plonq | There are worse things to have stuck in your head, like an axe, or a roofing nail.

I have the Capital I song from Sesame Street stuck in my head this morning. There are far worse songs that could be lodged there, but I am doing my best to not think of any.

One of my co-workers has been teasing another co-worker with an on-going prank involving Post-It notes. The victim has set up his Windows desktop picture as a shot of himself and various friends and siblings posing gangsta-style. At least one a day, when the victim is away from his desk, the prankster draws a simple smiley face on a Post-It note and sticks it over the victim's face in the photo.

I was feeling left out, so I decided to up the ante. I had a copy of the victim's backdrop picture (I had converted it to B&W for him, and still had the original on my machine), so I decided to modify it with a touch of my own. I drew a Post-It sized yellow square over his face, added a drop shadow and drew a smiley face on it. At a casual glance it looked fairly convincing. I saved the modified image to a shared network drive and waited for the victim to leave his machine unlocked and unattended.

While he usually borders on anal-retentive when it comes to locking down his machine, he was serendipitously pulled away from his machine yesterday in a manner just distracting enough to make him forget to lock it. I pounced on the opening, and 15 seconds later my evil work was done. As a finishing touch, the usual prankster carefully affixed a real Post-It note on top of the Photoshopped one.

While it would have been cool if the victim had burst into tears and called us heartless bastards, he actually laughed pretty hard when he figured out what we had done (after a couple of futile attempts to peel off the bogus Post-It note).

Note to self: if you are going to reply to a public in-box with the phrase "My nipples explode with delight!", check in advance that the people who monitor the mailbox are versed in Python. The reply of, "Does this mean that you want to fondle my buttocks?" suggests that at least one of them is.