A Joke Gone Bad (Kind Of)

I’ve written about my principal “Barry” before.  He’s a difficult boss.  Sometimes he’s a good boss, other times he is not.  Over the past couple of years he’s spent a lot of time feeding his ego with the success of his teachers and because of that his actions have pit grade level teams against each other in this weird competition that has caused a lot of stress.  In addition, he has taken my team for granted because we are efficient, get “the job” done, and are pretty low maintenance.  Sometime he makes us so frustrated.

My team had the opportunity to write a grant for professional development money.  Since we played right into that competition thing, we decided not to tell anyone that we were writing the grant as we didn’t want anyone else to write one too and take our ideas or limit our chances in receiving it.  However we needed to have our principal’s signature on the paperwork before we could send it in. 

We waited until the last possible minute and set up a meeting with him.  Even then, we wouldn’t tell him what it was about because we didn’t want it to get around.  That made him a little nervous, and since we were tired of him not giving us enough credit for our successes, we decided to play a little joke on him. 

The four of us walked into our meeting with a piece of blue copy paper, in addition to our proposal.  Just a week or so before the “intent to transfer” requests were passed out and they had been run on blue copy paper.  We also walked in with very serious faces.  Jason, from The Jason Show, was chosen as our speaker because the rest of us were worried we’d break into a giggling fit.  When we sat down around the conference table, Jason told “Barry” that we’d been doing a lot of thinking, blah, blah, blah, and were therefore putting in for a transfer.  Jason kept a completely straight face while telling him, but the rest of us were covering our face with our blue paper and looking away, trying not to burst into laughter. 

The look on “Barry’s” face was priceless full of fear.  The fear was probably more for selfish reasons that he might lose 4 of his best teachers on staff.  He stumbled over his words a little before Jason stopped the joke and said, “Just kidding, we’re just here to get your signature on a grant we wrote.”  “Barry” was not happy with us.  It actually put him on the defensive and he ended up being kind of negative about our grant (see, not always the best boss). 

I rarely do practical jokes, not for any moral reason, but because I’m really bad at them.  I can’t get through them without giggling or laughing and giving myself away.  But the unsuccessful nature of this one might be enough for me to stop doing them period…just kidding!

Do you like practical jokes?