In my younger days, while employed at a warehouse, I was the butt of the usual practical jokes directed at newcomers.(Fetch me a light-bulb repair kit,

In my younger days, while employed at a warehouse, I was the butt
of the usual practical jokes directed at newcomers.(Fetch me a light-bulb
repair kit, son;etc) As days passed, I noticed that one of my antagonists
was actually afraid of his terminal. This was at the time when the press
was full of accounts of the dangers of X-rays from color TV's, and this
guy was deathly afraid of the noise made by the high-voltage section of the
CRT as it warmed up. Each morning he sat in his swivel chair, coffee in his
left hand, and with the chair as far as possible away from the terminal, used
his right hand to quickly flick the ON switch, and then jerked it away from
THE CERTAIN DEATH THAT AWAITED. After the racket settled down, he would wheel
up to the terminal and commence operations.
This situation was too good for yours truly to pass up. I went upstairs
and pulled out a stock item, a stadium buzzer, used by high schools on the
football fields to announce the end of a quarter. I came in early the next
morning and installed it in one of his file boxes, near the terminal. I ran the
wires out to the next office via a pass-thru, and alerted all of the staff
(but him) of what was about to transpire.
He entered the room, coffee in hand, and sat in his chair. All others
were heads-down in work. He adjusted his chair to the proper distance, reached
way out for the switch, and as soon as he pulled, I plugged in the cord. As the
buzzer sounded, he assumed the facial expressions of one who has seen death
reaching it's skeltal fingers to snatch him from the land of the living.
Coffee flew to the ceiling, and for a few brief seconds before hitting the
opposite wall, a new world land speed record for backward swivel-chair
operation was established!