The afternoon went on like this: Porsche, pizza, Porsche, pizza. I was the most popular employee in the office: not only did I have an expensive sports car, I had free food. My co-workers descended on the pizza like a pack of ravenous wolves, as if they had been held as political prisoners in Burma for the last eighteen months.

By this time, I had figured out that the criminal behind the pizzas had also posted something on the Internet instructing people to send me e-mail. But who it was or how they obtained my credit card number was beyond my grasp. I called ZUG artist Al Natanagara and hurled desperate accusations, but he too laughed and denied it.

I began concocting elaborate theories about a ZUG reader who might have stalked me and obtained my personal information. It was a lesson in how easily we can delude ourselves: having ruled out the list of obvious suspects, I was ready to believe that a brilliant psycho hacked into the high-security computers at American Express just to order me pizzas. By the time the count got up to six pizzas and 15 subs, I was getting seriously worried, although the final delivery came with a bottle of Surge, which I thought was a nice touch. At least the serial killer had a sense of humor.

At 4:45, I got a phone call from Jay Stevens. "Can I show you something I've been working on?" he asked. He gave me a web site address, which I typed into my browser.

It was this page.

"NOOOOOO!!!!" I broke out laughing.

"Early this morning, I called up Ned," Jay explained, referring to my co-worker Ned Rhinelander. "He secretly obtained the address of your computer, and we rewrote the ZUG homepage so that everyone could see the link to the prank page except you. It took a lot of coordination."

I slapped myself on the forehead, because I had been on ZUG all day long, posting the details of my birthday adventures on our message board, GAB. The prank had been pulled off right under my nose! "What if I had used another computer?" I asked. "How did you know it would work?"

"We didn't," said Jay. "There were lots of ways it could have failed."

Jade added, "The only thing that went wrong was that you weren't supposed to see the credit card receipt. When I ordered the pizzas, I told the delivery guy to ask you to pay each time. I didn't think you would, so he was supposed to act more and more angry each time he made a delivery."

"I can't believe you guys made this work," I said. "I can't believe you did an interactive prank, and not one ZUG reader gave it away. Incredible!" They giggled, obviously pleased with themselves.