The Mutant Files: 50 ways to liven up your working day at the office

Liven up your day in the office with a set of fun challenges that will set you on the path to finding a new place of work.
1. Grow yourself a keyboard lawn

2. Devise an entertaining ‘Out Of Office’ reply

3. Champion a corporate Green Policy

4. Stare mindlessly at the sunbathing robots on the adjoining roof

5. Create an entertaining poster

6. Customise your workspace

7. Print this out and stick it on the photocopier. Wait and watch.

8. Hold a MEETING! [via]

9. When she’s out for a meeting – relocate the contents of boss’s office.

10. Always take phone messages

11. Hone your topiary skills in the company car park

12. Get creative with the stationery

13. Dream about landing a more interesting job [via]

14. Surf the web

15. Redefine office job descriptions

16. Work out how to hack the office CCTV system

17. Have fun in corridors

18. Draw-up an realistic work schedule

19. Make shadow puppets

20. Leave a thoughtful gift on a colleague’s desk

21. Text a colleague. Say ‘You better come back to the office. You’ve been given a signicant raise.’

22. Bake someone a leaving cake

23. Troll the photocopier

24. Attempt to restore karma

25. Refuse to tolerate pranks..

26. However – DO dole them out to others

27. Deal with unwanted lorries that block your natural light in the following manner..

28. Deal with complaints made against you

29. Go to work dressed as a tomato. [via Facebook]

30. Leave a surprise in the kitchen

31. Take some time to appreciate how office friendships work

32. Deal with fridge theft appropriately

33. Surf the web again – but careful not to get caught on camera during media visits

34. Combat toilet hygiene issues

35. Have a word with the office manager about the desk lay-out

36. DO NOT allow people to use the fire exits

37. Deal with poor typography issues swiftly

38. Make the necessary preparations for inter-desk conflict

39. When your boss asks you to follow him into his office do this.

40. Use natural office resources to create entertainment

41. Try these dares
ONE-POINT DARES
1. Ignore the first five people who say ‘good morning’ to you.
2. To signal the end of a conversation, clamp your hands over your ears.
3. Leave your fly open for one hour. If anyone points it out, say, ‘Sorry, I really prefer it this way’.
4. Walk sideways to the photocopier.
5. While riding in an lift, gasp dramatically every time the doors open.
6. When in the lift with one other person, tap them on the shoulder and pretend it wasn’t you.
7. Finish all your sentences with ‘…in accordance with the prophecy.’
8. Don’t use any punctuation
9. Interrupt your conversation with someone by giving a huge dejected sigh.
10. Use your highlighter pen on the computer screen.
THREE-POINT DARES
1. Say to your boss, ‘I like your style’, wink, and shoot him with double-barrelled fingers.
2. Kneel in front of the water cooler and drink directly from the nozzle.
3. Shout random numbers while someone is counting.
4. Every time you get an email, shout ‘email!’
5. Put decaf in the coffee machine for 3 weeks. Once everyone has got over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
6. Keep hole-punching your finger. Each time you do, shout ‘damnit, it’s happened again!’ Then do it again.
7. Introduce yourself to a new colleague as ‘the office bike’. Then wink and pout.
8. Call the I.T. helpdesk and tell them that you can’t seem to access any pornography web sites.
FIVE-POINT DARES
1. At the end of a meeting, suggest that, for once, it would be nice to conclude with the singing of the national anthem
2. Walk into a very busy person’s office and while they watch you with growing irritation, turn the light switch on/off 10 times.
3. For an hour, refer to everyone you speak to as ‘Roger’.
4. Announce to everyone in a meeting that you ‘really have to go do a number two’.
5. When you’ve picked up a call, before speaking finish off some fake conversation with the words, ‘she can abort it for all I care.’
6. After every sentence, say ‘Mon’ in a really bad Jamaican accent.
7. In a meeting or crowded situation, slap your forehead repeatedly and mutter, ‘Shut up, damn it, all of you just shut up!’
8. At lunchtime, get down on your knees and announce, ‘As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!’
9. Repeat the following conversation 10 times to the same person: ‘Do you hear that?’ ‘What?’ ‘Never mind, it’s gone now.’
10. Present meeting attendees with a cup of coffee and biscuit; smash each biscuit with your fist.
11. During the course of a meeting, slowly edge your chair towards the door.
12. As often as possible, skip rather than walk.
13. Ask people what sex they are. Laugh hysterically after they answer.
14. While a colleague is writing, grab their pen and throw it out of the nearest open window.
42. Change your manager’s desk plate

