I don't know why I just thought of this but relatively early in my federal career I had a supervisor who was a great guy but was a bit of a nervous nellie and a frenetic personality.

When he'd be on a phone call he'd be a whirling dervish of activity with a loud voice that could be heard across the group.

One day we decided to be real jackasses and unscrew the earpiece of his telephone and remove the speaker so that he couldn't hear the party on the other side. (I don't think we put shoe polish on it, we weren't quite that bad.) Anyway, he got a series of phone calls and we were dying as he kept screaming into the phone as if that would make him hear the other party better. Once he finally realized we were rolling on the floor he got it and typcial of him, forgave us on the spot.

But, the best caper I ever pulled on Jerry was the following...

Every morning, when Jerry would park his car he'd walk around it, look under it and check that everything was okay. It wasn't unusual to see him do this again during the day if the vehicle was parked close by.

One morning I happened to notice him parking adjacent to a filling / service station on the corner of the block where our office was located.

On a break I went downstairs and asked the manager of the station if I could borrow some of his junk parts laying around for a while. He told me to go ahead...

...So, I put some around the perimeter and under the chassis of Jerry's sedan and then went back upstairs and grabbed a cup of coffee.

While standing at the window looking down toward his car, I said, "Hey Jerry, isn't that your car parked down there?"

"Yeah, why"

"Something doesn't look right. Did you check your car this morning"

"Yeah...Let me see. Oh my God. Oh my God. What the...?"

Well, Jerry scooted out of the group and flew downstairs faster than a man of his bearlike proportions would seem capable.

He spent the next five minutes with his hand on his forehead walking around his vehicle in disbelief. When he looked up at the office window and saw us laughing and then looked back down he realized that he'd been had.

The man was a saint and never sought revenge or carried any enmity. I probably haven't thought of that good man in 30 years. I hope he's still with us...the world needs more good folks like him.

And I'm sure I'm going to hell for torturing that good and gentle soul.


Please feel free to add your own practical jokes...

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642-1, M&P15 TS

One time my wife got invited to a make your own pizza party by some of her foo-foo Sedona artsy crowd. The hosts made a bunch of homemade crusts and guests were invited to bring toppings. The toppings were to be laid out in dishes buffet style to share with everyone.. You could top your pie however you wanted and it went into their fancy Italian woodburning outdoor pizza oven, the inauguration of which was the point of the party.
Toppings were an amazing, upscale assortment. Smoked duck, wild boar salami, pricey cheeses, exotic greens, heirloom tomatoes, you name it.
I had told my wife "don't worry, I'll make something amazing", as I am the family cook.
I received endless positive comments on my cubed Pate of Pork en Gelee, which was, in fact, artfully arranged SPAM. They never knew.....

Many years back, our fire trucks had swing-out doors. The doors on the body that were immediately over the wheel wells swung up, these were great when you needed shade in the hot Texas sun, but were somewhat prone to damage.

One of my college roommates was in the fire dept with me, and one evening after truck checks were completed, he went to pull the truck out of the station. Most times, we had a spotter when we moved trucks around, but it was late in the day and some folks had ideas about dinner, so this fellow was on his own.

Prior to moving the truck, he had made a lap around checking everything one last time, but he missed those dang swing-up doors - he walked right under them.

Well, you guessed it, when he pulled out of the station he caught both doors on the station walls and ripped them right off!

Now, this made a horrendous noise. Both doors were torn completely off of the truck, and the tracks for the garage doors were pulled free and mangled beyond belief. All of the staff came running out into the bays to see what was happening. This poor fellow felt truly badly as he did everything that he was supposed to do, but made one big error.....and if you know firemen, we were not going to let him live it down any time soon.

We got the mess cleaned up, the doors set out to be hauled to the body shop in the morning when they opened, and it was time to close up shop. By this time most of the interest had died down except for a few stragglers watching the goings on.

This fellow and I had been roommates for some time and had attended the same classes, and even our girlfriends hung out together....I could not let this opportunity pass. He went out to the truck to back it in, we assigned a nice young fireman to guide him into the bay (lest he have another incident).

I walked over to the storage area just out of his field of view and picked up as many folding metal chairs as I could carry. When he was backing in, I waited right next to the door opening and just as he cleared the bay doors, i dropped the whole load of chairs on the concrete.

