Halloween is in the air. A couple of weeks ago, I spontaneously painted a Birthday Banner for a colleague, using my hands and fake blood. It was demonic. Just the way I like it.

After I painted, I ran out my office and down the hall with my hands covered in fake blood and ran up to people, shoving my hands in their faces and breathlessly questioning, "I think I cut my hand!"

You should have seen the reaction. Every so often I like to create a nice little ice breaker like that. We all work hard and can lose ourselves in our work, forgetting that we are a creative business.

When Gingi worked with me, I used to do things like take a pair of large grandma type underwear (not mine & not used) I stored in my drawer and wear it on my head for meetings. Because WHY NOT?! I mean, really, why not?

I also tormented Gingi by frequently calling her extension and when she picked up, blast Kid Rock's "Cowboy" through the system. I could hear her scream in 2-D, through the phone and through the hallways, from her desk a few feet down the corridor.

At my job before this, the President of the agency used to totally abuse me. Our offices were on this U-shape floor, and there were days when I would see my VM light blink and blink with scathing, profain messages, and I would crawl under my desk and hide there until she would send someone from her side of the office to mine and that young guy, who was a friend, would peer down at me, shake his head and say, she's calling you. And then I would ask him to pick it up in the hopes that someone else's voice would calm her down, but inevitably, he would hand over the phone and I would shakily raise it to my ear, but before it even got there, I could her her shrill voice with a heavy Queens accent, scream my name through the phone and catch up with decibels flying through the hall and penetrating the sturdy exterior of my desk fort.

Awful.

So, I'm a big proponent of mixing it up during the work day. However, since the fake blood incident, one of my co-workers has been trying to "get me back." As far as I'm concerned, the fake blood performance was a generic stunt. I wasn't targeting any specific person, so there's no qualifying for "payback." Apparently, he feels otherwise. So he keeps coming into my office and trying to prank me.

Yesterday, he places a plastic rat on the floor behind my chair. Then he says, "Partygirl! What's that?!?," while pointing with a faux shocked expression, at the rat. I slowly turned around in my chair, stared down blankly, looked up and said a "a plastic rat," as I turned back to my computer.

Today, it was the fake, "There's a roach behind you!" ploy. I barely tilted my head.

Clearly this guy doesn't know who he is dealing with.

Halloween cannot come soon enough.

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