What's the meanest prank you ever tried to pull?

[stiffdogg]

Mine is from high school. And it's pretty evil. I'm very glad in retrospect that it didn't work. A friend and I thought it'd be funny to try and ruin the homecoming football game. So while everybody was in a pep-fest in the gym, we went out to the field with our tools and found a spot on the 20-yard-line hashmark. We cut a patch of grass on three sides, essentially creating a trapdoor, and then shoveled a good 18-inch hole underneath. Next we proceeded to jab a few sticks into the ground and then lay the sod gently on top. Naturally, in our 17-year-old idiocy we were thinking that we'd simply cause a ball carrier to fall, never thinking that someone might snap a tibia. Like I said, the adult version of myself is really glad it didn't work. Who else has a story?

www.stephenpaske.com

[gm]

I impersonated tafnut and Zat0pek last....errrr.... never mind....

[paulthefan]

i think you needed serious counseling, that is sick.

[stiffdogg]

i think you needed serious counseling, that is sick.

I can't say I totally disagree. Though I'm inclined to think that it falls under the category of high-school-aged kids having an inability to totally contemplate the consequences of their actions. Honestly, at the time it didn't seem that evil. Something during the last ten years clicked in my brain that allowed me to see it that way.

www.stephenpaske.com

[paulthefan]

it is true that the adolescent male mind has such a hard time seeing reality that it is amazing we didnt do far worse things.. .. thank goodness for parents.

[dukehjsteve]

At about age 10, I dug a hole in the ground in a vacant lot, put a large old baking pot in it, then filled the pot to the brim with water and mud.... covered the whole thing with sticks and brush. Final step was to cajole 6 year kid that lived next door to step on top of it. When he ran home crying I got in a spot of trouble when his mother called my mother.

[stiffdogg]

I must confess. The football field prank wasn't my only one. They used to run cross country ski meets in the park reserve by our house. Lets just say high school boys can have a lot of fun with a ski meet, walkie talkies, winter camo, a big curvy hill, and a numerous dead trees and logs lying around.

[Zat0pek]

Junior year in college.

We're at a cross country meet at UW-Madison in October. Not leaving to return until the next morning, so we had a free evening Saturday night. We all meet at a bar on State Street.

A teammate disappears for a while with an "older" women. He returns to the bar sometime later, telling tall stories of the event.

Fast forward a few months.

In a stationary store, we find some gag envelopes that say "HERPES TEST RESULTS -- PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL."

We buy the envelope and go back to my apartment and compose a very official sounding letter from a fictitious medical clinic that begins "Recently a woman tested positive for herpes at our facility. Wisconsin state law requires that we notify all known sexual partners within the last year. It has taken us some time to locate you." It goes on to warn him that he could have contracted the disease even if he wasn't exhibiting symptoms (just to mess with his head), urging him to refrain from sexual conduct and get tested immediately.

Unbeknownst to my teammate, my old high school flame went to school at UW-Madison. We put the letter in the envelope, then put that envelope in a larger envelope and send it to her asking her to mail it from Madison so that it would even have a Madison postmark. She willingly complies. The letter looks as authentic as possible, right down to the postmark.

He gets this thing a few days later, and doesn't take the news well. He goes into his roommates room (who actually helped me write the letter and was in on the ploy) looking pale and a little freaked out and tells him about it.

Now here's the bad part.

We don't tell him it's a joke for TWO WEEKS.

Seems his grades began to suffer, and he started running like crap.

Finally I have to tell him. Now, understand that the only guy he told was his room mate and he threw the letter away when he got it.

We're leaving the weight room one evening and I throw my arm around his shoulder, and begin to recite the letter to him word for word. It takes him a second to process it, then gets what I'm telling him.

It took three guys to keep him off of me.

And yes, we are still great friends to this day, even having been groomsmen at one anothers weddings.

[paulthefan]

Zatopek, you were a genius from birth ...

[DrJay]

This is one a friend did, but I had to post it, it's even T&F-related. Phil was off at his freshman year in college. Tom, his high school teammate, was still a senior in HS, looking to run 4:20something that spring. Phil, having read and enjoyed "Once a Runner", crafts this recruiting letter and sends it to Tom's track coach, who also teaches one of Tom's classes. Coach is so impressed he reads the letter out loud to the whole class:

"Dear Tom,

We continue our recruiting for next year's incoming freshman class. Your performance during last fall's cross-country season has been brought to our attention. Blah, blah, blah. We would like to invite you to visit our campus and meet the team blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah.

Sincerely,
Coach Cornwall
Head Coach, Track and Field
Southeastern University"

[dukehjsteve]

Just a small little "meanie" here

When I was about 8 I convinced the 5 year kid down the street to swap me some dimes he had for some of my nickels... I convinced him that nickels were better than dimes because they were bigger.

[DrJay]

Phil got his from someone unrelated to Tom and running. Same freshman year in college, he takes a girl back to his dorm room. There's a lot of skin and heavy breathing and moaning. Suddenly, while they are in the midst of the act, his roommate runs out of the closet and out of the room. Phil and his companion for the evening are startled, then chuckle about it and go back to heavy breathing and moaning. The next day, Phil chews out his roommate a little, they laugh, and Phil forgets about it. Until Monday morning. As he's sitting in English 101, waiting for class to begin, he hears these strange heavy breathing and moaning sounds behind him. Coming out of a portable tape recorder. Turns out his roomie had an accomplice who was lying on the floor under the bed, holding a microphone up in the air. Not much Phil could do to refute that. However, after word got around, he actually had a few hot babes come up to him at parties and say, with a sparkle in their eye (the sparkle part was his imagination, I reckon), "You're that tape recorder guy, aren't you?" He felt it was a badge of honor, though he didn't actually get any encore performances out of it.

[Zat0pek]

I have another one involving a small amount of methylene blue, a large Dr. Pepper, two hot blonds and another teammate and dark blue urine.

For the uninitiated, here's a brief explanation:

Pranks
Methylene blue is highly stable in the human body, and if ingested, it resists the acidic environment of the stomach as well as the many hydrolytic enzymes present. It is not significantly metabolized by the liver, and is instead quickly filtered out by the kidneys. A common prank amongst biochemists is to add small amounts of methylene blue (generally a few drops of a stain solution will suffice) to coffee, cola, or another dark beverage. The stain's color will be masked by the beverage, and its taste is fairly faint. Within a few hours, the methylene blue will have been removed by the prank victim's kidneys, causing his urine to change color. The urine may become green if little methylene blue was added; larger amounts create a deep blue color. The prank is fairly harmless if small amounts of methylene blue are used, although allergies are possible and it is advisable to use pharmaceutical-grade stain which has been carefully protected from contamination. The main risk of methylene blue pranks is generating a sense of panic in the victim. Another common prank is to introduce a slight amount of the dye (usually adsorbed on a sliver of filter paper) into an NMR tube, thereby introducing substantial impurities into the sample and necessitating its repurification.

[DrJay]

There was a sulfur-containing solvent we used in a protein chemistry lab in college, can't recall its name (fairly simple molecular structure), that stunk like the worst rotten eggs you could imagine. I wanted to seal 20 cc os so in in a baggie and walk through a crowded party at the fraternity house next door to ours and casually let it slip to the floor. Once someone stepped on it and ruptured it, the house would have cleared out in thirty seconds. I never did it because even with a half-dozen chem majors in our house, someone would have found out who did it.