Kids have no sense of the cost in time and money to build and repair things. I think that’s largely why they are little shits sometimes. I never did any serious harm, but I would also never engage in the mindless, pointless (petty) vandalism that I did on occasion back then.
Somewhat similarly, my younger sister and I were arguing one day. We were truly kids, no older than ten. Anyway, we were upstairs in our house, and at one point, I hauled off and punched her.
“Mo-o-o-m!” Sis screamed down the stairs. “Spoons hit me!”
“Spoons, don’t hit your sister,” Mom called up the stairs.
“Yeah!” Sis shouted gleefully, and promptly slugged me. “And you can’t hit back 'cause Mom said so. Nyah, nyah.”
Where to begin?
On Halloween night one year, a couple of friends and I setup a row of roman candles aimed at the road. When a car came along, lit the fuse and about 10 roman candles shot into the side of the car.
A buddy and I created an Estes model rocket launcher out of PVC pipe. Shot a couple of D-Size rockets across the street from my buddy’s house into his across the street neighbor’s garden (in which she was working at the time).
We had a friend in HS that had a Triumph TR-6. He was going on and on about getting to some important meeting after school and was really getting on our nerves. We picked his car up and set it up in the median of the school parking lot, so he couldn’t leave until after everyone else had already left (including all the buses).
There’s alot more I can’t think of at the moment - will post as I remember them…
That reminds me of something back in my early twenties. In nearby Brockport, while I was finishing up some extra college courses at the State University College, a new diner opened up.
The Open Pantry.
You can just imagine how quickly someone developed the idea of removing one of the letters from the second word.
And, no, it wasn’t me. I merely approved of it.
Third word you mean.
Geez, do I have to explain everything?
The PEN Pantry
“Pen” has its etymological roots in “peniculus” or “little penis” which is a wheeze enough on its own, but in context with “Pantry” and its etymological connection to*“panis”[/]i] or “bread”, the clear intention is to bring to mind the natural intersection of these two concepts in Penicillium notatum, implying that the establishment may entirely satisfy the requirements of the local health code.
I think that website has really lowered people’s expectorations of college humour. It’s galling, frankly.
Just remembered another couple of relatively minor things compared to the others here.
Once my younger brother and I had been dragged to Target with our parents, and we’d run off- he to the toy section, and I went to the electronics, since he was 10, and I was 17. I got bored with the electronics and went to go find him. I found him with some strange conical clear green plastic thing called a “bomb bat”. He couldn’t figure out how it worked- it was supposed to make sounds, but he was swinging it and it wasn’t doing anything.
So I guessed that you had to hit something with it, and had him pitch one of those pink rubber balls to me underhanded. I lazily swung a half-swing at it, and BONG! the ball went flying much higher and farther than I’d ever expected, to be followed a second later by a huge crash of breaking glass that went on for a few seconds. Our eyes went wide, and we snuck off to hide in the pharmacy section for a while.
Turns out we’d destroyed an entire display of glass knick-knacks and bowls.
Story #2:
On New Year’s Eve on about 1988 or 1989, my parents went to a NYE party, and I stayed home to babysit my brother (with financial compensation, of course). He was about 10 at the time, and a huge fireworks fiend. Fireworks were illegal in Houston then, but we’d just drive out into the county, buy them, drive farther out and come back along a different route.
Anyway, the people caddy-cornered to us in back were some kind of middle-easterners Indians or Pakistanis, and they were throwing a massive shindig- music going, people in the backyard, the whole nine.
My brother and I lit up a bunch of M-80s and a string of black cats, and chucked them over the fence. We had 4-5 loud booms, and then a bunch of quick cracks.
That was it for the party- people shrieked, the lights went out, and they all went inside! We stared at each other for a second, then tore inside, and turned our lights out too. We saw a police car drive down our street really slowly several times over the course of a half-hour, but we kept the lights out and just peeked around the mini-blinds.
<nm>
In my reminiscing, I was going back and forth between “Open Pantry” and “The Open Pantry”-- which one was it? I then wrote the latter, while still thinking in terms of two significant words. (If you can call what I was doing at ther time thinking.)
So the real WHOOOSH was only between my ears. Although Larry Mudd’s unexpected interjection may have made it look like you were being set up.
Oh, another one I just remembered. This was back when Wal-Mart had just started carrying PCs and they were still a novelty for most people, 1989/90 or so; I was about 13 or somewhere thereabout. Anyway, it was back when DOS was still the OS on the computers, QBASIC came installed, and if you had Windows, you actually had to call it up from the DOS prompt.
I was playing around with the computers in the electronics department at Wal-Mart and got bored which led to mischievous. For some reason, I was also fascinated with the command SOUND. So, I wrote a program in QBASIC to beep, wait a bit of time, then beep again. That wasn’t satisfying enough, so I reworked the program so that it beeped, but put it in a loop, plus used variables for the tone. It would run up and down the scale, nonstop. While all this was going on, the screen ran through the entire color palette.
