That Was Unexpected

Did you ever have a really cool idea for a joke and have it go horribly wrong, but still be worth it?

A co-worker (Hi Mark) and his sister are always trading gotchas and he has been after me to take some cheesy steering wheel cover on vacation out west and mail it to her so she won’t have a clue who sent it to her. Seeing as we are redoing bathrooms in lieu of going west this year he cooked up a different plan that I could help with. And it fit right into Donna and my Post Office picture taking.

Mark bought a deck of cards, a box of envelopes and 3 books of stamps. We would put one playing card in an envelope and mail it to his sister from each Post Office we visited. I used a laser printer and addressed 55 envelopes to his sister with a return address of John Smith, 123 Main St, Anytown, USA 123456. The first envelope contained the box so she would have a place to put the cards when they arrived. To ensure she kept the box I printed out a little note to go in the envelope with the help of the Ransom Note Generator. Two weekends ago Donna and I made a trip up to Greenwood, SC to mail the box. We picked Greenwood, the sister’s hometown, so she wouldn’t immediately suspect Mark (even though he knew she would think it was him anyway.) Mark didn’t even tell his wife what we were up to because he knew his sister would call her and get the truth out of her.

Because I didn’t want to just put a playing card in an envelope, I was going to put a piece of blank paper in with it. Then I thought maybe I’d put one word on the paper and when she had all the pieces of paper there would be a sentence that explained the whole gag. But I thought that was a little too much, so Plan B was to gather 52 quotes from the internet and put one on each page. For extra fun I made sure to get a quote that included a bolded word matching the card, i.e. “When I have to choose between two evils, I always try to pick the one I haven’t tried before.” – Mae West went in with the two of clubs.

This weekend when we went on our PO photo trip we mailed an envelope from nearly every Post Office on Saturday and a couple more on Sunday. Because the Post Offices were all closed when we got to them we mailed them inside when we could, but most ended up in the blue box outside. Because the blue boxes don’t get emptied until late in the day, almost all our “letters” didn’t make it into the system until Monday night.

Yesterday Mark’s sister got 11 pieces of mail that included a playing card and a quote. Now here is where it went off course, instead of thinking it was her brother having a little fun, she thought someone was harassing her and went to the local police. That’s right—the police.

This morning Mark’s sister called Mark’s wife to tell her about the ordeal she was going through. Now because Mark’s wife knows nothing of the prank she can only listen with concern about the problem. Naturally when they get off the phone with each other, Mark’s wife calls him. She tells him about his sister going to the police with these harassing letters and how the officer has told her it looks like the work of a sexual predator and if she gets anymore (which she will tomorrow) to bring them right in and they’ll try and get some fingerprints off them. At this point Mark realizes the jig is up and confesses to his wife that he was behind the letters.

Mark then came up front to tell Donna and I the story where we all had a great big laugh about it. Then, because both Donna and my fingerprints are on file from being in the military, and not being real sure how serious the detective was taking the case and not wanting to really worry his sister Mark emailed the quote file to her and then called to tell her to check her email while he was on the phone with her. She was somewhat relieved at not being stalked, but somewhat mad. We are hoping in a couple weeks she will see the humor in the whole thing.