Hey there. What’s the best college prank that you’ve pulled off or had done to you? Any notorious ones from your college?
Once, in college, a group of my friends and I decided to head into Chicago to spend the weekend. It was bitterly cold and about 2 a.m. and they were insisting that as the only sober member of the group familiar with Chicago, I take them all to the Sears Tower. We stumbled out of the bar, I took them all over to the John Hancock building and proudly announced that it was the Sears Tower. Then I shuffed them all into a group and snapped a picture of them with the words, “JOHN HANCOCK BUILDING” right above their heads. They were too drunk to notice. I took a picture with about 4-5 different cameras. It wasn’t pretty when they got those developed.
In the late 60s, at the University of Wisconsin, there was a guy–let’s call hum Morty–in one of the men’s dorms and he was a total pain in the butt. The kind of guy who would rush to the hall and tell people to be quiet at the slightest noise; who would call the police to report the smell of marijuana; who would excoriate other guys for telling dirty jokes. A prude, and a pompous, self-righteous, nasty little prude. Come Easter vacation, ALL of the people on his corridor got back two days early. They brought with them an assortment of crowbars, sledgehammers, cinderblocks and mortar, paint and brushes. They proceeded to bash out the door frame to his room (he had a single), fill in the space with matching cinderblock, and paint the wall to match the corridor. When he got back his room had DISAPPEARED!
I’ve posted this at least twice in similar threads, but I think it rocks so here goes again…
Biochemistry Grad student friend of mine had world’s largest anal pore for an advisor. Grad student puts a couple drops of moth pheromone inside advisor’s Corvette on the headreast (hmmm… just turned 50, buys corvette, right on schedule). Oil (a thick viscous liquid) gets on advisor. For months he was plagued by thousands of horny moths, constantly. Swarming on car, on the outside of his bedroom window when he woke up each morning, landing on him all hours of the day. He never found out who it was…
I’m not sure if this counts as a prank, but it’s amusing. Someone grafitied the words “question everything” onto a school building. The next day, the response came back. “Why?”
A group a couple of years ahead of me at the University of Chicago climbed the walls of the Reg (the main library on campus, about 100 or so feet high) and stole all the huge banners celebrating the University’s centennial. When it was discovered, it was condemned as “a mean-spirited thing to do.” So, of course, all of our dorm house t-shirts had “A Mean-Spirited Thing to Do” printed on them…
Back in the 80’s there were these things called “albums” or “lps”. If somebody ticked us off, we would fill an album cover with shaving cream, then slide the open end of it under the dorm room door. Then, we STOMPED the album cover, sending a spray of shaving cream all over the room.
We also used to move people’s room furnishings out onto the quad, carefully setting up the furniture exactly as it had been in the room.
AuntPam, that disappearing room thing is hilarious.
We managed to create a little garden in our college. It had some street signs, potted plants, table, chairs and a concrete bench. We were on our way to getting a fountain when a tutor turned up and told us to take it all back. Apparently they didn’t like a garden on the second floor corridor. The hardest part was the concrete bench, those things are heavy.
Some people from UNSW took several barrels of hydraulic brake fluid (fluorescent green) and replaced the labels with radioactive labels from a chemistry lab. They then dumped them on a road near the nuclear reactor in Sydney. The police closed down the entire area for half a day.
This one is complicated (and old, my dad was there). There was some road reconstruction going on outside Sydney Uni, on the main arterial road. Some students went and told them that because it was foundation week, some students were going to turn up in a little while dressed as policeman and try and shut them down. Then they went and rang the police claiming that as it was foundation week, some students decided to shut a road down. Then a lot of students took their lunch and sat around looking on.
I know a lot, but that is just because at UNSW there is a scavanger competition, and one of the points is to get in the newspaper. Showing pornography on the main cinema strip and so on.
along the lines of the shaving cream under the door, I’ve heard of (but never knew of) dumping baby powder in front of somebody’s door and blowing it into the room with a hair dryer. Big problem is that the powder is so fine it stays in the air and can destroy computers and other electronic stuff.
My then boyfriend, now husband, and his boys up at Michigan Tech really hated their rat of an RA–so they got back at him. They purchased a blow-up kiddie swimming pool at the local Walmart, then filled up every container (trash cans, cups, etc) they could find with water and stashed it in their rooms. My guy obtained some sand for the bottom of the pool, and one of the posse was responsible for procuring some live fish for decoration.
Once the RA went to lunch (he never locked his door), the boys pounced–pool inserted, sand dumped, water drained, and fish added to their new home. Took about 15 minutes. Poor RA–he comes home to a kiddie aquarium in his room, then must clean it all up by himself. Pretty inventive, though. Never left his room unlocked after that.
We won’t talk about the time they blocked up the same RA’s car so that its wheels were just imperceptibly off the ground…
I don’t remember the schools involved, but I heard of a clever one from last year’s football season.
