In the NYC subway system, temporary service changes are often announced via fliers printed on 11x14 paper which is taped to the steel pillars in the stations that hold the street up.
Once, I took a bunch of them and relocated them to cover the C’s on these things.
In the second women’s restroom stall in from the door in the first floor women’s restroom at the Baker Systems building on Ohio State’s campus (enough prepositional phrases for you?) there was a hastily scribbled bumper sticker abortion slogan in pen on the side wall of the stall. It spawned an entire wall plus the inside of the door of abortion debate, where women wrote their opinions and experiences and responded to those that were already there. I added a few sentences to the wall.
Was one of them an astronaut?
One bit of vandalism that seemed to bring a smile to everyone’s face was perpetrated on Rte 2 near my office. The highway has periodic “Deer Crossing” signs (Page 4 of this pdf). Before Christmas one year, someone stopped at every sign and put a big red circular sticker on the deer’s nose. Public Works employees are vigilant in removing stickers from their signs, but they left those alone for years.
Brilliant. There is a local restaurant called the Canal Pub. Oh, how I have longed to cover up the C and add an E at the end of the sign…
Another one that I thought of that I can’t take credit for. In my town, there are quite a few stop signs that have letters spelling out “Hammer Time” below the word stop. Every time they get removed, more pop up on different signs. I sure wish I knew who was doing that, because I think it’s hilarious (although it has gone on a bit long now). The first time I saw one, about a year ago, I took a picture with my cell phone, but I have no idea how to upload it to the computer.
I have a few.
When I was 10, I thought it was the height of hilarity to steal a “Home for Sale” sign and put it in up at a church that was across the street from my neighborhood. Yuck-yuck - God’s home is for sale! Get it???
A few years later, a friend of mine got upset that his neighbor had a better lawn than he did. So, chemically induced, we go out one night with some of the cheesiest flower-seeds-in-a-$.50-pack and plant them in their flower bed. Since I lived in a completely different neighborhood, I never saw the carnage, well, bloom.
When I was 12 it was 1979 and two Popes died within a month of each other. I told a friend of mine, who was VERY susceptible to Nostradamian claims (her mom was an avid Nat. Enquirer reader, back when it was qwality), that it was predicted that if two Popes died within a month of each other, the world would end the following Friday, at 12:00 noon.
She believed me, like I knew she would. She told everybody in the school, which was a completely unexpected benefit: you have no idea the inner joy I felt when somebody came up to me a few days later and said “Didja hear? According to the Bible the world is going to end during lunch tomorrow because two Popes died!” “No, really!” “Really! Bobby told me!” (I didn’t tell Bobby and had no idea why he was spreading the rumor, but God favors the fortunate. Or something like that).
So, sitting in the cafeteria that fateful morning, the weirdest thing happened… the entire room, full of 200 or so kids, grew quiet. It was about 11:56 and everybody stopped speaking and started to look at the clock. The teachers (who sat on the stage (the cafeteria doubled as an auditorium)) were looking about, trying to figure out what was up (I’m sure that some of them knew, but there were a number of puzzled glances from some of the more clueless ones). The clock slowly inched towards 12:00… waiting, waiting, the entire room in deep silence.
Finally, sometime between 12:00 and 12:02, a few people let out some nervous laughs, the kids started talking again, and life resumed its normal course.
It was the greatest joke I ever perpetrated on anybody in my entire life. And it was a good lesson on human gullibility.
I love it when people do that.
On Skyline Truck Trail in Jamul, CA, about 100 yards before the school stop sign, there’s a “horse crossing” type sign. Someone did a pretty good job matching the paint and made it very clear that the horse is *not *a gelding. A bit like the one here but bigger.
My high school crowd was definitely into the random “vandalism” - I use it that way because we never did anything that couldn’t be undone.