43. Acquire an entertaining tie

44. Offer to help out in the I.T Department for the day

45. Familiarise yourself with the latest office jargon
A Mills and Doom – doomed office romance
Adhocracy - a department with little to no process or organisational ability
Administrivia – vitally important stuff that managers leave to everyone else
Agenda Bender - a co-worker who is easily side-tracked in meetings.
Al desco dining – eating at your desk. See also Deskfast
Blamestorming – a meeting in which a scapegoat is identified for causing a problem
Blownus – the money which would have gone on paying bonuses that was spent on the directors xmas lunch
Brandalism – sticking company logos on everything and anything
A Buellerlemic – an employee addicted to throwing a sickie
Chainsaw Consultant – an outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count
Chartist – an accountant with a deep love of graphs
Chinese holiday - taking a five minute break by faking the need for the loo and just sitting on a china latrine, head in hands
Clapathy – not caring enough about what you’ve just seen to applaud
Communicaking – a session where employers encourage staff to network with colleagues by bribing them with coffee and donuts
Crapplicant – an applicant that’s crap.
Credit munch – switching to a cheaper lunch
Cybernating – snoozing at your computer
Decruiting – firing someone
Deja-moo – bullshit that you’ve heard before
Delegut - A representative at a conference whose sole contribution seems to be that of demolishing the lunch buffet.
Desk jockey – office-based employee
Deskfast - eating your breakfast at your desk (via @GriffySavalas)
Dracula shift – Going to work in the dark. Going home in the dark
The Dopeler effect: Tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly (via
Ego-Surfing – Searching Google for instances of your name.
Flashturbation – self-congratulatory and excessive use of animation in Powerpoint
Fleemail. Email delegating responsibilities whilst avoiding confrontation, sent just as your boss is about to leave
A Friday FOE. Someone who tends to leave early for the weekend. (ie Fucks Off Early)
Goat rodeo – an embarrassing meeting
Googlenosis – looking up symptoms on the web to make your sickie more believable.
Google Zoo – when an entire office is pretending to work
Horizontal Promotion: climbing the career ladder while laying on your back.
Incompitemp Temporary office drone. Serving only to drain budgets and wreak havoc. Possibly offset by tea making skills.

iTea department – a group of individuals who break up their day with excessive kitchen loitering.

Kebab manoeuvre – packing up low quality products, heavily marketing them and selling at an elevated price
Lynx Minx – A female who brings improvements in personal hygiene in male staff
A Middleton – posh, pretty dimwit in the marketing dept who is only killing time until she marries into money
Mushroom Management. Keeping staff in the dark and covered in shit.
Open Kimono – throwing an idea out, but being open to criticism
Parliamentary bonus - act of wrongly claiming expenses to get more money
Pope-ing it – when losing the real argument during a meeting, to take the moral high ground
Putting socks on an octopus – an impossible task
Randy Pogo – someone who jumps around the office trying to get laid
Ricky Malaise – The discomfort felt when someone attempts a David Brent impersonation
Ronnie Bics - the great stationery cupboard robber
Scatisfaction - the smug feeling one gets whilst taking an extended dump on company time
Shirking from home
Special Projects Manager = dead man walking
Special sauce – adding a low-cost ingredient to a poor product and achieving a 500% mark-up
Stroperator – the mardy bitch on reception with an over-inflated sense of importance.
Teahydrated – the urge, nay the need for tea
Teflon Shoulders - nickname for co-worker who offloads work to others, a drop of the shoulder and it slides off onto someone else
T.W.A.T - a person who doesn’t work Monday or Friday – only Tue Wed And Thu

Wallpapering fog – a pointless exercise
Zombie project – an initiative that keeps coming back to life no matter how many previous attempts to kill it
46. Because paper jams are ‘hilarious’