyone to be in on the prank so that he doesn’t loose steam even after it’s over, because a good prank should never be over, ever.

Plus the more witnesses to your pranking genius the less likely you are to be murdered, at least without justice being served.

Pay attention to details

Look, an elaborate plan is bound to get boring, especially after the first hour of meticulously wrapping business cards in tin foil. You need to maintain your motivation. You need this to be better than anything the prankster has ever done before and to do that, you need to prefect everything down to the most minute details.

Think about the door knobs and the chair wheels. Think about the way the air moves and how the blinds open. Don’t forget a single thing. The details make you a winner, and you are a winner.

Keep it all a secret

The hardest part about pulling a prank is keeping everything close to the cuff. You will feel the urge to brag but you must wait.

Wait, and do not tell.

Ssssshhhh….