Real life: Dana Knight

Laughing matters: Workplace pranks are as close as your inbox

Quick. Take this medical terms quiz.

What is benign? Of course, it’s what you be after you be eight. Bacteria? The back door to the cafeteria. Dilate? To live long.

Before you boo me or, worse yet, quit reading, I didn’t make these up. I was duped the other day by an e-mail that disguised itself well enough to persuade me to open it. What I found was a forwarded e-mail joke titled “Redneck Medical Terms.”

Now thar’s a durn lousy trick to pull on some gal, but the sender was smart enough to trick me.

Forwarded jokes that land in my inbox usually don’t have a chance. Any messages with subject lines like “Make $1 million” and “99% Spam” are deleted lickety-split.

It’s not that I’m some workplace martyr refusing to use company equipment for a personal laugh. I just think the jokes are stale, completely lame and, for the most part, a waste of time.

Evidently, I’m cooler than I thought. According to the younger generation of workers, e-mail jokes are so totally yesterday. A new trend is sweeping the nation’s workplaces — forwarding the latest funny Web videos.

With the pop culture explosion of Web sites such as Stickam and YouTube and TV shows like WebJunk 20, a VH1 weekly countdown of the top 20 silly videos online, employees have found a new way to be cubicle comedians.

“Online employees are logging on in record numbers during working hours to fill their friends’ and co-workers’ inboxes with proof that they truly are the funniest person they know,” according to Stickam, a Web site that allows users to place streaming videos on their blogs or Web sites that then can be downloaded to co-workers’ inboxes.

Not only are workers surfing the Web for the funniest online videos they can find, but they are creating their own, says Aaron Novak, an executive project manager with Stickam.

“These aren’t celebrities doing things. We’ve got a lot of random people dancing, doing weird performing in front of the camera,” he says.

Some office workers play pranks, like dropping a net of balls on top of a co-worker’s head, catching it on camera and then distributing it, Novak says.

On YouTube, a site with the tagline “Broadcast Yourself,” users can upload and share videos worldwide. Among the featured videos, a guy named Noah who took a photo of himself every day for six years. The 2,190 days of photos play in 5 minutes and 45 seconds for people who care to take a look at Noah, a dark-haired, plain-looking fellow. Evidently people are. He had 545,000 views.

Another popular view: Fred Grzybowski doing some amazing tricks on a pogo stick. (Really. He had 153,019 views.)

So far, I’ve been forwarded just a few of these videos. Among them: kittens fighting over a tissue box and a guy slamming his office computer against the desk when it won’t do what he wants.

Sure, it’s mildly entertaining, but beware. Most company policies require that the computer be used for business only. A 2005 survey by the American Management Association found that 75 percent of employers monitor their workers’ Web-site visits.

So view these forwarded videos at your own risk. Or better yet, delete them just like those stale jokes.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 9:23 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.