That truck had never stopped so hard in it's life. The poor driver hit the parking brake and bailed out....he was hyperventilating and turning various shades of red. When he realized what I had done he just crumpled to the floor. I guess that he thought for sure that he would be fired for two crashes in a single day

I still have not been repaid for that little joke, but he has a good memory...I am certain that he will get me at some point in the future even though we no longer work for the same depts.

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On the Oak Savannah

When I was a young engineer at Rockwell International (early '80s) I sat next to a draftsman named Jim. This was in the era where everyone was in a big open room, each person with a drafting table for a desk. Each side of the table had a set of drawers with a shallow drawer at the top for pens, pencils and such. A standard piece of equipment was a 12" engineer's scale, which was triangular in cross section and looked like this:



We had taken to shooting rubber bands at each other, trying to catch the other unaware. Somehow I found out something about these scales. You took a rubber band and hooked one end in the middle of the end of the scale so that it was locked into the grooves, and hooked the other end of the band at the other end of the scale to where it was just above the grooves. The end that was on just the wedge shaped lobe would slowly slide up the wedge until it came loose, and shoot the rubber band wherever the scale was pointed.

So I set one up like this and laid it on my open drawer closest to Jim and walked away. After a minute or two the rubber band slipped off and popped Jim hard right in the side. He just knew that I had done it but had no idea how. I finally did tell him, because it was too good of a gag not to share.


Since the desks and stools were tall so that you could work at them standing up, there was a metal footrest under each desk that was made of sheet metal bent into a channel about 8" tall and a foot wide. Laid on its side, it would ring kinda like a bell pretty well.

One evening I stayed late. I took a piece of poster board and used it to form a channel about an inch wide and an inch deep. I taped it underneath Jim's desk so that it slanted downward at a slight angle, directly over the footrest that I had turned on its side. I tied a straight pin to a piece of thread and stuck the pin through the lower end of the poster board channel, then filled the channel with a couple dozen marbles. Then I pushed his chair underneath the desk and tied the thread to it.

Next morning, Jim comes in and pulls his chair away from the desk to sit down which of course pulls the pin on the channel. DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING.... Bonus - the marbles rolled all over the linoleum floor.


A few years later I was on loan to Douglas in Long Beach, working on the C-17. It was another big room with drafting desks and an open ceiling structure with fluorescent lights and air vents just hanging from the concrete ceiling - no acoustic drop panels. There were also big square concrete columns here and there. I got to be pretty good friends with the other youngsters I worked with (I was the old guy at 28). If it was someone's birthday there would usually be cake and a card or flowers or something on their desk first thing in the morning.

Christine's desk was in front of one of these columns. Her birthday was coming up so the night before, so I set up another marble channel under her desk. Since the column was behind her I was also able to run a tube across the floor and up the column and over to the fluorescent light fixture and air vent over her desk. Inside the tube was another thread that I attached to a "Happy Birthday" banner that was stuffed up inside the air vent, and a couple of mouse traps on top of the light fixture with paper cups full of glittery confetti in them.

The next morning Christine came in, and was bummed to see nothing on her desk. Nobody remembered her birthday. She pulled away her chair from the desk and the marbles roll - DING DING DING DING DING and the banner falls down, right on cue and everyone turns to look at Chris. To my dismay the mouse traps with confetti didn't go off - until a few seconds later when everyone was looking, and she pulled on her chair a little more. Pop pop! Accidental perfect timing!

In the early 60's when I was about 11 or 12 I got a "job" handing out flyers for the local movie house which was located about five or six blocks from my home. By handing out or delivering the flyers I was able to attend the Saturday matinees for free.

Since I was already well on my way to becoming a ne'er-do-well I soon figured out ways to lighten my load. Some flyers ended up down a sewer or left in abandoned properties. (That is until a vagrant who had taken residence in one fired a bb gun at me and convinced me there were better places to "drop off" some of my leaflets.)

Anyway, my scheme was soon found out by the manager and I ended up relieved of my duties and unemployed.

Not taking this shame sitting down I decided to exact my revenge.

Back then if you called the movie house one of the phone numbers would connect you to a recording which would inform you of the name of the feature and the times of the shows. It usually went on for several minutes to accommodate both weekday and weekend showings.

My dad had only recently bought me a cassette tape recorder and I carefully recorded the message spelling out the features and times.

After making the recording I would call the manager's office, he had a separate line, and when he answered the phone I'd push "play" and play back the recording. "Thank you for calling the Main Street Movie Theatre...Today's feature will be...showing at..."

