Okay, so I pulled my first real office prank a few months back. For those who don’t know, I work as a web engineer/designer on my company’s affiliate marketing team. Our affiliate marketing team partners with other websites to find interested students and connect them with our clients (schools). Some of these sites are education portals, but some of them are job sites, some are entertainment sites, and some are even more outlandish. Basically, anything that attracts our demographic and gets a fair amount of traffic is fair game.

We recently put a few of our art schools up on skateboards.com (which, I have to admit, was a pretty good idea). The guy who closed that deal, Brian, is crazy about skateboarding. He talks about it at least once a day. Shortly after that deal, he closed a deal with another skateboarding site. Anyway, Brian was gone at a conference, so we started dreaming up a good prank to pull.

We decided that a site about skateboarding dogs would be the way to go. I went home that night and registered dogsonskateboards.com and threw some content up there. We ran the site through our prospector and put the site in Salesforce (our sales management software) and assigned it to Brian.

Brian got back a few days later. We were all waiting for him to come back to us and say, “Alright, guys, what the hell?” Much to my surprise, Curtis (the alleged owner of dogsonskateboards.com) received an e-mail from Brian. Here it is:

Hi Curtis,

I happened upon your site and wanted to let you know that I think it’s great! If I’m not mistaken, Tyson was featured in an old Powell Bones Brigade video, maybe Public Domain with LanceMountain. Lance is one of my all time favorite Skaters.

At the bottom of the page, I noticed that you will be adding education offers soon. Here at Plattform, we represent approximately 3,200 schools and I hoped there would be an opportunity to work together. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.

Thanks and best regards,

Brian Blancho

Amused, I responded:

Hello Brian!

You are the man! Thank you for getting back to me so quick! And I believe that you are right. Tyson was featured in a skating video for a famous skater. I’m glad to hear that you have heard of him! I think that Tyson was on Oprah! Did you see that?

Do you have a dog? Does he like to skateboard? Would he like to? I will be selling doggie sporting equipment on my site!

I would very much like to work with you and your schools! I believe that my site will attract a crowd that would love to go to college! Specifically animal training (because who would not want to work with animals after seeing my site?) but I believe some may be interested in other studies as well. Do you have gunsmithing?

I thank you for your quick response, and I hope that you enjoy my skateboarding dogs! I know that they would enjoy you! I will talk to you later!

Curtis Hornbuckle
Dogs on Skateboards!

I got this back:

Hey Curtis,

Thanks for the reply. No I don’t have a dog that skateboards. To be honest, I don’t have a dog at all or any intention of getting one, skateboarding or otherwise.

Who are you currently working with to bring on education offers?

Why gunsmithing?

Brian Blancho

And my reply:

Hello! Brian!

My wife is really looking for a gunsmithing degree! This has been the source of much strife in my marriage, since guns are often used to shoot animals! She’s a member of the NRA and I’m a member of PETA. One time, I showed up to protest at one of their rallies and there she was! We laughed and laughed! But if you don’t have gunsmithing I think I will be ok.

I found out about your offers from search4careercolleges.com! I was hoping to put up some of your offers to help people go to college. I have seen similar offers on skateboards.com. Was that you?

Are you sure that you do not have need for a dog on a skateboard? Maybe you will like some of my other sites that I will build in the future! I will build catsonskateboards.com to start, and will build more later! I have attached a picture!

Thank you for your reply! I will talk to you later!

- Curtis Hornbuckle
Dogs on Skateboards!

Brian then sent me instructions on how to sign up for our affiliate network and told me to apply so we could start talking about allocations and payouts. I set the whole thing down for a few days and went about my business (I was quite busy).

A few days later, my boss, Brandon, pulled me aside. (He was in on the joke.) He told me that Brian came to him and asked for advice, since I was coming off as a shady affiliate. I only replied at night and had waited several days, so he thought I was flaking out. Brandon told me that I had full permission to check Curtis’s e-mail and respond to it from work.

