I shoulda kept a Prankster’s Diary so I could remember them all, but here are two that come immediately to mind.
The first is a prank I pulled on one of my best friends from high school. It’s pretty tame, but quite amusing (woulda been more amusing if another buddy of ours hadn’t been with me, but we’ll get to that). Me, Jimmy, and Jeff had been partners in crime through our junior and senior years in high school. After graduation, Jeff went to UT, I went to a local community college, and Jimmy was working full time with plans to get married. One afternoon, Jimmy stops by my house. We were talking about hooking up with Jeff and going to shoot some pool, but first, we thought it would be a good idea to rile him up a bit. Jeff drove a red Geo Storm which his mom and dad had gotten registered with FRE-BRD on the license plate … for Skynrd’s Free Bird, of course. This was perfect, since we could easily remember it. So, I call up Jeff at the dorm and, in my best cop-impersonation voice, I ask for him by first and last name, adding a ‘Mister’ in there for good measure. He says “That’s me”, so I claim to be Officer Todd Banks (or something … memory fails me on the exact name) with the UT Campus Police. I tell him that our records show he is the operator of a 1989 red Geo Storm with license number FRE-BRD (I read each letter instead of the “Free Bird” so it sounded more formal) and I ask if this is correct. He said yes, he is the operator, and asked if there was a problem. I said “Yes, sir, your vehicle is parked in the middle of Cumberland Avenue and is blocking traffic. Would you please come down and remove it?” Cumberland Avenue is the main street through campus, called “The Strip”. At any rate, he swallowed this hook, line, and sinker and said “I’m on my way,” … until Jimmy (who had been listening in at the earpiece) chuckled. Then I lost it! Then Jeff realized we had him and spouted so many expletives that I can’t possibly post them all. I coulda killed Jimmy that night. It was almost perfect, especially since Jeff mentioned that he actually had parked in a different location, down by Fraternity Row, and couldn’t see his car without leaving the dorm anyway.
This next prank was pulled on me (by association with the real marks of the joke) in architecture school. I was in second-year, and our class had somehow generated some real animosity with third-year. Little pranks had been bouncing back and forth, like desks being moved from one end of the building to the other (a LONG distance at UT’s Art & Architecture building), but things finally escalated in the spring of 1998. I was in the same studio with the three biggest trouble-makers in our class. They sat by the west wall, all three together. One afternoon, Jason got a whiff of some stench that really curled his toes. He kept smelling it, and as he would get up to leave his desk, it would go away. So he narrowed it down to that location. A search of his desk turned up nothing unusual, however, the fluorescent light above was the next place he looked. He took a brush handle and started prodding and sweeping on top of the light when he hit something and broke through a shell of some kind. The resulting odor was so foul that the entire studio cleared in seconds! That smell was so vile, it had to be brought to us from the deepest reaches of Hell! There were pig’s brains on the light and he had broken the dried crust, which kept the worst odor contained! :eek: Of course, the pranksters in third-year had heard we found it, so they were waiting in the hall, doing all they could to keep from falling in the floor. Jason swept it into a trash bin and got it out of the studio. But there was still something else. There are partial-height block walls that separate the studio from the hallway, so they are open at the top. The third-year gang must’ve felt they got the best of us, so they told us to look in the wall to get the last of their torture devices. Now I didn’t get to smell this next one, but it HAD to be ultra foul because, occupying a nasty leather boot was the most gangrenous mixture of pig’s brains, eggs, and who-knows-what-the-hell-else that they had let ferment outside in the heat for a week before introducing us to it! This was trashed along with the original pig’s brains, and both were put outside. WHEW! What a semester! The end to this madness happened when a paintball/water balloon war sorta made a casualty of someone’s project. At that point, the director of the school made it very clear that this was the end. For the rest of our stay, our classes were put on separate floors to keep us from repeating the antics so easily.
