Johnny Monsarrat Pranks: Hall of Fame #2: Office of Balloons -- Johnny Monsarrat Pranks

Fall 1994. I was a PhD student in computer science at Brown University, and the pressure is getting to me. Time for some stress relief! Download the balloons movie: balloons.mpg (1.1Mb)

Filling the balloons

I've always wanted to fill a room with balloons, after experiencing how difficult that was back in 1985. I'd been an MIT student and foolishly thought blowing up a few hundred balloons manually would do the job. It turned out to be not enough balloons and too hard on my lungs.

This time we'd do it the professional way. My thesis advisor, Tom Dean, had innocently given me a key to his office. Now I would put it to good use.

I rented tanks of compressed air and a bunch of balloons. We sent word around to all the students and suddenly there was a group

I'd chosen nitrogen instead of compressed air. Nitrogen is actually less expensive because it's a by-product of making compressed oxygen. Nitrogen wouldn't float the balloons like helium, but nitrogen is probably the most inert gas. 75% of the atmosphere is nitrogen. We still had to keep an eye out for

Christine ties off a balloon

ventillation.

The balloons were pretty cheap too... although they wouldn't have been if I'd bought the fancy self-closing ends. Instead, we tied them by hand. A little hard on the fingers, but do-able.

It took six hours with four tanks of air. Actually, three tanks of us filling the balloons and tying the ends. would have done it, but two of them leaked so it was good we had all four. We used 2,200 normal 9" balloons to fill up a medium sized professor's office.

We started out with the tanks in the room. One person would fill the balloon, using a special adapter nozzle on the tank. Another person would tie off the balloon, and then throw it into the far corner. When the corner filled up, we backed out to the middle of the room. When that filled up, we backed out to the corridor and stuck the balloons through the doorway one by one. Occasionally someone would wade in and sweep the balloons further in.

We ran out of balloons a couple of feet below ceiling height. Good enough.

500 down, 1700 more to go

Since my advisor was an early riser, the idea was that after he saw the balloons, we'd pop them before anybody else arrived for the day. Unfortunately, one of the secretaries was getting interviewed on videotape, and wanted to get the balloons. By the time they were done, there were too many people around for such a loud noise.

But Tom wanted to work in his office. So we cleared out a little area around the desk by pushing some of the balloons into the corridor. There was quite a rubber smell, and he couldn't open the windows because the balloons would leak out. But it was OK.

Walking through balloons is strange. You have to kind of wade through them, because if you step you might burst one, or even lose your balance. Most people loved the prank, but the balloons in the corridor were an annoyance. I was told to get rid of them.

How do you dispose of several hundred balloons? Well, we had to marshall them down the fire stairwell, four stories down to the first floor. Of course, there they created a fire hazard, so we did finally pop them... but nobody worked near the ground floor stairwell so it wasn't disturbingly loud, except for us. We wore earplugs.

Sometimes these pranks can go awry. For example, the faculty at the computer science department were interviewing a prospective new faculty member, Maurice Herlihy. Tom Dean was to interview him! Maurice met up with Tom in his office — where all the balloons meant there wasn't enough room for both of them. Fortunately, Maurice was a good sport, and he did eventually end up joining the department. Phew! Nobody suggested the balloons would spoil the interview, but this is just the sort of thing a careful prankster is supposed to watch out for.

After the day was over, we did finally pop the balloons in Tom's office. It took over a half hour, and then we had to clean up all the little pieces of balloon. Fortunately, the rubbery smell in the air disappeared entirely — it did not get into the carpet the way cigarette smoke would.

This was a prank I was expecting to get into a little trouble for, but it turned out everyone loved it. I even got a writeup in the department newsletter.