Office1000 Blog June Archive

Push pins can be a fun way to decorate a child's room

By Lizzie Botticelli at 06/26/2007 10:06

Kids love to stick things on their walls. Even though we hate to fill in all the little holes, it gives them so much pleasure why not give them some designer push pins to tack up their posters and what not.

Even better, buy them or make them their own place to keep mementos and pictures by using cork squares. You can double them together to make it thinker, cover it with a pretty piece of fabric and glue it on the backside. You can use a couple of strips of ribbon going over the fabric to give them another way of holding pictures there. They just slip them under the ribbon.

You can put a wood frame around the cork tiles if you wish since it will be easier to hang on the wall. Then buy them some kewl push pins to stick things on their new display.

What is the difference between push pins and map tacks?

Are you wondering what the difference is between map tacks and push pins? Well, after doing some research on just that subject I found that they both have many uses and in some cases can be used interchangeably.

Push pins are great for tacking stuff to cork boards like pictures and other crafty things. Kids use them a lot in their rooms to mount posters to walls and stick their photos on their spaces they have created for such things. I have found some very kewl push pins in lots of shapes and pretty colors. I found pewter push pins that are really neat for speial uses. They can be plain boring colors or neon brite colors. There are also push pins with round flat heads you can write on.

Map tacks, or map flags, or sometimes even map pins... are very diversified and can be used for bunches of things. Art galleries buy the numbered pins to identify artists work. Planners use map pins on schematics to identify key tasks in a project. I was looking at some different map tacks and it seems there is one for everything you can think of and more on a map. You use different colors and shapes to denote different features.

Some type of map tacks are:

• Erasable map pins
• Small map pins
• Medium Map pins
• Large map pins
• Medium pins with dots, stripes or crosses on the pin head
• Flag and pennant map pins
• Large colored push pins
• Numbered map pins

Of course you can also think of other uses for map tacks and push pins, like putting them on the teacher's chair (common in my day and age at school), using them for land mines in areas you don't want intruders sneaking in and many more.

How to Spite Your Intra-Office Nemesis (Part-1)

So there's that guy (or gal) in your office who totally drives you crazy. Maybe he or she kisses up to the boss in ways the rest of you can't stomach, or maybe it's that lazy jerk who gets all mad because you're kissing up. It doesn't matter to me, so either way, here are a handful of subtle methods you can use to spite your coworkers. This is kind of a long article, and I tried to keep it to a single piece, but once it broke the thousand-word mark, it necessarily was broken into two, but I assure you, revenge is a dish best served via a long, drawn out article explained in vivid detail.

I'll try to put these in order by least offensive to most, but in the end it's all a matter of taste.

Starting off easy, if you've got a co-worker you dislike, take his or her handset telephone cord, disconnect it and place it in the top drawer of the desk. No harm, no foul, but it will be fun when the phone rings, they try to answer it, and they're stuck with a disconnected handset upside the head with no ability to hear or be heard. Oh, it's just fun.

If your co-worker uses a 10-key to punch up numbers, take a fine-tip screw driver to disassemble and rebuild it. Take the traditional number placements of the calculator, and re-order them in keeping with a telephone, which is top-to-bottom, instead of bottom-to-top. Visually, it will still look fine, but all of the math that comes out of it will be crazy messed up. It isn't too bad of a prank, but don't worry, we're just getting warmed up.

If you've got a beef with the janitor, as I did when she hit on me, dressed up fancy, then turned me down once I succumbed to hitting on her, take the contents of your hole punch and place them strategically around the office. There's nothing harder to get out of the carpet than hole-punches, so lean towards your bosses door, since he or she will be the first to complain, and the most probably to fire that janitor.

Bring in a two-dollar vial of clear nail polish, and use it to varnish the pencil and other erasers. It's virtually invisible, but the damn things won't erase nothing for nothing once you've sealed them in polished lacquer.

If your office has air-fresheners, whether of the clip on, tape on, or spray variety, use them up entirely against your nemesis co-worker. If you have to buy it and bring it from home, go for it, it's still a cheap degree of vengeance. Easy is to fill the bottom of a garbage can, since it will reek for weeks, but go for cloth or hidden areas. Stick a paste-on sort to the bottom of a desk (wide open, of course), or dump a few ounces of patchouli oil in the swivel chair. The stench will quickly become unbearable, and there ain't much a darn thing that can be done about it.

Save up dead ink cartridges and put them in your coworker's desk. It's easy, you just take his or her good, new ones, and replace them with your own old, dead ones. It's the most minor distraction, but every bit helps when it comes to harassing your least favorite coworker.

Steal office supplies and put them in your office-mate's desk. Especially if it's something critical and important. If the tactic doesn't work, mention to the office busybody that you thought that person might have them. It will be a surprise to everybody, and you weren't part of it, but it's trouble when we're out of push-pins and one person has every single one of them buried in the desk.

Go in a tad early, and take the making of the morning coffee upon yourself. Do it, and do it with glee, but make the coffee ever and forever weaker. I had an ornery ass of a coworker who made four times what I did, and that jerk would drink a hundred half-cups of coffee per day. He wouldn't brew the stuff himself, but oh man, that Bill Watt would drink it like a madman. I took it upon myself to make the coffee weaker and weaker until he wouldn't drink it. He had to walk halfway across the complex to get coffee strong enough for his taste, and my single pot became enough for us, even though three-pots never was before.

If your hated coworker uses Equal, Sweet & Low or Splenda, it's easy to spite them. Just start slitting the packets and emptying them out. It doesn't work with sugar, but it does with these. If you also use an artificial sweetener, just keep a stash in your desk and you'll be fine, but they'll find none of what they want, and that small irritation will overwhelm them in a day.

If you don't drink coffee, go ahead and add pencil shavings, ash and spices to the coffee grounds. Even mixed up a tad, nobody will notice it, but even a dash of All-Spice will forever change the flavor of the coffee in ways they can't imagine. If you do drink coffee, and you still want this prank in your arsenal, keep taking cups of coffee yourself, pour them out in the bathroom by degrees, and insist you don't notice anything wrong with the taste of it.