used to work with a guy who was really OCD. I don't mean that he was particular, I mean he was diagnosed with OCD. He didn't really count things, but he did arrange things just so. He was a teacher with me in Vietnam and the company we worked for had a room where we'd go to prep our materials and plan lessons. Each of us had our own seats staked out at these two long tables since management got rid of our desks, claiming that they wanted us "to be more collaborative." I'm pretty sure they just wanted more seating space since our staff doubled in a year.

Anyway, D (OCD guy) had really started to get under my skin, just by being himself. He's one of those people who are absolutely convinced that they can do anything under the sun. Not too long ago, he decided he was going to be a novelist and his goal was to get his first novel published within a year. I also watched him straining as hard as he could to do a pull-up and his face falling into bewilderment as he realized he couldn't do it. He thought he'd be able to do at least ten because the rest of us were able to. Never mind that the rest of us had made an agreement to push each other to work out for the six months prior.

Due to his OCD, D is an extremely fidgety person. He's always fiddling with this, straightening that, making sure that everything is in order. To be fair, it is that same quality that allowed him to maintain and use a 1997 Dell laptop until 2011. I don't know what he did, but it ran almost as well as my (then) new computer. In the office, I am a very focused person and even though I was at the other end of the table from D, his fidgeting would drive me nuts.

So I began to mess with his things. Very subtly, I moved each and every one of his things, just enough for him to recognize that something had happened. At first, he thought it was something he'd done as he'd got up. Then, as time went on, he began to check the table, to see if there were loose screws that were making it wobble. He observed the way people moved around the room to see if anyone regularly knocked into the table, thus moving his things.

Eventually others occasionally began doing the same things I had started doing and it was pretty apparent that it was really bugging the shit out of him. He had no one to point a finger at and at this point it had been weeks and no one fessed up to seeing anything. Fortunately, (probably more so for us) all of us in on "the joke" stopped.

Months later, D had again gotten on my nerves and on the nerves of a good friend. That night, D insisted on arm wrestling each of us and marveling at his own strength whenever he beat someone. He was even going around to other customers, who for the most part were pretty good natured about it, but as some of those guys had been on oil rigs for the past three or more weeks, it seemed like only a matter of time before he got knocked out.

The plan for our "prank" on him was to get him blackout drunk and put him in a taxi, after taking his shoes, money and phone and paying the driver the equivalent of $60 to drop D off in a random corner of HCMC. Luckily for D, another friend talked us out of it 3/4 of the way into the process. I can't help but feel like that was the prank that got away.

Of course, D could have ended up having his organs farmed or some other horror, but man does that guy get my goat.