Hmmm. Let’s see…
-they carpeted my garage roof, set up a nice table (complete with breakfast) and a lovely blinking road sign for my birthday one year
-we covered every square inch of a garage door in election signs, and set up an entire children’s kitchen playset on the lawn
-we sodded the roof of one guy’s car (don’t recall where we got the sod)
-same guy - we all spraypainted our names on his car. His father tipped us off and let us in, believing it was just a base coat…turned out it wasn’t. Fortunately he was really, really angry at his dad, instead of us
-spraypainted “drunk and naked” under a number of bridges (oh, wait. That really was vandalism)
I’m sure there were others. These same friends used to drink oyster sauce until they vomited, then run around naked on a municpal golf course. But - time marches on. One is a doctor, one is a lawyer, one is the spokesman for the paramedics in the city…
The practice appears to have reached its zenith in Iowa.
cackle.
This is why I love this board. 
When I was 7 a 12-year-old boy convinced me to throw a giant rock through a schoolhouse window and crawl in after it. We got caught. Later that night some cops showed up at our door. He got in very deep trouble, and I totally got away with it because I didn’t really understand what I was doing. Also, the cops thought I was adorable. I totally milked that.
‘‘If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?’’ they asked.
‘‘Yes I would.’’
‘‘You would?’’
‘‘Oh, yes. If I had a parachute.’’
‘‘Awwwww.’’
Suckers.
This was my only act of vandalism until the day I graduated college last year. In the ladies’ bathroom at Angel Hall people have written epic stories about their lives, no doubt in the midst of drunken stupor. As a send-off to my beloved alma mater, I added my own contribution:
THERE IS LIFE AFTER DEPRESSION.
I HAVE FOUND IT.
What did it mean? It means I am free. I’ve spent a lot of my lifetime crying in the ladies’ bathroom stall. I hope when some other miserable girl is in there crying, she will see that and it will give her hope.
The maliciousness of the fork prank is that, here in the Northeast, you time it so you’re putting the forks in the lawn before the ground freezes. After the ground is frozen, they are very difficult to remove.
Another one I remember from back in the day was with Oreos. If you split the Oreo and lick the creme, you can stick it to glass, like on a windshield or a big picture window. You can spell out words with them.
I never did either of these myself, but they were popular at my high school. The Oreo one always struck me as particularly disappointing – what a waste of Oreos.
Gummi bears also stick when licked, are much cheaper, and you get to use a smaller font. Of course if your intention is to have it visible from a distance you would go Oreo. But for windows in the school stairwells, there’s nothin’ like Gummi. (Swedish Fish being too heavy to stay stuck.)
Or so I’ve heard.
My acts of vandalism were limited to one or two instances of “For Sale” sign transposing and brief pumpkin-smashing sprees on Halloween (I would feel guilty and stop as soon as we encountered the first pumpkin obviously decorated by a small child). And of course, any number of marker pen commentaries, tooth blackenings, additions of freckles, mustaches and nipples or letter adjustments done on ads in the NYC subway (which I still do to this day at age 37, especially if I’m coming home after a dinner out with my wife and we’ve had wine).
My favorite one (which was an act witnessed and not committed) was when someone used both White-Out and a black magic marker to vandalize a movie ad for the David Lynch movie of Dune, which had the slogan line “…beyond your imagination” and the text in white letters on a black background. With magic marker, the perp blacked out the center bar of the “E” in “DUNE”, then added a very neat final “E” at the end that fitted with the font, rendering it “DUNCE”, and also inserting the world “feeble” with an arrow under the word “imagination” in the slogan line.
It was the use of both black and white writing material that spoke of someone who planned ahead rather than committing the usual random graffiti while waiting for the train. Nice.
Something similar happens around here, it’s called flocking… it’s usually a fundraising thing for a local highschool group though. You can ‘hire’ the highschool kids to remove them for 10 or 15 bucks. For 20, they’ll ‘flock’ someone else’s yard at your request. 
Rats, missed the edit window…
When my brother was in high school, during the christmas season, him and his friends would go around and arrange all the lighted deer lawn decorations in rather, um, questionable poses.
Not at all. I work at a high school here in sunny San Diego, California, where the lawn of the school itself recently got forked as part of a senior prank.
Pink flamingos were once considered a sign that a home was literally a safe house for gay travellers. Someone was probably trying to imply that you intended to throw a gay party in your home with men you’d never see again.