While playing the recording I could hear the manager muttering "What the ####!!!" and continue a string of curses as he couldn't understand why his phone was being connected to the theater's preview line.

I'd do this every half hour or so, (thank God there were no caller ID's back then), and I'd laugh my *** off as he got more and more riled up.

Ah...sweet revenge!

I still get a big smile on my face when I think of that time.

(Though I'm not particularly proud of shirking my responsibility, I tried to make up for my lack of character as I grew a little older and wiser.)

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642-1, M&P15 TS

When I worked patrol, the whole shift went into prank mode for a while. No one was immune, even the Lt. It started small, Vaseline on car door handles, inside the sweatband of the patrol cap, talcum or glitter in the AC vents.

Soon it escalated to pepper gas in the vents, eggs and water balloon drive-by's, we were stalking each other all over the bounds of the precinct. Then somebody took it up several notches and brought a paint ball gun into play. Man, it was on like Donkey Kong!

For about a week, there were running battles between the ward cars. Then one night, two guys were on a call and were talking to the complainant and her son in the front yard. Two officers from the adjoining ward did a drive-by on them and got 'em good. Unfortunately, they also incurred civilian casualties. But the civvies were surprisingly good natured about it and took it all in fun.

Next night at roll call, after learning of the collateral damage, the Lt. firmly announced that all hostilities would cease by midnight. The two perps from the night before had so far been the only ones that had escaped being hit by paintballs, so everyone was gunning for them. Late that night, they had made an arrest and transported downtown, everyone knew it was their last chance before the ceasefire.

There was a long narrow walkway leading from the sallyport to the write-up room and a hasty ambush was laid at the chokepoint. There were at least half a dozen people there waiting on them as they came down the hall. When the targets were about halfway down the hall, the ambushers opened up. Every color of paintball imaginable was represented on the walls, floor and ceiling, there had to have been around 30-40 rounds fired...but some how they survived without taking a hit!

There were plenty of other incidents over the years but none as memorable as that

I like gags that mystify or reduce someone to helpless laughter without hurting or embarrassing him.

Once when a colleague of mine in the outpatient department of a treatment center was away on a two-week August vacation I got one of the maintenance guys to help me completely decorate her office for Christmas. Decorated tree, tinsel hung everywhere, the lot. She nearly injured herself laughing when she came back to work.

My late wife had a similar sense of humor. Once we went to an antique fair, with her carrying a clipboard. We would walk up to a large piece of furniture, and I would take a piece of white paper tape and rub it lightly on the underside and examine it closely. Then I'd call out a number, like "C 145", and she would frown, say "Hmmm," and write it down. Then we'd walk on. If anyone asked what we were doing we'd smile apologetically and say, "I'm sorry, we aren't at liberty to discuss it."

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Oh well, what the hell.

I'm going to relate one that happened TO me, rather than one I pulled.

We lived in Florida in 1990, and I had just bought a brand new truck. I left it parked outside one night, and the next morning came out to find it sitting on cinder blocks...the tires and wheels had been stolen. The thieves also hit several other cars in the neighborhood. We called the police, and the insurance company covered the loss. I didn't expect to hear anything further about it, frankly.

About six months later, I was in my office and got a call from someone claiming to be the thief who stole the tires and wheels from my truck. He said he had hurt his back while on my property, and wanted to see if my homeowners or medical insurance would cover his injury. He also wanted to see if he could get some of the insurance money that paid to replace my tires and wheels, since he didn't get as much for them as he had planned. Well, the conversation went from incredulous to obscene on my part, as you can well imagine. Finally, the caller revealed himself to be a DJ from a local radio station.

This radio station had a morning program (which in my defense, I never listened to) which featured this DJ and crew calling individuals up and seeing if they could get them to react. It turns out that my dear, darling wife had called them and put them up to calling me...and, my employees knew that the DJ was going to be calling me. When the call came in, my secretary told my employees, and they were all standing outside my office laughing their heads off.

The radio station aired my "bag" (which is what they called it when they bagged some fool) which had been enhanced with funny sounds, a laugh track, and the DJ's voice was altered electronically to sound like a stereotypical minority (this was in 1990, and no way would this happen today.) By the end of the call, all that could be heard of me was a series of bleeps, since what I was saying couldn't be aired.