I had received a message from Brian—but it was from his home account. It said, in a nutshell, that he didn’t think I should be working with PlattForm. Brian was thinking about quitting soon and was actually looking into going into business on his own. With the network of sites he had connected with and his insider knowledge of the industry, they could sell the leads directly to the schools. He invited me to call him on his cell sometime outside of business hours so we could discuss these dealings further.

My response was, “Oh shit.” There are all kinds of legal rules that that would be breaking, and it could really screw over my company as well.

Unfortunately, I had a meeting right after I received the e-mail. So I had to sit for an hour and grapple with the difficult decision of what to actually do with this information. I had three choices:

1. Ignore it. This would be the easiest, but I don’t think I could really do this one.
2. Report him. This was probably the right decision. There were too many legalities to get caught up in, so it was probably the smart choice as well. But this would mean some major trouble for Brian, and he was in the process of buying a house.
3. Talk him out of it. I had no idea how this one would go over, but it seemed to me to be the thing I had to do.

So I decided I was going to talk him out of it. It was about 3:45 when I got back to my desk, so I had a little over an hour before I could go home and respond to the e-mail.

As soon as I got back to my desk, Brandon sent me an e-mail asking me to meet him outside. I shrugged and met him outside. Once we were outside, he said, “Well, you’ve probably been sweating enough, so you should probably know that this is some sort of counter-joke we’re playing on you.”

Brian knew the site was B.S. right from the start. He immediately went to Brandon and they started scheming how they could get back at us. The only reason I was let in on the joke was because they realized that it would probably be a while before I responded to the situation.

Anyway, I went back to my desk and e-mailed the other sales guys on the team, forwarding them the e-mail and asking them what to do. The entire room got really somber really quick. Brad immediately turned around and said, “We need to pull the plug and pretend this never happened.”

A few minutes later, I e-mailed the guys on the team again, telling them that the stakes were too high and that I couldn’t afford to get caught up in something like that. I told them I was going to forward the e-mail to Brandon to let him decide what to do. I forwarded Brandon the e-mail. A minute later, he called Brad over to his desk and said, “Brad, is this some sort of joke? Please tell me if it is.” Brad gave an earnest no and Brandon stormed out of the room.

Now’s probably the time to explain that all of upper management was out of the country on an upper management retreat. So the highest level of management around were my director and manager, Brandon and Rebecca.

Brian got a page on his phone asking him to come to the Vice President’s office. He got up and left, and the rest of the guys in the room got together and started talking. Most of us were getting pretty nervous (although Shawn couldn’t stop laughing). About ten minutes later, Rebecca comes back into our office and tells us all to go to the Interactive Conference Room immediately. The Interactive Conference Room was actually occupied, so she took us to the break room and left us there for about fifteen minutes. After that, we were all herded into the Vice President’s office and left there for another fifteen minutes. By this point, we were all pretty nervous.

After the fifteen minutes, Brandon and Rebecca came into the office and started giving us “the talk.” They said that they found out something about Brian that they really didn’t expect to find out, but sometimes we discover things we really don’t want to find out and we have to respond to them. Long story short, Brian had been “fired.” He was gathering up his things and would be gone by the time we got back to our office.

This put us in an interesting legal position, though, since what we did could be construed as entrapment. Brian could come back and say that this was all a set-up and that we solicited the information. That wasn’t the case, of course, but all of us would need to come back on Saturday to sign a legal affidavit saying that we didn’t solicit that information. The Chief Interactive Officer was going to fly back early so he could be here for the event.

We were then released back to our office. Brian’s stuff was gone, and he had kicked over his trash can. We all went back to our desks, and he had left one of us a note saying, “I’m sorry I let you guys down.” David wasn’t buying it and Shawn was still laughing, but everyone else bought it. At about 4:50, Brian burst into the door to our office and asked, “So who wants to start a new business?” The guys were legitimately mad for a while, but managed to calm down before we left for the day.

So that’s the Dogs on Skateboards story. There’s a second part to it, believe it or not—but that’s a story for another time.

That’s right: I caved in and installed Wordpress. I’ll work on getting all the old content moved over to the new format in the next few days. In the meantime, I’ll try to write a few entertaining posts to keep you entertained.