mkf plays a practical joke

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[this one's for noblesavage--he'll know why]


one day back in the day, i suddenly found myself anointed day supervisor of a document-services department for a law firm here in los angeles--i say "suddenly," because right up until it happened, i was just a lowly part-time temp who had been brought in a couple nights a week by the then-night supervisor [and my friend and former roommate] paul.

when the previous day supervisor of fifteen years unexpectedly up and quit and i was offered her job, my overnight ascendency to the throne came as a shock to many, but no one more than my former roommate--all of a sudden we were equals on his home turf, and while paul smiled stiffly and wished me well, i could tell he didn't particularly mean it.

at first it wasn't much of a problem--my shift ran from 8 to 4 and his from 2 to 10, so we had a two-hour overlap; it only became an issue as our individual styles began to conflict.

see, i'm mild and easygoing by nature, the morning crew i inherited was a joy to work with, i took great pains to ensure that subsequent hires fit right in and we all got along great.

paul, on the other hand, was difficult.

while he could be [and often was] brilliantly funny, he was just as often cutting and cruel, and his captive night crew mostly reacted to him with all the mixed emotions of battered wives.

he was especially hard on the girls--a true heterophobe, everything about women and their physiology repelled paul, and he made no secret of his revulsion whenever anything even remotely related to the subject came up in general conversation.

and, like all bullies who love dishing it out, he couldn't take it worth a damn.

whatever--point is, the minute paul walked in the door, the laughter stopped and everybody tried to gauge his mood, see what kinda night it was gonna be.

everybody, of course, but me.

see, being suddenly bulletproof, knowing him from way back when and not giving a rat's ass either way, i delighted in fucking with him--mostly mild shit at first, but the road to hell always starts small.

why i chose to up the ante exponentially on this particular day i cannot tell you--it might've come down to nothing more than a combination of paul's misogyny, my perverse sense of humor and his unvarying routine.

here's what i'm talkin about: every day at 2:00 like clockwork he'd sail through the door bitching about something, grab a handful of whatever had been left in the communal snack area and pop it in his mouth, dump his shit on his desk, pluck the bulletin outta his in-box and settle back in his chair to catch up on the events of the day.

the bulletin, you ask?

the bulletin was the firm's daily newspaper--who's outta the office, who closed a big deal, who's having a birthday, who's selling girl-scout cookies for their kid, that sorta thing.

as the first guy in, it was my job to pull together and distribute the bulletin firm-wide each morning. being a creative type, i decided early on to liven up the dry, uninteresting rag i had inherited by adding graphics and shit.

on the morning in question, whilst searching the corel archives for a piece of clip-art to spice up a notice for some secretary's kid's candy-bar sale, amongst all the usual inoffensive images of balloons and birthday cakes popped up one that was so completely outta place and inappropriate it almost made my eyes bug out outta my head.

but it also started the wheels turning in my evil little brain, and in a flash, la leche de la madre league was born.

please understand: normally, i can't abide practical jokes--not merely because they're juvenile, but because (when i do 'em, anyway) they tend to become incredibly detail-oriented and time-consuming--but when presented with an opportunity of this magnitude, i simply couldn't resist.

once it was saved and distributed, i pulled up the day's bulletin, made a copy, excised the item regarding said secretary's kid's candy-bar sale and replaced it with something very much like the following [sadly, this was back before i realized the importance of saving shit]:

Support la Leche de la Madre League

In order to promote the healthy practice of breast-feeding of infants
in poor Latin American countries, la Leche de la Madre League
is selling these delicious breast-milk chocolate candy bars to
demonstrate that human breast milk is infinitely superior in taste
and nutritional value to ordinary cows' milk.


Please, stop by [secretary's] desk, buy a bar and show your
support for this most worthy cause.

i printed one copy of this faux-bulletin, which went directly into paul's in-box in place of the real thing.

i then dropped by the secretary's desk who was selling chocolate bars for her kid, bought a bar for a dollar, removed the label and, bringing to bear my not-inconsiderable desktop publishing skills, created a new label which was identical in every way to the original--except for the shit i chose to change, of course.

once i was satisfied it was perfect, i wrapped the old candy bar in its spanking-new label, opened it, laid it out in the communal food area, broke off a piece for authenticity's sake, informed the room of what was up, calmed their fears, told 'em to play along--they were almost all actors in their other lives, and good ones--and sat back and waited for 2:00.

it went like clockwork.

at the usual time, paul breezed through the door, paused at the communal food table, snapped a piece off the candy bar somebody'd thoughtfully provided, popped it in his mouth, rounded his desk, dropped his shit, reached for the bulletin as he chomped his newly-acquired mouthful o' milk chocolate and settled back in his chair.

i counted maybe 30 seconds before he looked up, eyes wide, came outta his chair cursing and spitting chocolate, rounded his desk, grabbed and read with all-consuming horror the wrapper which elaborated the all-too-human ingredients of the chocolate he'd just ingested

and maybe 45 seconds before the room finally erupted in laughter and i told him to relax, it was just a joke.

[that this bit of harmless levity would later and very decisively come back to bite mkf in the ass is a given, but that's another story for another day. whatever--on this day at least, i got the last laugh.]