The radio station regularly played my bag for years. I was transferred back to Texas in 1996, and for several years after that my former employees would call me and tell me they had heard it on the annual "best of the bags" program. My boss got a copy, and thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard...so much so that while I worked for him, he'd play it at our staff meetings.

I tried to get even with my wife. While we still lived in Florida, we were eating at a restaurant and the diner sitting at a table next to ours was getting sick. He got up to go to the bathroom, and didn't quite make it...he threw up all over my wife. I called the radio station, and they called her pretending to be the owner of the restaurant wanting her to pay for cleaning the carpet. She didn't fall for it. I guess she really is smarter than me!

The only revenge I can think of is staying married to her...that'll teach her!

The drafting room prank brings back a memory. In high school the "mechanical drawing" shared a room with electronics classes. And we had a classmate who almost everyone kind of hated and picked on. OK, he was a jerk and didn't take the abuse well. That only resulted in our continuing the fun (for us).

So he was working on a drawing. And we found some wire others were using to wind small motors. Really thin stuff. And someone came up with a nice big capacitor. The kind you could charge up and it would really zap you if you weren't careful. So we hid the capacitor under a heater by the windows and ran 2 leads, one to the desk and the other to his chair. Then we charged it in place. No one around for at least 10 minutes. He comes in sits down and grabs the desk to pull himself forward. ZAP! The best part is the thing was discharged. He took it through his butt and hands. But only once. Of course he yelled and screamed (like a little girl). But then no one, including the teacher could figure out what he had been yelling about. The wire was so thin no one saw it. And we didn't get in trouble for that stunt.

Same guy, the next summer was hitch-hiking down the road. Some other guys saw him, filled a water balloon with water (a big one), and handed it to him as they drove by. Knocked him head over teakettle. The bad guys couldn't wait to tell everyone what they'd done. We all had alibis.

The jeep club I belong to had a tradition of bottle rocket wars. The fat guy really got my beer drinking buddy good. Fired a bottle rocket into his car as he was getting in. The guy was so big he had trouble getting up from a picnic table. My friend, the victim, was sitting across from him and took some ribbing about the rocket going off right in front of him. My friend reached in his shirt pocket and lit an old drill bit, then threw it under the table while getting up and running. The fat guy actually fell off the seat trying to escape the up coming explosion. Except the M80 he knew we had was just an old drill bit.

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Dick Burg

Long long ago in a far away kingdom I was planning a great prank ... late 1970s - Springdale AR

Owner of a back porch gun shop had feeder calves in the back pasture.
One of the calves was nearly pure white.
At the time grapes were being grown and processed into juice locally.

IDEA - a PURPLE CALF ...
Several possible co-conspirators - attorneys/sworn officers/loafers/liars

The remainder peels resulted in a purple sludge/slime.
I contacted the grape processor asking about getting some of the slime/sludge.
He was dubious about possible misuse ... and liability.
Offered to have a Sargent of the local PD pick the material up.
That was good enough.

Knowing that some calves had recently been sold ... called owners wife and asked about the white calf.
He was the FIRST on to get on the truck.

It would have been great.
Figure five or six of us could have surrounded the calf and given it at least two coats of purple ....

At least I had a plan ...

Bekeart

I was the Lt on a shift and working one night. The Captain had always been kinda "hard to deal with" to the fitrefighters..So when I was transferred to the captains shift I told him to leave the firefighters alone..they were my responsibility. He agreed to this unorthodox way of working and it was going ok. Went to the TV/kitchen area one evening to get some coffee. HOLY TOLEDO!! the guys were playing softball in the kitchen with baby watermelons. I walked in and it was like deer in the headlights,,,immediate quiet and no movement. Got my coffee and on the way out I just said...WOW!!. I mean there was watermelon and cantalope even on the ceiling. Got over to our office and the captain said he was gonna go get tea. Told him...Tom when ya get over there..don't say a word..nothing..just get his tea and look around say WOW and leave. I didn't think he could pull it off but evidently he did. Left those guys hanging till shift change the next morning. One told me they had spent almost 3 hours cleaning up..It was spotless and shining at shift change. Captain never got fired up as he normally would and he left the firefighters alone... I think he learned a lesson too. Sometimes...men will be boys

When my step daughter was 7 or 8 one Easter, I was cleaning feces out of the cat box by picking it out with a paper towel. Me being me, and since children are for terrorizing, I was chasing her around the house with a paper towel full of "chunks". After a couple minutes of chase she ran into her room and closed the door.

