Operation Diet Coke

Background:
- Yannis just received tenure from University of Oregon.
- Yannis likes Diet Coke and uses it as the sole source of caffeine.
- Yannis has a sign on his door. On one side, it says "I'M IN", on the other side, it says "I'M OUT". He flips it over everyday to indicate his location, until more sophisticated GPS-tracking technology becomes more accessible.

The Idea Man: Christoph Csallner. Born and educated in Germany, Mr. Csallner has been working for years in the prank-making industry, trying to be the first German to break into the Billboard Top 100 of pranks. Despite of heroic efforts, Mr. Csallner has largely been unrecognized by both the critics and the public. Mr. Csallner is looking for Operation Diet Coke to be his break-out hit.


The Idea:
- Replace the sign on Yannis' door with one almost identical. It says "I'M IN" on one side, "I'M TENURED" on the other. *
- Stack up cases of Diet Coke against Yannis' door.

*Idea #1 comes from Michal Young, underground prankster cult favorite, now retired from the scene.

The Financiers: Christoph Csallner, Me, Tony Kay, Reimer Behrends. The first three are Yannis' graduate students. Reimer is a post-doc. The only actual Doctor among us. As it turns out, Reimer later proved to us that there really is a difference between having a Ph.D and not having a Ph.D.

The Logistics Woman: Me. I'm good at crunching numbers for the amount of fund, sending out emails soliciting fund and labor contributions.

Operation Diet Coke was officially kicked off last Friday, when we learnt that Yannis received tenure. The first step was making a replacement sign for Yannis' door. As it turns out, Yannis' sign was made with cut-out stick-on letters, stuck onto a piece of construction paper. We found an appropriate font in MS Office that looked close enough. A manila folder was used to glue print-outs onto either side, to make it feel more like it's made on construction paper.
Sunday night, we made the purchase of 24 cases of Diet Coke, 3 cases of Diet Coke Plus, and 1 case of Diet Pepsi. This was not easy. We had to ask a Safeway employee to go into the storage room to fetch us more Diet Coke. And we had to endure very strange looks from the cashier.

The actual stacking of the Diet Coke cases took three tries.

Version 1.0: stacked them straight up. Completely unstable.
Version 2.0: This is where Reimer showed us what a Ph.D. can really do. Reimer came up with a zig-zagged configuration that looked much more stable. We tried that. But as we were almost done, the whole thing started swaying. Not good.
Version 3.0: A slight tweak of Version 2.0. We kept the spirit of Version 2.0's zig-zagged design. But rotated the formation such that the stack leans against the door for support. Much, much better. It might even stay long enough for Yannis to see it.
The Result: Yannis showed up around noon, on schedule. He was happily surprised. The pranksters are happy.