escalation unknown

Well, the events of last week's cranial explosion still haven't blown over. The guys in my office are getting more and more evil with their little pranks, especially since they were also yelled at by my customer for distracting me when I'm trying to work.

Sunday they hatched a plot where one of the guys would pretend he had to talk to me about work, luring me out of my chair. As soon as I would get out of my chair, and walk away from my desk, another guy would run over, sit in my chair, and fart. I know. Forty years old going on four. This little prank left me with a dilemma. I didn't want to sit in the fart chair. No one would exchange their chair for the fart chair, unless they farted on their chair first, leaving me still with a farty chair. I tried standing up to do my work, but that just caused more problems, namely...

They also paid the poor guy who cleans our office 30 dirhams (the equivalent of about $9 US) to constantly sweep around my cube (if you guys are reading this, I have moles in your organization). So if I am standing up trying to work on my computer, this guy is constantly behind me with his broom trying to sweep up my feet. He's not exactly right in the head, and finds this riotously funny, because everyone else in the office is like "sweep more!" and "you missed a spot!". I can't get mad at the poor thing, so I have to let him sweep, but it really makes me want to wring the necks of other people who shall not be mentioned here.

They keep raiding my stash of food, eating it, and stuffing paper into the packaging so that I won't know my food is missing until I decide I'm hungry. One enterprising chap took my grapefruit today, ate it (he better have eaten it), and then spent who knows how long retaping the peel together after filling it with little pieces of paper. I pulled the grapefruit out after a meeting and it fell apart, spilling paper pieces all over my desk. Then the guy with the broom came to clean it up. Though, I don't think they were smart enough to coordinate that. I think it was an unplanned outcome of the exploding grapefruit attack.

Today the pranks got a little dangerous when we had a meeting in the downstairs conference room. It has chairs normally screwed into the floor in a row, like a movie theater. I always sit in the front row because I'm a total control freak, and have to get up and fix things as people are drawing diagrams. I am working on not doing this, but it's hard. And the guy drawing today was purposely doing stuff that he knew would upset me, because his group had a nefarious plan.

Every time I got up to fix something today, the clever lad behind me unscrewed one of the screws under my chair. I facilitated this little prank because after I'm done at the computer I always slide across the floor (in my flip flops, on the marble floor, it's fun) until my shin hits the row of chairs where I'm sitting, then I do a little spin and drop ungracefully into my chair. After the last screw was out, when I dropped into my chair, it caused my entire row to fall backwards. I ended up in the lap of the incredible hulk.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

I was so sad I wasn't holding a scalding cup of tea at the time.

What they don't know is that I'm hatching a plan of my own, to be executed the day after I leave for Banff. Then we'll see who gets the last laugh.

Um, if anyone has any ideas for the above mentioned plan, please let me know.