At this point I quickly washed my hands, got a clean paper towel and unwrapped a couple small chocolate Easter eggs. Then I sprung my trap. When she came out of her room the chase resumed. After a couple more minutes of chase, I stopped, rolled my eyes, started laughing like a maniac and popped the easter eggs into my mouth.

The look on her face was absolutely priceless, and she hasn't forgotten it to this day. (She's 35 now).

As far as I am concerned it was the epitome of my parenting.

Couple of techs were checking a limit switch on a clarifier drive last week. Elevated tanks around a centrally located distribution box connected by concrete walkways transitioning to diamond plate over the tanks. They were squatting over the box not paying attention. Too perfect. I launched off the concrete down to the diamond plate landing on one foot. THOOM!
Rarely have I been so creatively cussed.

There was a small machine shop in the building I used to work in. We had an arrogant machinist working there who thought the world revolved around him. He kept a pan of kitty litter in the hall way outside his shop which was right next to the lunch room. It stayed there for several days. One morning as I was leaving for work one of my cats left a fresh deposit on top of her litter pan. A light clicked on in my head and I got a small plastic baggie from the kitchen and picked up her leavings with it. When I got to work I carefully placed it in the litter pan next to the machine shop. Everyone was looking around for the cat and the litter pan disappeared that day.

While I was in the Army I got some cannon fuse. I wrapped masking tape around a piece of cardboard about the size of an M-80. I attached a very short fuse, lit the fuse and threw it in the shower which was occupied to capacity at the time. I never saw my friends move so fast. After some discussion they decided to let me live after they saw the humor in it.

Practical joking is subjective, and often not received well especially by the target!
I am not a fan of it, and having been around construction sites almost all of my life, have seen attempts cause injury and or hard feelings. Several instances ended up with people being removed from the site, to avoid serious retribution injuries, and in one case an arrest, conviction, and some jail time. Not everybody takes practical jokes well, and in the old days, a different crowd. The starter often does not know when to quit or keepmit light and funny as some of those previously posted are. When women started showing up on construction sites so called practical jokes really started in earnest, and never were funny. In todays world who knows what would happen?
Grumpy leaving now!

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Wherever my mind isn't
Jim

A friend of mine at work took a winter vacation for two weeks, I went into his office and put a open can of sardines on the radiator, and closed the door, when he came back two weeks later and opened his door, the stink would have knocked you over, he blamed everyone but me , this was about forty years ago and I know to this day he is still looking for the guy who did it. after that he had a lock put on his door.

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Don

Madmikeb, you are a man after my own heart. My hunting partner’s son was 12 or 13 when we pulled this stunt. I brought a box of Welches Junior Mints along while we were deer hunting. I waited until I found a pile of fresh “deer sign”. I pointed the deer sign out to my friend’s son and told him we would demonstrate the fine art of reading sign. I had palmed a couple of junior mints and pretended to pick up a handful of droppings and place them in my mouth. I chewed them making sure he saw the contents of my mouth. I stated that in my opinion they were 3 hours old. My friend then pretended to pick some up and then chewed on some mints and told me they were much fresher and the deer was most likely very close by. His son was absolutely horrified until we let him in on the joke. He is now 40 and that is his favourite hunting story.

I just drink my blue Gatorade out of a Windex bottle.

An apple pie with partly melted chocolate bars on top.

Me and my wife put this "kitty litter" in the middle of the dining table and when our son came home we told him this is the new place for the cat toilet from now on. He rolled his eyes and went to his room. When we showed him that it was really just a pie he said he thought we had gone crazy and decided better not to say anything. And he refused to eat the cake, it looked too grizzly to him.

True story here.

Place: A Little Country Church Outside of Lancaster, South Carolina
Time: Easter Sunday, early 1930s, maybe '31 or '32

My dad, his older brother Carl, and younger brother Cole always rode to church in Carl's Model T.

On one Easter Sunday, they set off for church, all dressed in their finest suits for church...or as fine a suit as cotton mill workers could afford in the midst of the Great Depression.

Dad told me Carl looked particularly spiffy in his new (second hand) cream colored three piece suit, white shoes, and white fedora.

Seems Carl had his eye on a pretty young Baptist girl named Ruth. He'd been hanging around her so much, she'd finally agreed to go on an Easter Sunday picnic with him after preaching. Dad said Carl would get to trembling like a setter on point at just the thought of it, he was so excited.

