The funniest thing

I guess he got what was coming to him -- or maybe he deserved worse.
My colleage, John Boyle, and I were making our afternoon coffee run. Between 2:30 and 3 every afternoon, we start to drag, so we go for coffee. You can almost set your watch by it.
Today, as we were going down the stairs, Boyle heard the stair door close again and assumed it was a colleague who had startled him when she honked her horn at him in a parking lot yesterday.
"Wait," he said. "Stay here. I'm going to give her a little scare."
I stopped and stood behind him, and as the person reached the landing, he jumped out and said, "Boo!"
It wasn't the colleague he wanted to scare.
It was the publisher. Big boss. Where the buck stops.
Both of them had the same look: utter terror.
The publisher sat down and started to laugh as Boyle tried to explain.
"It wasn't supposed to be you," he said. "You see, Karen Chavez scared me yesterday when she honked her horn at me and revved her engine. I thought she was right behind us."
This is a trick he has played on Karen, on me and on just about everyone else in the newsroom.
"C'mon, John, I'll help you clean out your desk," I said. "By the way, when you kill the publisher, do you get to do the story or do I get an exclusive jailhouse interview?"
For the rest of the afternoon, he kept saying,"How was I to know it was him? I thought it was Karen."
So, did he learn his lesson? I don't think so. The great part of his charm is that he doesn't learn his lesson. He is refreshingly immature and inappropriate just when people need it most. No matter how bad things get in my life, he can make me laugh. And he gets away with his antics because -- well, I'm not sure why.
But he has everyone wanting to get him. I did it a couple weeks ago when I talked the VP of Human Resources into calling him into her office. She was very serious for about 30 seconds, telling him she had gotten a pretty serious complaint. He struggled to think about what he had done in the last couple of weeks and came up with a couple of practical jokes and wise-guy comments. She had him going. He was ready to apologize. But then she started laughing. When he told me how scared he had been, I laughed and admitted I was the one who plotted the whole thing,
I'm waiting for payack.
Or maybe he learned his lesson today when he almost gave the publisher a heart attack.
Naaaaah.