Balloons and Basketball
At work, we are slowly working to fill a co-worker's office completely with balloons. This initially sounded like a great idea, a harmless office prank with enough fun to go around for everyone. Then we moved past the high level planning stages and into the practical planning stages and we realized the daunting tasks we had ahead of us.
The office is about 10'x10'x10' so that means we need about 1000 cubic feet of balloons. Even the largest balloons are barely a cubic foot so we are going to need at least 1000 balloons. A human being can blow up and tie a balloon in about 30 seconds tops. This rate cannot be maintained for many consecutive balloons, so if we conservatively say that someone could do the rate of one balloon per minute, this could take 1000 man minutes. Fortunately, this task is easily parallizeable. Unfortunately, everyone involved in the prank also has a day job (that is we should probably keep doing work). Even with 5 full time people, it could take 200 minutes (over 3 hours). This does not include the time spent packing the office, which will grow as the office reaches capacity.
We were able to find both an electric pump and a hand pump which speed up the process considerably. We don't have firm plans for how to deal with the packing issues, but hopefully those can be dealt with. As of now, we are about 1/3 full. I'll try to get pictures at some point.
So far, the experience has been a good one and has been very good for team building. Lets hope this doesn't end like this. I do think the victim in this case is wound considerably less tight.
I have basketball 3 nights in a row this week. I'm past night #2 and my legs are done. We'll see how I'm feeling tomorrow. I'm still looking for my lost shot. If someone finds it let me know because I'm tired of missing 10 foot jumpers.
The office is about 10'x10'x10' so that means we need about 1000 cubic feet of balloons. Even the largest balloons are barely a cubic foot so we are going to need at least 1000 balloons. A human being can blow up and tie a balloon in about 30 seconds tops. This rate cannot be maintained for many consecutive balloons, so if we conservatively say that someone could do the rate of one balloon per minute, this could take 1000 man minutes. Fortunately, this task is easily parallizeable. Unfortunately, everyone involved in the prank also has a day job (that is we should probably keep doing work). Even with 5 full time people, it could take 200 minutes (over 3 hours). This does not include the time spent packing the office, which will grow as the office reaches capacity.
We were able to find both an electric pump and a hand pump which speed up the process considerably. We don't have firm plans for how to deal with the packing issues, but hopefully those can be dealt with. As of now, we are about 1/3 full. I'll try to get pictures at some point.
So far, the experience has been a good one and has been very good for team building. Lets hope this doesn't end like this. I do think the victim in this case is wound considerably less tight.
I have basketball 3 nights in a row this week. I'm past night #2 and my legs are done. We'll see how I'm feeling tomorrow. I'm still looking for my lost shot. If someone finds it let me know because I'm tired of missing 10 foot jumpers.
posted by beatdodgers at
11:53 PM
1 Comments:
You make me proud. Harmless vandalism is a necessity in fostering friendship and staving off boredom. We would fill our friends rooms with crumpled up newspaper in college. Pretty quick and a giant pain in the ass to clean up.
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