A little background. I am a middle school band teacher. A fringe benefit of my job is that the outside of my house is sometimes decorated for me, even without my asking. Usually, when this happens, toilet paper adorns the many trees in my yard. As long as it doesn’t happen too often and nothing gets broken, I don’t get too upset about these things. Most of teacher friends see it as a sign of popularity. Sometimes, shoe polish is used to write notes to me, or passersby. This is rare. Over a year ago, one person wrote “Mr. [Drum God] likes big dicks.” Charming. It even had accompanying artwork. (For the record, I am quite attached to my own equipment, but I am quite happy allowing others to keep theirs put away in my presence.)
This weekend, however, something new happened. As I fetched my Sunday newspaper, I saw two “House for Sale Signs” in the yard. “Funny,” I thought, “I don’t remember putting the house up for sale.” However, this was not the first time this has happened – first time in a long time, but not the first time. It was the other stuff that was new. Someone had emptied a box of CareFree maxi-pads all over the lawn. I know it was a full box because the box was there, too. This was new. What is the meaning of this? Is someone saying “Mr. DG’s a pussy”?
So, I mentioned my “padding” to a friend from Upstate New York. He laughed and said that it was a badge of honor at his school if your yard was “forked”. “Huh?” says I. My friend said that this is when the kids stand up plastic forks in the yard. I’ve never heard of such a thing. It sounds like a lot of trouble. Toilet paper is quick and quiet. Forks take time to press into the ground. Do people really do this? Is it a Northeast thing that hasn’t found its way to Texas?
What is the weirdest vandalism you’ve ever participated in, been a victim of, or witnessed?
(Also, for the record, my kids do like me. This decorating of the yard doesn’t happen often and it’s usually harmless. The dirty words on the window was a one-time thing a long time ago.)
In my high school, a lot of the lab tables in the biology room had the word BOOK carved into them in block letters. I spent a couple months wondering why some person would go to the effort of carving that into a table, since it didn’t really seem within the idiom of a bookworm, until one day I saw the biology teacher carefully converting the word FUCK into BOOK. Mystery solved.
This local family owns an entire street, basically. Every Christmas, they used to put up a huge Christmas display, lights, figures, etc. One year they spelled out
GOD BLESS AMERICA
Some wag disabled the “B”.
The next year, someone fucked with the lights to say
DOG BLESS AMERICA
and finally, we got
GOD BLESS AFRICA
They stopped doing the lights after that.
ETA: I loved your story, Miss Purl.
When I was 8 years old, I and two “friends” broke into the local elementary school in broad daylight by shattering a window. We made it to the teacher’s lounge, stole a jar of Tang, left the building, but stupidly remained at the scene until the police arrived.
I’d never done anything remotely like this before.
I probably did it because my parents were about to get divorced.
When I was in HS there was this bagel bakery that didn’t lock up their dumpster… Didn’t take too many raids until we had enough to bagel a lawn or three.
None of what is described in the OP is strange, interesting or imaginative. It’s just typical stupid high school behavior. Crude vandalism isn’t entertaining, but if you want to be flattered by it, Drum God, go ahead. I personally would be a little disappointed. When I wanted to cause trouble in high school I orchestrated things like making the French teacher think he was inadvertently getting involved in an international espionage ring, or taking control of the student government. Toilet paper? Maxi pads? Forks? Pretty pathetic.
Well, in high school, I flagged a girl’s yard, with a bunch of 12" square fluorescent warning flags we stole from Laclede Gas Company work sites. The goofiest part of it was that I didn’t want anyone getting hurt because we were doing this, so I insisted that we steal only one flag from each worksite. We drove all over south St. Louis until we’d gathered up two dozen flags, then drove to her block and stabbed orange flags into the ground all over their front yard. It meant something stupid like “Becky, you’re the girl of my dreams.” (It did me no good.)
Another high school episode involved a friend’s car. Three of us found his car (we knew he usually parked over by a local machine shop), popped the hood and cored his coil wire. That is, we pulled the coil wire, yanked out as much of the conductor as we could and put the wire back on. He ran down his battery trying to start the car and didn’t get it running till we told him the next day what we’d done. That one meant “Ha! We found out you were the one that took all the valve stems out of Rich’s dad’s Mercury’s tires last Saturday night. It took a couple hours to carry’em down to the nearest open gas station and back. Did we mention it was cold and raining at the time?”