So they all went in to preaching, and soon as the service was over, Cole (always a jolly prankster even later in life), slipped out the door while the rest of the family slowly made their way outside...and he went out and disconnected the coil wire on Carl's old Ford.

Now here comes Carl and Ruth, Carl carrying this pretty picnic basket Ruth had put together. Dad and Cole told him to go on with Ruth and they'd get a ride home...patting Carl on the back and all, wishing him a good time with Ruth, you know.

So Carl starts twisting on that Model T's crank, and of course the thing won't start. Now Easter Sundays in South Carolina can get real hot sometime, so it wasn't long before sweat was just a pourin' off Carl, soaking through that pretty suit, and getting some grease on it in the bargain. Carl was so intent on gettin' started, it never crossed his mind to open the hood.

Finally Cole says, "Hey, lemme check out the motor," and looks under the hood and says, "Hey Carl, the coil wire's not even hooked up!" And dad's just almost rolling on the grass laughing, letting the cat out of the bag. Even Ruth was laughing by then.

Dad said Carl chased him and Cole all around that little country church, swattin' at them with his hat and getting even more sweat soaked, dad and Cole just whoopin' with laughter.

Finally even Carl had to laugh at it all, and he and Ruth went on to their picnic.

I think dad was about seventeen then, Carl a few years older, and Cole a few years younger than dad. They're all gone now, of course. I think about them a lot, the older I get. I believe they were better men than I'll ever be.

Carl and Ruth, by the way, ended up being married almost sixty years.

I don't know - if it hasn't worked by now......

Kids today are such wimps...

A few years back a pharmacist I worked with had a new BMW SUV. One of the bigger ones. He always took two parking spots. One day near the end of his shift I parked about an inch from his drivers side door and had another buddy park an inch from his passenger door. Of course several of us just "happened" to be outside on break when he left. We watched him walk to the drivers side. Finding it impassible, he then walked to the passenger side. He looked a bit flummoxed for a few seconds. Then he popped the hatch and crawled over the seats. He made sure to honk and wave at us as he drove away.

I was sort of famous as joker until I made Lt., and had to behave myself. One of my favorites was the potato up the tailpipe. Another was the fish in the heater box. We had air force style hats then, which nobody wore, so switching them around before a parade or memorial always caused some confusion. Especially for the black women officers, who tended to hsve big hat sizes, and the oriental guy officers who were pinheads.

Another friend a bit older college professor...I mean he even looked a bit weird. Kept his beer in a box on the porch(colder weater y'all). Wife called up one day after they had been gone on a short trip. Asked my wide if I had taken her husbands beer...as a practical joke. Said no of course. About a month later picked up the phone...wife looked at me quizically and I just shushed her. Dialed the fellow and when he answered (on speaker phone) I asked if this was donald Con nell. In his most professorial voice he said yes this is Mr Connell..pronounced correctly of course..may I ask who is calling.. and I said...well I is the one that took your beer and I wants to know when you gonna put some more out dere. Well he fired right up with Why you somnab****..I'll put some more...then realizing he had been had.... once again...he said Awwww ****!!! Got me again and hung up...he called me back ...later that day. My wife was rolling and his wife called up mine laughing her butt off. She had heard the whole thing . Those wimmin had a ball telling all the other gals at the hospital how I had bagged him up. He even got calls from some of the other nurses over the next few weeks wanting some beer too. He finally did forgive me after a year or so.... Maybe..luckily he is still in Md while I am out here in Wyoming.

I never was one to do this kind of stuff, but did participate in hard to accomplish projects.

Our towns Coroner and funeral home fella had a son who was drifty, he tired sports and failed but to his credit he kept at it each year and ended up being the place kicker our Sr. Year.

His Daddy bought him a used VW Bug the summer before our Sr year. He was slow to get undressed, shower and get out the door after the late summer drills. Some guys pushed his Bug across the baseball field and hid it behind the sorage bld.

We watched him look for it, he looked and looked, finally found it and drove it across the baseball field, a young coach in on it cehewed him our for driving there.

Some guys just cant take a joke, he whined, complained and became a nuisance. Time to do something. A smart guy would have rolled the windows up and locked it, but smart he wasn't.

There was a narrow walkway below ground level between the shop class and the parking lot. About 6' wide.

