Office Pranks
This excerpt is from chapter 14 in Jones' point of view. Caffrey had just vanished and Shield had shown up as his temporary replacement. The office feels Neal is being forcefully replaced so they start playing pranks on Shield. (Not necessarily realistic for the group but a fun concept to play with anyway). Without further ado, one of my favorite excerpts :D
Feeling like Neal was being forcefully replaced, no one was pleased, but what choice did we have? Unable to entirely set back and allow this, the office decided to make their displeasure known in a manner that wouldn't have repercussions.
Things started with little comments like "Neal's desk," small references that separated Shield as a temporary participant from the residing team, and Peter never called Shield his partner like he did Neal.
Watching how Shield treated Neal's stuff as if they were his own possessions sparked our second reaction. A few agents stayed late and removed all of Neal's possessions into a box which Peter took home to hold until Neal's return.
The next day Shield came into the office, took one look at Neal's desk, and walked back out with a smirk on his face. When he came back a little while later he had a box filled with his own possessions that he set up to replace Neal's belongings.
It seemed that he not only wasn't fazed by our actions, he thought it was amusing.
The third protest was to remind him that the desk wasn't his which led to a series of pranks (some got a little off course but were too fun to pass up).
On day one, he came into the office to find the desk securely wrapped in crime scene tape while other crime scene paraphernalia was spread a crossed the top making a bit of a mess for him to clean up.
His response was a report on who had done what based on finger prints, supplies used, and general personality traits. Unnerved by how accurate he was we decided to be more careful on the rest of our plans.
Day two, we rearranged the items in his drawers so nothing was where it was supposed to be. Then some tech savvy agents set up several pranks on his computer so that it had messages popping up randomly, the mouse wouldn't work, the keys were rearranged, as well as a few other clever pranks to annoy him. He responded with prank messages popping up on the computers for all of the agents involved.
Mine was the screen shot prank which meant that my screen only showed the message listing what we had done to him and the" I know you were involved Clinton" with a smiley face ending. It was designed for me to think that my computer had frozen, but I knew how it worked so I check that the recycle bin could still move before changing the screen image back to normal.
For the third day of pranks we took random things from his desk and left ransom notes with treasure hunt messages for him to follow. We also hid several remote controlled noise makers around his desk that we would randomly turn on and off as we pleased. Again, he seemed relatively unfazed as he simply solved the puzzles quickly and with keen hearing he discovered the noise makers with in a use or two.
As we were leaving the office we all found ourselves having to return to our desks for our wallets and keys because he had picked our pockets clean throughout the afternoon and left us ransom notes in exchange. Collecting our belongings we discovered our noise makers placed with the appropriate owner's belongings.
The final prank to his desk took a lot of planning and calling in several favors. We set finger print locks on all of the drawers, set up a retinal scanner to access the computer, and put everything on top of his desk into various kinds of lock boxes and mini safes.
No one ever figured out how he bypassed the retinal scan or finger print locks since they were set to Caffrey's scans, but he did, and removed them so that no one ever got the chance to discover his methods. As for the lock boxes and safes, we got to watch him break into them with Caffrey speed and finesse.
For days after the last desk prank we occasionally found cryptic messages warning us that pranks were going to be coming our way. We would take precautions having no idea what he was going to do to us, but nothing ever happened leaving us with the impression of the prank where the prank never comes.
Finally, our last prank got a reaction that ended the pranks.
Deciding that if Shield thought he was going to be replacing Neal then our prank should be something that would affect Neal. Choosing the tie as our point of attack we set up an arrangement that would cause Shield's tie to be damaged before someone would innocently offer their "spare tie" (a really horrid tie that would be a personal affront to Neal and had been purchased for this specific prank).
In essence, this would be to make the point that he may have taken Neal's desk, but he would never be Neal.
The morning we chose to complete our prank Peter and Shield were getting ready to meet a victim for a case. My conspirators set up the situation while I brought Shield into the trap. Once the mess had "accidentally" been spilled all over his tie and Shield was trying to clean it off we put the second part into play. Agent Blake was sitting nearby just happened to have a "spare tie" laying around and offered it up as consolation.
Shield responded in a very Caffreyesque manner complaining "Come on, I don't know how you can expect me to wear such a tie with this suit" and so on.
Surprising us all Peter distractedly responded "It's just a tie Caffrey. Cowboy up."
Suddenly Peter and the rest of us stopped to really look at Shield and except the hair being done different, the sunglasses firmly in place, and a few slight facial differences…we had Neal Caffrey standing before us in appearance, speech, and personality.
Completely flummoxed we simply stared while Shield gave up on the tie and rearranged his wardrobe to accommodate the tieless appearance seemingly oblivious to our baffled expressions.
Then someone's phone rang and we were released from our frozen state allowing for us to get back to work while Peter and Shield left for their meeting. The circumstances of the situation never left our minds though and Shield joined the realm of our Caffrey theories.