My first house got pink flamingos in the front yard within a week after I moved in. There were a half-dozen of them; I never found out which of my friends did it. What annoyed my neighbors was that I liked them and left them in the yard. I used to rearrange them periodically, until someone stole them all: I never found out who stole them. I don’t know what any part of this episode meant.
My parents have a close group of friends (whom I know as Aunts and Uncles although they aren’t) who have a tendency to play tricks on each other. One of my dad’s best tricks was with Aunt E.
Aunt E is one of those ‘worry about everything and prepare for the worst’ types of people. As a consequence, at any one time she will have about 30 - 40 toilet rolls in the cupboard, ‘just in case’.
One evening when there were a few people round at Aunt E’s house for dinner, dad hid every single toilet roll throughout the house, leaving only the roll that was currently in the bathroom.
For the next few months, she’d often call to tell us what silly place she’d found the latest roll in. I assume she eventually found them all.
So yeah, not exactly vandalism, but certainly lots of fun.
My friends and I never did anything too serious or elaborate in high school. We mostly stuck to stealing real estate signs and putting them in random yards, or stealing those “vote for so-and-so” signs and putting them in random places. Sometimes we would grab a whole bunch and stick them all in the yard of someone we knew. Once, I was doing the planting of said signs, and a huge dog came running out of the back yard. I had to take off and jump into the back of the waiting pickup truck as my friends were about to take off. That was pretty fun.
Also, we used to throw a lot of shit at houses and cars. Eggs, corn, cheese, open containers of condiments. Once, a few of us were coming home from Pizza Slut and I had a whole dish of ranch dressing ready to throw at something, when this SUV begins tailgating us on the highway. It was a two-lane road, and they couldn’t pass, so they just kept riding our bumper for a while. When we were getting ready to turn, the other vehicle slows a bit behind us, and right as we make the turn, I launch that ranch dressing out the back window. SPLAT! All over the windshield. That was so awesome.
I didn’t do this one, but on a nearby overpass someone has spray painted JEHOVAH LIVES in big red letters. For a long time, I have been tempted to take black spray paint, cross out JEHOVAH and write FRODO over it. It would be funny, but I doubt anyone else in the area would get the reference.
I think the wierdest vandalism we did was taking cassette tapes, rewinding them to one end, popping that end of the tape free, tying it to a tree or pole, and tossing the cassette into a truck or something passing by and seeing how far the tape would go. We would follow the truck on our bikes. If the truck didn’t turn, those things went surprisingly far.
I can’t find any records or pictures online, but -
I grew up a few towns over to a house on a well traveled road in or near Newtown Square, PA. (I haven’t been by in several years or more, so my memory’s a little fuzzy.) They were notable because of three near-life-sized bear statues, made of wood and covered in fuzzy moss, that they had sitting next to the road. I assumed for many years that they were just some wacky art of theirs, but a story about them appeared in the local paper one day. The owners of the house had woken up one day to find them sitting in those spots. No one ever claimed credit for this hugely complicated prank, but the owners decided that the bears should stay.
A friend of mine & I discovered a case of crepe paper streamers in our high school scene shop under a bunch of junk we were tasked with clearing. We decided that these would be so much more fun to use than toilet paper on various people’s trees. We also reasoned that crepe paper was stronger than your average Charmain, so it would be easier to clean up.
I admit it looked really cool & it became our “trademark” until once it rained and all the blue dye came out on house, driveway, trees, etc - at my then girlfriend’s house. It stopped being cool at that moment…
My friends and I engaged in a great deal of delinquency in the early days of high school, ranging in order of “tame” to “insane,” from TP-ing, to egging all the windows of both middle schools in town, to breaking into a house which we thought was abandoned (but later learned was actually occupied) and smashing things at random with baseball bats, to creating gigantic explosions with cans of gasoline or kerosene and nearly destroying an old man’s truck. There was never any particular meaning to any of this, we were just being shithead kids.
