Güten Pränken

Güten Pränken is the term coined by Jim Halpert in the series finale of The Office to describe the good pranks that he was going to play on Dwight as his bestest mench.  I am extending the definition to any prank played with joy on someone you love to show your affection.  Today, we played such a prank on our beloved IT director, Sean, who is leaving for another field at the end of the week.

The idea of this prank started in a Latin class five years ago.  At that time, Sean's room was our computer lab (because we had not yet instituted our one to one MacBook program).  The Latin teacher and a small group of students decided it would be really fun to put so many balloons in the lab that he would have to wade through them to get to his desk.  They came to me about the math.  After some initial calculations, we realized we could not afford this prank.  It was too many balloons.

Our school size has inflated since then.  Pun intended.  We had to do some restructuring of our space.  Since the kids all now have laptops, there was no longer a need for a computer lab, and he was moved into a much smaller space.  That caused the Latin teacher and I to re-address the issue of "ballooning" him.  When he announced that this would be his last year, we knew we had to do it.

We learned that a lot of collaboration is required to pull of a prank of this magnitude.  First, his office is locked by a combination, so we enlisted the help of the maintenance team for access as well as measurements.  Second, we are talking about hundreds of balloons.  We pulled in quite a few friends for balloon donations (we think we ended up with about 700).  Timing matters too.  You definitely don't want to take any chances with a guy who can take over your computer while you still need your computer.  We finally had decided on a day and had drafted some helpers when Sean detached a tendon and needed surgery the very next day.  To decide on another good day, we had to let Sean's tech partner, Dana, in on it.  This only seemed fair since this is also his room.  He was on board and gave us some days to NOT do it.

It was finally decided that the week after graduation would be best.  It's a good thing because we learned just how long it would take to blow up this many balloons.  We spent all day blowing them up, both with the lungs of about eight people and with an air compressor provided by our maintenance director.  Early on, we had some difficulty with the compressor, and Sean walked in while we were working on it.  I was sure our cover had been blown, but he didn't seem to even notice the pile of inflated balloons behind my desk.  We concocted a cover story just in case he came back because it became clear that it would soon be impossible to hide.  By 2:45, we had inflated every balloon we had, and our fingers were deformed from tying them. At that point some students came by to help, and we waited for Sean to leave the building.

When he left, we started toting all these balloons from my room down to his, 300 feet away.  Our administrators even helped as we stuffed them in his room.  It takes a while, starting at the back of the room and piling hundreds of balloons to the height you want.  Then, our Latin teacher had to swim out.

At the time of this writing, we have just finished.  Sean will not see it until tomorrow, and I will go to sleep with a smile.  During the entire day, we giggled at each other because we were certain he had no idea what was happening.  We were so excited about the fact that we were finally pulling this off after so many years.  We laughed the maniacal "Mwahaha" laugh.  It is a great way to wrap up a year because it was fun as a team and done with love - Güten Pränken.

Photo taken by Alex Dolwick (who also helped).