The visiting team’s band members each had a handful of a thick growing grass seed, and dumped it on the field while they were in formation. A few weeks later the home school found the initials of the other school growing thickly on their field.
In the spirit of “things under the dorm door” you can pee on a plate and freeze it into a nice disc that will slide under the door. A word of warning, always remember which plate you used. “Dude you’re eating pizza off of the pee plate.”
At a party a girl left her camera on the table so me and my idiot room mate took pictures of our dicks in the bathroom.
Best one I’ve heard about was one my aunt participated in back in the day. She told me that she and some others took apart some guy’s car and reassembled it on the roof of the main building. Classic prank, that.
When I was in the dorms last year I saw a bunch of wierdness. This being an art college, and the freshmen dorms no less, it was pure chaos. Some examples are the falling objects. The dorm was actually an old hotel, six stories tall plus the ground level stuff. The rooms opened to corridors that were basically balconies. The balconies ran all around the building, but for some reason there were no security cameras in the front of the building to monitor those balconies. So around Halloween last year, people would take pumpkins (or dorm food) and fling them off the balcony at all hours of the day. It got so bad someone drew a chalk police style outline of a man on the sidewalk. Someone then later added a chalk dog. Both were used for target practise.
My biggest regret was never finding out the story behind the flaming bicycle that was thrown off the railing in the middle of the night.
Best one I ever heard of was the Yale fraternity that invited Carrie Nation, the great (?) temperance activist, to give them a lecture somewhere back around 1910 or so.
After the speech, which was politely listened to, Nation posed for a flash photograph (holding a glass of water as a sign of Sobriety) with the members of the frat.
In those days, the lights were doused just before the picture would be taken…then there would be a tremendous flash from the powder as the shutter clicked.
In the seconds of darkness before the photo was taken, the students whipped out concealed beer steins, gin bottles, highball glasses, pipes, cigars, and cigarettes, and adopted expressions of extreme intoxication. After the flash went off, they were hidden again before the lights came on.
Miss Nation was thanked profusely and went home in a dignified manner.
The next morning, the front page of the Yale Daily News featured a splash photograph of Carrie Nation in the midst of a drunken orgy, holding a glass of what looked like gin. “‘I take mine straight up,’” said Miss Nation with a leer." the caption read.
In college, a bunch of us in the Baptist Student Union snuck out of our dorms, took signs from a particular realty (drove around town and picked them up) and put them in the yard and on the front door of Campbellsville Baptist Church. Of course, since we were the “good girls and boys,” they never suspected us…
When my dad was in college (back in the day) he was having a fire extinguisher fight with his friends. He was inside his room and they were all outside the door waiting to get him… so he jumped out the second story window, and then he came up behind them. of course the whole time they thought he was still in his room.
(he’s v. proud of this story)
A bunch of fellow pottery students “faked” a pottery piece for the student show. The head of the Ceramics Dept. had approved of all the submitted ceramics works to be in the annual Student Art Show. They were all cluttered on a table (with the appropriate paperwork) on a table in his office. A whole bunch of us found some old piece of ceramics crap that some student had abandoned. It was truly an ugly piece of ceramic artistry. We faked the student application, faked all the approval paperwork, and put it in with all the other legit, approved student works. And so it went to be put up in the gallery, in the Student Art Show.
It was a JOKE! We thought it was hilarious (we figured they’d catch it before it was put on display.) The Head of the Ceramics Dept. did find it, and thought someone had really tried to cheat their way into getting into the Student Show. He was pissed. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that some of his “favorite students” (that would be us) all conspired to do it.
Anyone go to Rensselaer? I didn’t, but a friend helped make nitroglycerin in an RPI bathroom sink. Well, they tried to but blew up the bathroom when the apparatus fell apart. They successfully blamed it on a rival dorm.
My brother told me of a prank that occured while he attended UBC (University of British Columbia). The students from the Faculty of Engineering where notorious for outrageous pranks, and had on ongoing feud with the students of the Faculty of Arts. One spring, in the middle of the afternoon, the engineers paraded out into one of the greenspaces and began to destroy a large number of abstract art sculptures that had been gracing the area for a couple of weeks. As horrified onlookers watched, the sculptures were attacked with sledge hammers and cutting torches, then they carted off the fragments. The local papers were flooded with a deluge of letters to the editor, asking that these “barbarians” be identified and punished for destroying all those beautiful pieces. The Engineering students let the fiery complaints continue for a copule days, then revealed photos and videotape showing them in the dead of night secretly planting the sculptures they had made then later destroyed.
I’m rather proud of one prank that I played on a college buddy, even though I did not get to see the results myself. It was simplicity itself to unscrew his shower head and slip in a couple of boullion cubes. Nothing quite like a nice hot soup shower when you’re in a hurry…
