Jason - Prank

Ghost Hands

The office was one Henry had not been in before. In an environment that was already a little too serious, this one was even more so. If the office had been a person, it would have been the kind of person that took himself way too seriously, the kind of person who thought they were very important, much too important for the likes of Henry. It made him nervous.

He sat in the teal chair which looked puffy and comfortable, but in fact all the give was gone from the cushion. Perhaps it was just old, or perhaps it the very intimidation of the place had caused it to be repeatedly soaked in sweat. No matter the reason, it made trying to figure out what he was going to say even more difficult. He knew Ursula, the HR lady, was not going to be happy to see him again. He thought there was a good possibility he would be fired. This was the first time he had been “called down”. He needed to choose his words carefully.

Ursula was Henry’s opposite. She was dark skinned, with her hair pulled back tight. She was short, but almost a force of nature. She wore what Henry secretly thought of a granny glasses, complete with chunky bead chain, which rattled as she opened the door. “Come in, Mr. Gilliard,” she said in an almost ominous way.

Henry hoisted his tall frame to an upright position and biting back the flood of explanation, he walked into the interrogation room.

“Do you know why you are here?”

“Well, yes… Um, sort of…”

“Is says here, Mr. Gilliard, that as a result of actions you are solely responsible for company property has been damaged, one of our employees has suffered an injury, which might have them off work for a while and emergency responders unnecessarily came as a result of the commotion. They plan to charge our company. What I don’t actually understand is how you can claim innocence.”

It had started with a podcast Henry had been listening to as he put the last touches of a PowerPoint presentation. It had talked about how good the human body was at adapting, to hot or cold, to tough terrain or to sleeping at different parts of the day. The podcast suggested that over time it causes us to actually feel different about things. In one of the experiments, the students being tested wore weights on their arms for an extended period of time and when they were suddenly removed, there hands would seem to float in the air. Ghost hands.

This lead to a conversation with Charlotte, in which they considered how many pennies could they get in the handset of Odd Jeremy’s phone before he noticed. Jeremy was often the butt of their jokes, but this should have been innocent. As Henry told Ursula his version of events, he said as much.

Anyway, Odd Jeremy was on call after call day after day, so they each figured he would notice the change in weight pretty quickly. So, not wanting the gag to be over quickly, Henry had unscrewed the speaker and deposited a single penny a day, for the first week. He never noticed. Never even flinched at the weight. Charlotte and Henry talked about it everyday at lunch for a month, until they decided it was getting to be too much. They needed to adjust it quicker so he would give them something. They wanted him to notice, really, to get that laugh. So, they started adding two pennies and then three pennies a day. Even though it was only a pound or two, they could not believe Jeremy had not noticed. In the early mornings as they were adding more, it felt like it was made out of lead.

“The phone would ring. Nothing. We waited for him to ask. Nothing,” Henry explained to Ursula.

So, two months and 253 pennies in they had run out of space. Not one more penny would fit in the phone. So, Henry suggested the only reasonable thing at this point, which was to see if they could give Jeremy “ghost hands”. Remove all the pennies and see if the sudden loss of weight would cause his hands to mysteriously float in front of him. He and Charlotte laughed as they imagined it.

Ursula looked at Henry who had paused for a moment, as if to let her realize his brilliance. “So,” she started looking up from the notepad where she had been writing down the details of his story, “how did that cause..um..”

“Oh, yeah. That is not what happened.”

This morning, after Jeremy had already taken a couple calls, so he was already in the mindset of the weight, Henry had Charlotte get Jeremy's help with the printer. Then, while he was coming to her rescue, Henry swapped out the handset for an unweighted, but identical version. It was amazing he thought, how different they felt.

Ursula had stopped writing and was looking at Henry. She wanted to know what was going to happen even though, based on the accident report, she already knew what had happened.

“It turns out,” Henry said trying to think about he was going to tell this next part, “you don’t get ghost hands when the weight is not persistent. Also, the weight of the handset loaded with pennies compared to one without is enough to cause someone to completely misjudge the force needed when swinging one's handset towards one’s face,” Henry paused letting the meaning of his words sink it, “Neither of us predicted that he’d punch himself so violently in the face, nor that it would result in him breaking his chair. It was unfortunate that the phone cord was draped behind the monitor in that way, not only did we not see it, but we had no idea that it would form a kind of electrical cord sling shot.”

Ursula looked over her glasses at Henry. “It says here, in the statement given by Jeremy, that you made some kind of declaration while he was trying to stop his nose bleed.”

"Oh yeah," Henry thought as he tried to figure out if there was a way to say this without him looking bad.  He thought of how Charlotte had laughed, but immediately realized Ursula was not Charlotte.  He figured he had better come out with it, even though he knew it would likely seal his fate.  It was clever, even if she didn't realize it.  It would, he thought, at least make a good bar story.

“Quit hitting yourself!”