I don’t think so. Or if the artist did know, then they didn’t continue to do it. It took a lot of effort to carve anything into the lab tables because the wood and the paint were pretty hard, and the pointy bit on a protractor wasn’t the best tool. The retrofitted graffiti only increased at the rate of one or two per semester.
Initials and full names were more common and much stupider. Seriously, why sign your work if it’s going to get you an in-school suspension or a string of detentions?
Here’s another one: In my high school, there’s this indoor garden. It’s just a few leafy green plants beneath a rock wall, but it’s nice and pretty and it’s easy to hide things in there. My senior year, some friends and I were discussing what would be an awesome senior prank, and I suggested lawn gnomes in the rock wall garden. I was joking, because, damn, but lawn gnomes are expensive when you’re in high school. Fifteen dollars for a little ceramic guy in a red hat? Yeah, right! That’s dinner and a movie, folks.
About a month before we graduated, a very large and sassy lawn gnome appeared in the herbaceous border one morning. Never figured out who did it.
A few years back when I was a sophomore in college, my friend and I went out to our usual hangout; soon enough, it was 2am and the bar was closing, but we weren’t ready to go home yet. What did we do? We trolled the neighborhoods looking for something to do and discovered inspiration on Pepper Street. Right there on someone’s lawn was the ugliest lawn ornament I have ever seen on public display outside of a shop: it was a blue-footed booby with a small blue cap and teeny beady eyes and the most constipated expression I’d ever seen rendered in hollow ceramic. We had to take it, and thus it went into my care.
Inspired by Amelie, I wanted to travel around and take photo adventures with it. I took it to Wal-Mart and across campus a few times, but I somehow got bored with it and it ended up in my mom’s garage. Somehow, I think she’s more proud of me for not being completely boring than horrified that she has the fruits of my bad behavior living in her garage. Someday I’m going to have to give back that horrible looking lawn ornament to my friend so he can replace it at the people’s house. I don’t know if they’ll remember it, as it’s been about four years and it was in an area where a lot of students rent.
Maybe it was someone else’s prank that I saved them from. :eek:
So you witnessed the prank? Then you were a good sport about it. You didn’t chase them off of your lawn shaking your first. No wonder your students like you.
The French teacher thing kind of worked. He’d almost been hired by the French secret service before he came to the States. (Or at least, that’s what he talked about in class instead of actually teaching French.) He said that he’d failed the “seduction test.” So I “assigned” a female friend to call him during break time and say she wanted to meet him about “some very important things that happened in France.” Then, another friend “poisoned” his thermos of coffee by pouring a whole bottle of almond extract into it, so it would be too obvious to actually drink. On the same day, in his attendance folder, we put a piece of paper with the telephone number of the French consulate in L.A., that had a note saying, in French, “If you need help…” After that, we were going to tell him to go to a coffee house where he would find a note under the sugar container at a certain table from some Algerians who were very anxious to meet him.
It turned out, however, that he’d been having problems with the administration (for not actually teaching French), so he assumed that they were “testing” him, or even simply tormenting him. When he called in sick, and after some inquiries, we realized that he was taking the whole thing wrong, and we confessed to the principal. He said, “Yeah, I thought it was you.” We were suspended for a week. In that time, I realized it was a cruel thing to do–but we we’re incensed that he never actually taught French. None of his students could communicate in even the most basic French.
Since you are a band teacher, Drum God, it reminds me that we also did a “stunt” where the band room was a staging ground for playing an air raid siren over the school PA system.
When I was 8 years-old I took an icepick and poked holes in every pumpkin growing in my neighbor’s garden. The pumpkins were almost to fruition, so they all bore little scars when it came to be picking time.
I ended up confessing because I felt so guilty. I think it was all about being a very weird child who got a kick out of doing bad things and then confessing; to the exterior world I was an utterly responsible and mature-beyond-my-years kid.
We were having dinner at a pretentious pub with artwork on the walls which were for sale. We decided that we preferred the lower priced work over the higher priced one so we switched the price tags.
