Brief

Approach

• Pick a potato
• Find a hiding spot they will never think about it
• Hide potato
• ???
• Get caught or turn myself in (as potato has probably started to rot and become a biohazard)
• Unsuspectingly repeat

Fun with Friends

1. How it all started

2. The First Potato

3. Collateral Damage

“it’s a good peace offering – there’s no beef” – Friend B

3. Escalation

One of these blocks has a potato wrapped in a cardboard tube and foil.

I only find out while unveiling the latest cake experiment to the team and immediately am impressed and enraged.

3. Indoor Snowball

Friend B has an important project review over lunch
Meanwhile, we happened to have bought a container of brownies to share with the team and finished it (without friend B – woops).

It suddenly snowed that lunch time (very rare for this part of the UK) and I decided to get her a coffee and put a snowball in the brownie container.

(I later gave her snacks to make up for this brutal betrayal)

3. Easter Hijinks

Pretty self explanatory : Put the biggest egg in an Easter Egg

Design Notes:

• I was surprisingly lucky that ALDI were selling non-foil wrapped eggs this year
• I bought a third egg to sacrifice for manufacturing – it ended up being used as a glue filler as this chocolate seemed quite brittle
• Replacing the tape ‘safety seal’ was paramount to the experience of not getting caught
• Friend B didn’t admit she had been potatoed for several months – I was terrified that the potato had started to grow and become biohazardous. Turns out she was fuming she had been potato-ed and was scheming for retaliation over the last 4 months as she had opened it in front of her friends and a potato fell out of the box.

3. Return from COVID

I do like juxtapositions – there’s something nice about putting a potato with potato products

Design Notes:

• The bottom of the pringles can does lend itself to being opened with a can opener. However sealing it shut was difficult – I was lucky friend A didn’t look at the bottom.
• The paper-foil seal remained intact – which really sealed the deal

4. Housewarming Candle

A housewarming party got me excited to up my game by putting a potato in a candle.

Design Notes:

• Candle exterior painting is not friendly with paint – bain marie-ing the wax out meant I needed to strip and/or repair some of the exterior stickers
• Wax expansion/contraction during cool down introduces some weird artifacts but seemed to be solved with some heat-gunning
• Practising with a second candle would’ve helped educate me with lessons – will do that next time
• Friend A started using this candle and was very having the candle exposed before I was unfairly outed by Friend B (who I had ‘goosed’ (the evolution of the potato)). I bought Friend A a new Yankee Candle and wonder where the potato candle was.

4a. The Decoy

This was a simple potato for people who didn’t know that the potato game exist and draw attention away from the candle potato.

Design Notes:

• Using adhesive tape on an oily plastic surface did not work.
• Heat sealing with an iron worked really well
• The potato falls out very quickly against a repaired heat seal – the bag was not designed to retain a solid potato inside
• Snacking on spare crisps that had to be taken out to offset a potato in the bag makes for a wonderful afternoon snack

Where to from here?

This isn’t the end of the game – but escalation and lateral thinking is the new game here.

I absolutely love the wholesomeness of seeing friends seeing what’s just happened and just clicked – it all comes from love (because who has time and effort to have such escalating hijinks?)

Moving forward, it’s probably less about a physical potato but news/information delivered in really special and unexpected ways.

In saying that, one of them has just started a potato patch… maybe the war has just started!