Ben and Kennyb live in a pretty sweet apartment in the Lower East Side in Manhattan, which you may remember from such past pranks as Sparkles.

We received an unfortunate phone call from our landlord 2 weeks ago, informing us that she was selling the place. She said not to worry though, because our lease would be honored until the end (August - it's currently April).

She asked that we cooperate with the realtor who was going to be showing the place, and we said ok.

Here is a photograph of the flyer for our apartment. The asking price is a cool $610,000:

So we starting working with the realtor, who was a total pain in the ass from the get-go. She was extremely pushy and and put us out a number of times. She asked us for favors, to be home at inconvenient times, and what not. Finally we were forced to tell her that we couldn't be troubled with her anymore, and that she had to deal directly with the landlord or the building management.

Editor's Note: For those of you who just like to scan the pictures on this site, I recommend you read the following text. There aren't too many pix to go along with it at first, but it's important background information. And trust me - there are some good pictures coming up!

On Wednesday afternoon, Ben is at work when he gets a pretty frantic call from Kennyb. "Was there someone in our apartment today?!?" he asked. "Oh yeah," Ben replied. "I forgot to tell you - the realtor was showing the place around noon. Is there a problem?"

"She's been touching my stuff" he yelled. "She made my bed, moved all my clothes around. You don't come into my house and touch my stuff!"

He was seriously pissed, and rightfully so.

Ben gave him the realtor's phone number so he could tell her off.

He didn't get through that night, so he called in the morning. And I don't want to replay the entire conversation, because this is a family site. Let's just say I think that was the first time in the history of the modern corporation that someone has been at the office and used the phrase "...and even if you walk into my apartment and see 20 dead cats in the living room, you better not touch a goddammed thing, because you know what? That's exactly where I want my dead cats!"

Needless to say, we were quite surprised when we came home from work that afternoon to find the apartment near 100 degrees, with all the lights in the apartment turned on, and the thermostat turned to full blast:

"Hi Realty Management Office? This is Kenneth Bromberg. I can't tell if your realtor is just kidding or not. Either she's got a great sense of humor, or we have some things to discuss. Please give me a call back as soon as you can."

Alright, so we were pretty pissed off at this point. We were going to call our landlord on Friday to complain, but she called first and left a message on Ben's voicemail. She just wanted to make sure that we knew about the open house on Sunday. Open house on Sunday??? The realtor didn't tell us anything about an open house! Holy carp! Now we were REALLY pissed off!

This woman thinks she can just waltz into our apartment on Sunday for two hours with out any problem?!

Let me repeat that.

This woman thinks she can just waltz into our apartment on Sunday for two hours with out any problem?! :)

We spent the remainder of Friday and Saturday night brainstorming ideas for what we could do. Now keep in mind, we wanted to mess with the realtor, but didn't want to do anything to jeopardize our landlord's sale or that we would have to live with that evening (that's why the skunk didn't make the cut).

The following is the list of our ideas:

Skunk in the living room

Turn 3 air conditioners on full blast and get the temperature down to 5 degrees

20 dead cats, of course

A giant pyramid of cans in the kitchen

Board up all the windows and remove all the lightbulbs from the house

The Numa Numa kid playing on repeat on the projector in a loop:

Intermittent flatulence playing on the stereo

Get a bunch of friends to dress like hoodlems and brown-bag it on the stoop all afternoon

In the end, we decided to take her head-shot from that flyer, photocopy it 100 times, and tape the pictures up all over our apartment.

This is the original picture we grabbed from the realty website:

The next stop was FedEx Kinko's where we could use the color laserjet and color copiers.

As expected, every copier at Kinko's was out of order. Here is a nice shot of a disgruntled employee trying to fix the copier for us:

She couldn't fix it, so we went to another Kinko's and eventually got some copies made.

Click the picture below to download the full 8.5x11" version:

These are all the pictures we could fit on our dining room table:

You know, we made enough copies of her face that if you lined them up end-to-end, they would reach all the way to the moon!

(At this point in time, I'd like to take a moment to thank god for red-eye reduction, if you know what I mean).

We then set to work cutting and taping, cutting and taping. Be sure compare Kennyb's pythons to the way they looked in the Cube Prank and compliment him on the progress he's made in the last year! Go Kennybodybuilder!

We taped up pictures everywhere

At this point, I think it's best to just let the pictures speak for themselves:

Ben wanted to put these little ones in a heart shape, but Kennyb said that would be creepy.

Can you count all the realtor pictures in the picture below? (hint: There are 15)

I almost forgot to mention - we also found a sound clip of a water drip on the internet. We then setup the stereo to play the drip every 30 seconds. Oh, and we hid the stereo :)

Download the drip sound: drip.mp3

At around 1:30pm, we sent Jeremy and Arin in to the open house to act as potential buyers and check up on things.

Evidently she had taken down about half of the pictures by that point, although there were definitely plenty of them still up. They said she was pretty much composed, although she's not looking so thrilled here:

We went to a coffee shop for the remainder of the afternoon. It was there that we had the brilliant realization that because we are huge nerds, our entire stereo system can be controlled remotely over the internet.

It took a while to come up with the best track to play, but Weezer's "Buddy Holly" ended up the big winnder. At about 2pm, we started blaring the song in the living room. We didn't want it going on too long, so after about a minute we slowly faded out. And then put the drip back on.

Apartment in Manhattan	$610,000
Color copies at Kinko's	$44
Getting 30 days notice as a result of this prank	Priceless

Update! 4/16/2005: The prank was written up in the NY Post (Download photo of original print article (650KB))