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The Madeleine Job
When I worked full time in an office I was a connoisseur of light pranks. One of my favorites of all time is one i’ve affectionally named “The Madeleine Job”. Let’s reminisce together:
We enter on a typical open office plan in the Bay Area California around 2015. Every day I would program with my pair programming partner Genaro as he carried me through learning ember.js for a project and I intended to do something nice to thank him.
Our office managers had recently discovered Costco and started getting snacks in bulk. The most prized of them all were individually wrapped Madeleines, which are a sort of spongy cookie situation. I began to notice a pattern where every time Genaro would get up to take a break he would return with a Madeleine in hand.
One day I decided to cut out a step from his routine and gathered a ton of Madeleines to take them back to my desk. I would stash them in a turkey-shaped hat I kept on top of my filing cabinet because what monster would think to check in there? It was an unspoken thing; every time he would get up to take a break I’d slip a Madeleine on his desk before he could see me do the deed. I never talked about it and I would deny that I did it. The Madeleine would just inexplicably be there.
This pattern continued for months until I had a scheduled vacation. No one else knew this pattern that I had…
