A couple years ago, I was at the office supply store when these Avery Matte White High Visibility Labels caught my eye:

You can imagine a pale, skinny, Edward Norton-looking graphic designer, sitting in a cubicle under florescent lighting, dreaming of punching his boss in the throat. But instead of founding a liposuction-fueled soap company, or a quasi-terrorist underground boxing league, this little culture jammer stuck it to the man by mixing a little mayhem into his package design assignment that the management wouldn’t likely notice right away.

Or actually, I like to think it happened like this…
It was all a big misunderstanding. Some employee of Avery, or their hired design house, got bored and sent out a humorous prank memo to the other designers:

Ha, ha, ha. Paper Street. Everyone in the studio had a good laugh and went about their day, continuing to design packaging with sample labels addressed to “Jane Jones.” Everyone, that is, except that one weird guy who sits in near the door and keeps track of how many donuts you took from the break room. You know that guy? He doesn’t get jokes. He takes everything literally and follows orders without question.

So off he went, dutifully obeying the memo and updating the design he was working on that morning. Two months later, to his surprise, the poor bastard gets canned for sabotaging Avery Dennison’s sterling reputation as a leader in paper solutions. (By God, they would not have their respectable company associated with the awful goings-on at Tyler’s place down on Paper Street!)

Today that graphic designer is bitter and unemployed, holed up in a basement somewhere, silently planning the destruction of Western Civilization. Tyler Durden, indeed.

That’s how I like to think it happened…

I came back a couple weeks later and these labels were gone. Did anyone else happen to notice this little exercise in design anarchy? I know this isn’t something I dreamed or hallucinated on a crack binge, because I have the photos.

Don’t you have a cartoon you’re supposed to be working on? Oh, wait. That’s me. Get back to work!

—- UPDATE! —-

Had I bothered to google this, I would have noticed that everyone in the world has already heard of it. It’s even in the Fight Club trivia at IMDB.

If you do a google search, you’ll find many, many mentions of this little prank. One person even speculated that the character was named after the paper labels. But the author of the original 1996 novel, Chuck Palahniuk, said the name came from a couple people he knew. And the Paper Street address has all kinds of wacky speculated meanings, including linking the two main characters to Puff the Magic Dragon and Jackie Paper.

Anyway, it’s likely the Avery labels came later. And obviously my prank memo hypothesis is still the most plausible explanation.

Seriously, now. Get the hell back to work.