My only checklist item for the weekend is to get a care package to the college dormitory-bound daughter of a friend. The lovely has no car and no job. Now she’s fresh out of Capri Sun and brownies that mom packed her for move-in. Poor thing.

Lest I be mistaken for an empathetic individual with a heart, underneath all the Oreos and Twizzlers and Lays products, I’m going to hide a couple Jenny Craig coupons at the bottom of the box. By the time she and the roommate get that far into her box of goodies, I’ll be miles away, laughing my evil ass off.

This has me reminiscing about the years my son was away at college. By October of his Freshman year the weekly phone calls home had dried up and all of my phone calls to him were going to voicemail, unreturned.

I hatched an idea for a prank. Without any heads-up, I started subscribing Ian to a new magazine every time I had a payday. I addressed all the subscriptions to his dorm room.

It started off with Entertainment Weekly.
Then Maxim.
Then Playboy.
Then MILF porno magazine.
Then PIMP magazine (yes, there is/was a Pimp magazine).
Then Modern Mother.
Then Civil War Miniature Enthusiast. 
Then a German language magazine that I had no idea what it was. It just looked bizarre.
Then White Crane, a gay spirituality magazine.
Then Cat Fancy.

Cat Fancy was the magazine that finally broke him. Oh man! He was so mad at me when he finally called home. “Dad! Knock it OFF! The girl who sorts the mail at the front desk thinks I’m a fucking whackjob pervert cat lover!”

It goes down as one of my best pranks. I’m proud of that one.

My second best prank was the Reverse Theft prank. Joe was a coworker who kept a couple dollars’ worth of quarters in his desk drawer. He was not discrete about the money. He was very generous to our writing team and frequently said, “If you need change for the soda machine, help yourself and pay it back whenever you can.”

Very cool.

Then one of the after-hours cleaning crew came through one night and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down. He even took my crappy old AM/FM Walkman knockoff that I left on my desk to hear baseball day games and talk radio.

After that incident, Joe replenished his change, but I saw him counting it every night before he went home and every morning when he arrived. He wrote the balance on the corner of his desk calendar. I couldn’t resist.

First I dropped an extra quarter in Joe’s drawer every night after he left. Of course, in the morning he had a quizzical look on his face when he added up his drawer change. “Man, apparently I can’t count,” he mumbled.

Then I started adding a dollar in change every night. Then two dollars. Then an entire ten dollar roll of quarters.

Behind the scenes, the rest of us writers had a pool on how much I had to put in before Joe said, “Hey! What the hell?”

ANSWER: $10. That entire roll of quarters freaked his shit.

Thank God. That prank was getting expensive fast.

What’s your favorite prank?  All you Facebook folks who never comment here on the blog, weigh in.

Happy weekend to you all.