I typed this on both (all three) of the computers on display, then ran it and took off. At first, you couldn’t hear it because I’d started it too low, but then it got higher and seemingly louder. Then there was a call over the intercom “We need a manager to electronics NOW!” I didn’t go back to electronics to see what the results were.
A girl I knew in fifth grade was terrified of earthworms. I wasn’t, so I used to pick them up after it rained, show them to her, and watch her run away shrieking.
One time, I cut a rubber band so it was just one piece, got it wet, showed it to her, and watched her run away shrieking. She thought it was a worm! 
I have a few “typical kid” stories including mooning commuter trains, bottle rockets and soaped mirrors in school (not all at once, thankfully), and I have another story I wanted to share that I just can’t remember. I’ll have to just share this one instead:
Sophomore year in school, a small group of us would toilet paper a the house of someone in our class. Sam was kind of goofy, but I didn’t hate him or anything – it was mostly a matter of convienence as his house was relatively close to my friend’s.
So one weekend night, we set up a whole “commando style” mission to TP the house again. We decked out in dark clothes and instead of going there on the street, we went through people’s back yards along the edge of a river. At one point I was sprinting ahead of the rest of the crew and I upset a bunch of ducks sleeping in the water. The resulting quacking and splashing was so cacophonous that the other three I was with thought I had fallen into the water or something. We were lucky that none of the homeowners came out, but I suppose that from inside a house 100 yards away, it just sounded like a bunch of ducks squawking around.
Eventually, we made it to the house and proceeded to cover it with several rolls of toilet paper. The house was along the river and we got a footbridge and a dock and the screened-in porch as well. Granted it was only TP, but we put a lot of artisitic effort into it.
My pièce de résistance was taking a disposable flashlight that had run out of juice and writing someone else’s name (I’ll call him “Steve”) on the bottom of it. I dropped it in the grass after we ran out of toilet paper and took off. We took the road back to the house without a hitch and laughed and congratulated ourselves on a job well done once back at the house we started from.
That Monday, I got to school and was walking down “Sophomore Hall” to get to my locker when I saw Sam and Steve arguing in the hallway. Steve was very adamant that he didn’t do it but then Sam countered with “Oh yeah? Then what about this?” and pulled out the flashlight and showed it to Steve like he was Sherlock Holmes producing the one piece of evidence that would solve the mystery. I could hardly keep from laughing.
To top that all off, one of the other perps in my group talked to Sam about it and apparently Sam’s dad was waiting in the screened-in porch and was going to catch us red handed. He ended up sleeping through the whole operation.
Toilet-papering a house was called “warapping” a house where I grew up. The best time to do it was when the weather forecast predicted rain.
When I was in Little League, some kid was clapping while he was leading off first. I did a very slow pick off move, and he went back to the base standing up. I intentionally threw the ball as hard as I could at him, and it nailed him in the ribs. He dropped to the ground and went out of the game because he was having trouble breathing. Pretty sure he was fine, but I felt bad about that.
Did the whole TPing and forking. Didn’t really do anything cruel I can think of after middle school though.
When I was about 8 or 9, I had a best friend named Arnold and was semi-friends with another kid named Michael. Michael and I sort of went in and out of friendship. I think, looking back, both of us were jealous that Arnold was friends with the other, as he was the most interesting one of the 3 of us, and so we occasionally fought and went through periods where we didn’t talk to each other.
Eventually, by the end of the school year, Michael moved away, and then shortly after that Arnold did too. I asked Arnold to call me once he got settled, but he never did. I always blamed his dad, as he was very strict and probably wouldn’t have liked it if his son made a long distance call across country. I have never and will never accept that he just forgot about me, but I was a kid and felt abandoned. My resentment against Mike grew somehow. Maybe he reminded him of the times when Arnold would be mad at me and didn’t talk to me because Mike was able to turn him against me. Maybe I resented the lost time I could have spent with my best friend.
Me and Mike kind of kept in touch, he didn’t move too far away. I grudgingly talked to him, he wasn’t that interesting really but I answered his calls. One day, when we were talking on the phone, he asked if I had heard from Arnold. I lied and said I did. I guess I wanted to feel like he was my friend still, even though I never heard back from him. It was enough that Michael thought I was still in touch with him, I wanted him to be jealous that I still had a relationship with Arnold even if I knew it was all made up. So I told him that we still spoke and of course Mike begged me for the number. Well, I had known that there was some issue between Mike’s mom and Arnold’s dad that resulting in her calling the cops on him, so I made up another lie and said his dad forbid him from contacting Michael.
So for the next several months, I would occasionally talk to Michael and tell him what’s going on with Arnold, making stuff up as I went along. I would always deny him Arnold’s phone number whenever he asked though, no amount of begging would get it out of me cause of the whole cops issue, or so he thought. I smirked to myself as he begged me over and over, but I stuck to my guns and said I made a promise to Arnold that I would never reveal his phone number cause his dad wouldn’t allow it. I won, so to speak. Even though Arnold didn’t contact either one of us, at least Michael thought different. It was enough that he thought me and Arnold were still friends.
