Stacy’s Stick

Back in 2000, when I worked at Alldata, one of the guys I trained was named Stacy. He was a sharp student and a good worker, eventually moving up into a position where he was training new employees. Ah, the young grasshopper has surpassed the master.

I left that job in 2001 but through an odd turn of events, I went back to work there in 2006; and Stacy was my “trainer”. He used a long, white stick to point at the computer screen, so he didn’t have to sit in your lap. It only took a week for me to prove that I was still more than proficient at using the proprietary tools & programs that the company used.

Soon after settling back into my work routine, I looked to find interesting ways to entertain (READ: prank) Stacy. I got the idea of taking pictures of his stick in other locations, similar to Elf on a Shelf, Where’s Waldo, or other photography games. Several of my co-workers got in on the idea, so we would borrow the stick, mostly for a weekend, and send it away. One of my co-workers took the stick to Hawaii and it was swept out to sea, so we had to replace the stick with a “stunt double”. Eventually other departments in the company got involved and the pictures were flowing in. It seemed everyone in the company was in on the joke; everyone except Stacy.

We had secured the main web site URL as well as a Facebook page and a MySpace page. It was getting tough to keep my laughter under control when I talked to Stacy at work.

And then came the moment of truth. I had made a “ransom note” and one Monday morning, Stacy found the stick was gone and this note was on his desk:

Stacy went to the web site as instructed and found an alternate reality that his stick had been living, without him. The page was complete with numerous photos from all over the world. At the time, Jack in the Box restaurants had several different “antenna toppers”, so many times the stick had a topper as a decoration. It even had it’s own font and a sponsors page!