After graduating from UF in '83, I stuck around and got an MBA as well, so I was there for our first-ever 1984 SEC championship.  After graduating, I started a job in summer, 1985 as a financial analyst at Martin Marietta in Orlando.  Obviously, this was pre-internet.  A totally different world of work my millennial friends, because you could not play on your computer or pull out your phone to entertain yourself when you were bored.  So one way of dealing with the inevitable boredom of long work days was playing pranks on each other.  

There were 12 of us at the same job level that had desks out on the floor. An example of a work-related prank was unscrewing the mouthpiece on a guy's phone and removing the microphone, then replacing the mouthpiece  It was exciting to wait until he got a call.  "Hello"  Hello!"  "Hellooooo????"  (sound of phone slamming down and him swearing followed).  We did stuff like that constantly.  It really made for a fun work environment.  We were all mid-20's-ish, and had lots of fun while still getting the work done.

I kept my Gator Coke bottle on my desk.  We had just won our first SEC Championship the year before, and I was so proud of that accomplishment and the coke bottle that represented it.  One day, I came back from a meeting to find the Coke bottle missing.  I was furious, asking around but nobody knew anything.  Later that day, I came back to find a ransom note on my desk from the kidnappers of my coke bottle.  They actually cut out letters from newspapers and magazines and made a classic ransom note.  It took a lot of effort, but showed commitment to the prank.  I forget what they wanted for its safe return, but I didn't think they would do anything to my beloved coke bottle so I didn't comply.  This went on for a couple of days with more and more ransom notes with demands.  One even included a polaroid photo of my coke bottle next to the day's Orlando Sentinel to show it was still alive.  The demands and threats to the health of my coke bottle became increasingly aggressive.

I came in on Friday morning to see my coke bottle  on my desk.  It had been opened and was empty, laying on its side.  I totally lost my temper.  I never thought they would actually follow through with their threats to kill my coke bottle.  I swore at all of them (it was the norm then, nobody took offense) and screamed that they took this joke too far and they could &%&#& because they were %**^%&^$^s..  Lots of snickers from my colleagues. I knew they were all in on the prank.  But I was absolutely furious.

I come back from lunch and my coke bottle is back on my desk, and it is unopened, healthy, and sitting upright. Everybody starts laughing and clapping when I see it.  It turns out one of my colleague's got an SEC championship coke bottle from a friend who had purchased a bunch of them and opened it for the prank.  They never touched mine.   

That was why working there was fun as hell.  What an elaborate prank.  Stories like that make me certain that life was way better before phones and the internet where stuff like that was how we interacted.   

I just wish I had kept the kidnapping notes.  They were awesome.