However, after months of this, I was feeling pretty bad and wished I hadn’t lied in the first place. Mike wasn’t a super terrible person, he just occasionally annoyed me. And if Arnold didn’t call me, why did I still hold him in such high regard? But I was already in too deep with the lie. It took his mom finally coming to the phone and pleading with me on Mike’s behalf to explain to Arnold’s dad that the whole cops thing was all a misunderstanding. That’s when I knew I had to get out.
I didn’t end it with any closure for him. I simply stopped calling him and stopped accepting his calls. Eventually, he stopped calling. To this day though, I wonder what happened. Sometimes, I think maybe karma got me in the end and Arnold ended up calling him and they had a laugh together and realized what a douche I’d been. Then I think they’d rekindle their friendship and just leave me wondering, forever.
Funny thing though, I searched for Arnold a few months ago on Facebook and found him. He looks like he’s got a good life, he’s happy, engaged or married. Still has the boyish, square face that I remember from 3rd grade. I thought about contacting him, seeing if he still wanted to chat occasionally. But I think that chapter in my life is closed. There’s nothing really to be gained from contacting him now. If he didn’t call me back then when we were friends, there’s no reason he’d wanna talk to me now. At to be honest, I dont’ think I can really face what I did. I know it’s not like arson or some of the stuff you people did, but emotionally, this weighed on me for years. As for Michael, I forgot his last name so I can’t find him, not that I really want to. He’s probably either a minister now or a hellraiser, as his family was very religious when we were growing up. If I saw either one of them in the mall or something, I think I would just pass by and not say a word
I used to do prank calls.
One of my calls (and I’m 99.9% sure I read this in a book) had me play the part of a phone company serviceman. I would call my mark and say the following:
“Hello, my name is David and I work for AT&T. We are performing some repairs on your phone line, repairs of a delicate and dangerous nature. Is this (reads name from phone book)?”
<assents>
“Great. Well, here’s what is going to happen. For the next 5 minutes our technician is going to be working on a wiring problem that is tied to your phone line. Unfortuately, due to the high voltage of the wires that our technician is working on, he will be in danger if you answer your phone while he is working on it and can face possible electrocution.”
<words of concern>
"No, don’t worry, this is rather common and we have a simple procedure to let you know that your line is safe to use. We will call you and let the phone ring once, then hang up. One minute later, we will call you again, let the phone ring twice, then we will disconnect. One minute later, we will call you a third time, letting the phone ring three times, then we disconnect.
AFTER YOU HEAR THIS SEQUENCE OF CALLS, I will call back, letting you know that everything is fine and that your phone is operational again. Do you understand this procedure?"
<confirm procedure with mark>
“Thank you, and remember: DO NOT ANSWER THE PHONE UNTIL YOU HEAR ONE RING, THEN TWO RINGS, THEN THREE RINGS.”
…
So I waited a few moments, then called the mark back, letting the phone ring once before hanging up.
Wait another minute, call the mark back, let the phone ring twice, then hang up.
Wait one more minute, then call the mark back, but this time let the phone ring and ring and ring… eventually, they would convince themselves that either:
(a) They missed one of the calls, or
(b) They misheard the instructions
So when they answered the phone, I then screamed “AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!” for about 5-10 seconds, dropped a phone book on the floor (in my mind, it would sound like a body falling on the other end), and then hang-up.
I probably did this about 5 times.
I posted about it in another thread in the years past, but there was the time I convinced my entire school that the world was going to end at 12:00 noon on Friday. It was pretty eerie.
But not really for this thread as it wasn’t a “rotten” thing to do.
The time that I threw a dead possum down a chimney onto a lit fire… yeah, that was “rotten.”
I shimmied down that tree far quicker than I dreamed possible, ran across the neighbors yard, hid in my garage, and watched the fun.
All of a sudden the front door bursts open, the father yelling and cursing, the wife vomiting as she ran, the kids screaming bloody murder.
They had to get a hotel room for a few days while the house was cleaned and aired out. I can only assume that they didn’t eat the possum.
…
I was also the kid that taught everybody how to curse.
…
To be honest, I did all sorts of shit like that when I was a kid. Reading some of the above entries makes me realize just how much of a psychopath I was. *You hit a kid? Once? And you’re still ashamed about it 25 years later? Er, let me tell you about what I did, so you can feel better about yourself. * :o
I remember that episode of Married with Children! 
Using a neighbor’s Internet account when I accidentally admitted to porn watching and lost the school’s free Internet. And hitting my sister when she made me mad. I didn’t tend to do things out of mischief alone, as I never got the appeal.
Full story behind the Internet account:I had seen some naked women recently, and thought that was porn. Turns out some substitute teacher was using my account. I only put two and two together when I realized they were accusing me of doing it at school, and I had set up one computer to use my account while the teacher got their own, and he never got around to getting one.
Was it in MwC as well?
I did some thinking and I’m pretty sure it came from “The Pigman” by Paul Zindel. When I did this it was the late 70s, a bit early for MwC.