One day somone spied some 10' 2x10's stacked next to a project close by. The design engineer said, grab 2, we'll line them up with the Bug's wheels and push it on the shop class room roof. Worked like a champ. He looked everywhere as we talked and pretended to not be watching. He eventually found it, walked the plank and drove it over the planks to the lot. He cut the whining and we left him alone. We told him it was pretty gutsy to drive it off the school roof.

In college we had a compulsive whiner, cry baby in our dorm. He had a 64ish Ford Falcon with a small 260 ci V8. He would complain if anyone parked close to him, guys talked to loud after 9 PM were jumped verbally until we had enough. Work being performed close to any young guys gives ideas of mischief for sure.

A bunch of stacked concrete blocks, a car jack out of someones trunk, guys working harder on this than they ever did on homework soon had the Falcon blocked up, the tires were about 1/2" off the ground, hot whiner had a date, we waited. Some one leaned against a Falcon fender and smoked, he yelled, jumped into his car, put it in first and let out the clutch. WE could not contain ourselves.

He got out, nothing he could do as his mommy was not there to help him. You guys did this, someone yelled things like griping at 9 PM needs to stop, whining needs to stop. And he shut up for the rest of the year. Said he was transferring to a school in Ca. Don't know how he got it off the blocks. We went and had a a beer.

When I was in high school I volunteered in a hospital for a while. I got to see and do a lot of things that most young folks and even adults never get to see but that's another story for another time.

Anyway, I'd drive the nurses and staff nuts from time to time with my antics. I'd put a skeleton in a wheel chair and roll it down the hall, call to one of the nurses or doctors and say that "the guy just went to pieces!".

Some enjoyed the pranks, some did not.

Well, one time I had to wheel a recently deceased man down to the morgue and on the elevator, which had public as well as staff on it, I moved the sheet and acted like the dearly departed had just moved. Well, you can imagine the somewhat startled reaction of the folks comprising the non-medical riders on that elevator.

Anyway, I brought the deceased down to the morgue and pulled a similar maneuver on the pathologist who got a bit startled and didn't appreciate being screwed with by a wise-*** kid but didn't let on.

After I helped him put the deceased on a table he mentioned he needed to go pick up a piece of equipment and would be right back to start the autopsy.

As he left he closed and locked the door and shut the lights. (The lights and locks were all on the outside of the room as none of its occupants would be turning them on, off or leaving.)

Well, I didn't know whether to $#it or go blind! I was so freaked out that every time one of the refrigerators hummed I thought one of the "walking dead" was coming for me. I stood there in the darkness with a scalpel in my hand for what felt like hours but was merely minutes.

Needless to say I toned down my act after that and limited my antics to organizing wheelchair races with young patients (much to the dismay of the nurses) or occasionally walking the skeleton down the corridor connected to an IV.

__________________
642-1, M&P15 TS

Wish I could claim it. NOT mine but GREAT.
Friend at college (late 60s) told me about his prank.
Did not detail exactly why/how he picked the victim.

He used a pencil and tablet paper.
Wrote letters to several Radio Preachers telling how he listed and appreciated their great efforts.
He included a $1 bill and mentioned that when his situation improved he could send more.
Signed the VICTIMS name and address.

We both wondered how long the victim would keep getting letters from those Radio Preachers requesting donations.

Bekeart

It wasn't so much a practical joke, but the Training NCO had mounted a toilet seat on the wall. On the lid was artfully inscribed, "********* of the Week."

Just about every visitor, overcome by curiosity, would lift the lid, and be "startled" by the visage peering from the mirror.

The Brigade Commander did not find it funny.

I did something like that once, but it was to the local Jehovah Witness, and it was a $20. Got an entire summer of entertainment watching the victim get constant visitors. Yeah, I know I'm evil - been told that pretty much every time I told this story.

In 1972 my older brother and his best friend bought new VW Beetles. My brother liked his but his friend couldn't shut up about how great it was on gas, fun to drive, cheap, etc.

So my brother stole an idea from someone else and we started siphoning the gas out of his buddies car. This went on for a month and he was going nuts trying to figure out what was wrong. At the end of the month we started adding gas to it (it helped he didn't lock it so we could open the filler door).

Well, being the younger one I just couldn't stop laughing the day he was talking about why his car wasn't using any gas. One of my favorites.

I saw that in a movie once, with Walter Matthau as the prankster. He started off putting in an gallon a night & let the neighbor brag, then they took out a gallon a night. Final scene was the neighbor screaming at the service manager about his sudden decrease in mileage.