While the judge is away...

The judge either broke or sprained his foot this last week, so he's been out of the office almost every day. My bailiff, who I share an office with, has taken advantage of our judge-less days to start a little prank war.

It began innocently enough with Tom hiding my Harry Potter action figure in the huge plant in our office. While he ran down to the filing room, I unplugged his keyboard and turned the monitor display on his desktop upsidedown (a handy little trick, CTRL ALT Up arrow, flips everything upside-down. CTRL ALT Down to fix. Works on most computers.)

A little later, Deputy Garrett in security called me down to the Control Room. The control room is pretty high-tech, with a wall full of flat screen tvs that connect to the countless video-cameras around the courthouse. Using a 32-inch tv and the parking-lot camera, he zoomed in on my little Acura, with Harry sitting on top up to his neck in snow. Deputy Garrett kindly agreed to de-activate Tom's security badge for me.

That's when things started to get out of control. I came back from lunch to find (well, hear actually) my cell phone ringing in the ceiling. Yesterday he moved my chair into the Judge's private bathroom and put donuts on the ends of my windsheild wiper blades. At Wendy's fantastic suggestion, I sent out an email from Tom's computer to the entire staff:

"Hey everybody, Tom here from Judge McDade's office. I got my hair cut and highlighted last night and it looks great! Come say hello and take a look, office 202." The rest of the afternoon, I kept a straight face as court employee after court employee came to compliment his new 'do. He figured it out at about 4:30 because his lame bailiff friend replied to the email.

But now I'm out of ideas. Heard of any good office pranks?