My soft drink of choice is Diet Pepsi, and I generally drink a can or two a day at work. At one point I got lazy about taking the empty cans over to the recycle bin, so I just started piling them up in my office. After a while, I had built up a rather large block of them: 9x9x3, to be precise, or 243. When I jokingly suggested that I would start collecting them in the next cube over, the fellow there said it was fine with him, so I had another 60 or so in there. So as April 1 approached, it occurred to me that I had enough cans to do something interesting with them.

It turned out it wasn't quite enough cans, but by collecting my empties at home, and getting a bit of help from Coke-drinking friends, I was able to collect the 447 cans I needed. So on Sunday, March 31, I ducked into work and built this wall blocking the entrance to the cubicle across the hall from mine.

The Coke cans were used to fold in a timely message, though it was apparently subtle enough that not everyone who saw it realised it was there.

The "caution" tape, incidentally, was already present. Some of the people at my workplace use such tape as a sort of "do not disturb" sign. I did add a small attachment in the middle of the tape, displaying a paper I'd received in a fortune cookie the weekend before, when I was working out the details of the construction, some of which can be seen in this rear view. The full structure was 13x13x3, with the two non-front layers containing some gaps. There was a lot of tape used to give it some stability, but none of that was visible from the front.

I sent mail to the Engineering team saying I wouldn't be in on Monday, but that I'd still be with them "in spirit". That, plus the desk calendar I'd left on my keyboard prominently displaying the page for April 1, made it clear whose handiwork it was.

As I expected, Pavel, the co-worker whose cube I'd sealed thought it was a great prank. He thought about using the cans to build something in response in my cube, but he somehow thought I was going to be gone for the whole week, so he didn't get to it in time, and we just tossed the cans when I got back on Tuesday. But he did have a good time on Monday, when he climbed over the cubicle walls to get inside and spent part of the day working in his cube with the wall still up!