Toilet Paper Tubes: The Office Prank

Posted on November 12, 2018 by AIAO

It’s a prank that keeps growing and growing. It all began with one toilet paper tube, and it has since grown into something about 300 times bigger.

One little toilet paper tube. It came up at our Monday morning meeting, “Who left the empty toilet paper tube in the bathroom, instead of replacing the toilet paper?” No one took direct responsibility – however, I have been guilty of doing this in the past, so I did mention that it may have been me. We all agreed to try harder, and we moved on. We didn’t think about it much more… or so I thought.

Later that week, I came down to my desk to find a toilet paper tube sitting in front of my keyboard. Now at first, I thought this was a passive aggressive message. I thought that someone had found an empty roll left in the bathroom again and I figured they were trying to let me know I had messed up again (which I hadn’t this time!) but that wasn’t the case. I learned that my office mates had decided that a new office-wide practice of placing toilet paper tubes in random locations was the logical next step. And I was happy to play along! I proceeded to pass on the toilet paper tube to a new location and went on my merry way. The tube floated around the office for a while, finding new homes – and as the days rolled by, the tubes multiplied and the placement of the tubes became more and more creative.

My dad was visiting over the summer, and I brought him to work one day. As I was leaving, James (who was standing near my car) said something like “don’t forget to use your turn signal!” My dad and I didn’t know what he meant, so we just carried on with our day. A few days later, on a rainy day, I reached down to turn on the windshield wipers in my car and instead of feeling plastic, I felt cardboard. I realized that James mistook my windshield wiper controls for my turn signal controls. Everything became so clear. James had crossed over into new territory – by hiding a toilet paper tube in my car, he had brought the prank out of the office realm and into my personal realm. It was a whole new level of Toilet Paper Tubing. I giggled.

There were many other iterations of the prank. I found a piece of paper on my desk with a picture of a toilet paper tube that had a smiley face on it (See cover picture for this post,) and subsequently found the actual smiling toilet paper tube somewhere else in the office. At times I found myself sitting on toilet paper tubes left on my seat. James sent out this fuzzy picture of a pile of about 80 toilet paper tubes.

The toilet paper tubes were advancing rapidly – and James was the top prankster.

And then a beautiful thing happened – James went on vacation. Kyle and Farlin had been planning to stuff one of the cabinets in James’s Airstream trailer full of toilet paper tubes so that when he was on vacation he would open it up and they would all fall out – but the three of us ended up deciding on something different. Something bigger. We had saved 150 tubes between us, and we set out to find even more. A couple of Etsy/Ebay purchases later, we yielded about 300 tubes altogether and we began to set our trap. We put our heads together and designed a hair-pin mechanism that would make it so that when James entered the office, a trap door of sorts would open up from the ceiling and drop 300 toilet paper tubes from above.

Below is a diagram of our mechanism – created by Farlin.

After much trial and error, we had a working product. Below is our test run in slow motion (with about 2/3 of the total amount of tubes we ended up using)

The finishing touch was that we set up a motion sensing trail camera in the office that would activate when James entered the office, so we could document our success. We didn’t end up capturing much, other than a couple shots of James looking up after the fact and admiring our handy work.