The most unique thing we ever did though - we created a very long and very powerful “Potato Cannon” with PVC piping and a barbeque lighter for ignition and hairspray as fuel. In addition to using potatoes and onions, we also launched big globs of wet toilet paper all over the house of another kid in our neighborhood who we hated but for the life of me, cannot remember why. But it was certainly an ambitious project.
Here’s me and my two friends with the cannon (the “Stands” is the name of the development we lived in…(which as you can probably imagine was not a “ghetto” despite the photo’s caption.) We were all freshman in high school. Left to right, Dan, Nick, Me.
(These guys were the tamer of the two groups I hung out with - the random destruction/arson guys were another breed entirely.)
During my second year of secondary school (I was 13 for those from different educational systems) Our school purchased ‘indestructible’ chairs. These were meant to stop the constant stream of replacements for metal legged chairs caused by people leaning backwards on them. The chairs were our headmaster’s pride and joy, often referred to at the daily assembly.
Needless to say being of an inventive turn of mind my friend and I viewed words like ‘indestructible’ as a challenge. We painstakingly sawed a chair in half (along the left/right axis so it was nice and symmetrical) and left it outside the headmaster’s office.
The ensuing ballistics and mass inquisitions were quite instructive and we eventually had to confess or everyone in the school was going to be confined to grounds (boarding school). I think the headmaster was genuinely shocked by who had done it (we were easily the head of the class academically) so we got off quite lightly, we had to each purchase a new chair for the school and do some detention.
Well, Dallas is sooooooo cosmopolitan compared to us rubes in the hinterlands.
You are clearly a prank connoisseur. I bow to your sophistication. (Okay, the thing with the French teacher sounds funny. Did that really work?) I didn’t say I was entertained by the vandalism in the yard. The girl who yelled “Bitch” as she launched my mailbox wasn’t entertaining. (That one was because she was mad at my daughter and my poor mailbox paid the price.) Picking up soaked maxi-pads in the rain wasn’t entertaining. I had just never heard of such a thing. I figure that some kid was looking for TP in the cabinet and found his mom’s pad supply. Won’t Mom by surprised when she goes looking for them?
Now, that’s funny. Did the original artist know his work was being so modified? That might be motivation enough to continue.
We are lucky you are here, sir. Sounds like you were into the heavy-duty, juvenile delinquent, gets played on CNN style of nonsense.
Well my best harmless act of vandalism was on a barn next to the highway out of town. The side of the barn had “Goats for sale $200” painted on the side of it. I guess in case you were driving by and wanted a goat. Well one night me and my friends went in a pained an apostrophe and the word love. It was there until they tore down the barn a couple of years ago.
My other great act of vandalism was a revenge issue. My high school was playing the cross town high school and they snuck onto our field and salted their school initials into our field. After we soundly whipped them that Friday we got a truck of strawberries from a teammate’s dad, possibly without the dad’s knowledge, and then spread that all over their field except for a bare patch that was the final score. This was extra mean because we were playing the lower income high school in town and a large percentage of their parents picked strawberries for a living.
Not really vandalism but a prank on my football coach my senior year involved filling his truck with balloons filled with glitter. This by the way is really hard to do with out getting glitter all over. The coach did exactly as expected and pulled out his knife to start popping the balloons instead of trying to throw them away blown up. He was pretty pissed Monday at school.
Beautiful. The most we did in high school was putting vaseline on this guy’s steering wheel and windshield wipers.
It’s not really vandalism, but I was a member of the car displacement club in high school. Our parking lot was small, and more people wanted to park there than could. So the school drew lots to see who would have the option of buying a parking spot for the year. Some people would just show up and park wherever the hell they felt like, which pissed the rest of us off.
One guy did this quite often, so one day a big group of us just went out and physically picked his car up and moved it so the guy who’s spot it was could park there. He got called to move his car, and didn’t have a parking spot anymore. A few days later, some guy we didn’t know came to us and asked us if we could do it again, as it was his spot that got parked in. So we did. This happened 3 or 4 more times, each time this guy would get called down to the principal’s office to explain why he parked in the middle of the aisle. Last time we got caught by a teacher and all got detention.
