@Lorne Kates said:
@blakeyrat said:
"bosses shouldn't pull pranks on subordinates"
Reactions aside, I actually agree with this statement. There's just too much of a possibility that power will be abused. If it's not funny, do you laugh anyways instead of telling off the person signing your paycheck? Is there a subtext of "I can abuse you because I'm your boss"? What happens to the prank when there's no possibility of retaliation? Some reason a teacher shouldn't prank her students.
And yes, I'm sure everyone can come up with an anecdote of "but my boss/teacher/professor/gynecologist...". I'll thank you for the edge cases, and remind you the plural of anecdote isn't "data". (Ironically, it is "lore").
And this particular one, the more I think of it-- okay, I get the balloons and keyboard switching and stuff. They're obviously pranks, even if the prankster isn't around to say "gotcha!". In this case, if the boss hadn't been there to jump out of the bushes and go "ha ha"-- would Blakey's coworker have assumed the phone was stolen? That could be a few hundred dollars, possibly a call to security or the police to review tapes, etc. What would HR say about employees climbing up into the ceiling tiles? They're deathly afraid of people not knowing how to step over uneven surfaces, you think they want an employee being forced to climb on his desk to retrieve his property?
That video is 7 minutes too long. And just for a point of clarification In all cases of the pranks I listed earlier none were done by a boss on subordinate. Anyways on to what I was actually wanted to post...
I have three rules for defining what seperates a good prank from a bad prank:
- No one gets hurt
- No property damange
- Police don't get involved
In the case of the OP as Lorne Kates pointed out could result in an accident or them thinking the phone was stolen and reporting it as such leading to security or police involvement, but since none of those actually happened it can be considered a good prank, even though it was poorly executed, and should not have been done by the boss.