Kind of stupid, but when I was about eleven or twelve, a friend and I thought it would be hilarious to clog the toilet at the BP down the street. We tried a couple of things (I don’t even remember what all they were), and finally we found an old pair of reading glasses lying in the gutter.
Jackpot! So we went and flushed them, then ran. A hour later, we checked back, and there was an “Out of Order” sign on the door. After that, I think they started doing the key on the huge wooden paddle key-chain thing.
When I was about the same age, I wrote a few swearwords in the back of a hymnal at Mass. A few years later, I happened to pick up a hymnal, and guess which one? At that point, my Catholic Guilt[sub]TM[/sub] kicked in, and I was glad when we ordered new hymnals the following year.
Not vandalism, per se, but when I was a sophmore in high school, my best friend and I were inspired by Calvin and Hobbes to go up to our school and make a few Calvinesque snowmen-she did a two-headed alien, I did one with a bunch of “arrows” (sticks) sticking out of his chest.
Once upon a time in a world that has since moved on, computers used these things called punch cards. They aren’t born with those little rectangular holes, and the process of creating them yields little particles of paper that, subsequent to Election '00, would surely be called “chads”, but back then we called them “punchies”.
Our Explorer Scouts scoutmaster was treated to having his little compact car (Honda Civic or some such) stuffed very very tightly with overinflated balloons which, in addition to lotsa air, contained a few tablespoons each of punchies.
They’re inclined towards static electricity, so after blowing every-which-a-way they tend to stick to everything and are the very devil to pick up.
On our end, each balloon had to be filled, via funnel, with 3 tbsp of punchies, then inflated with the air compressor and tied off. Then came the very careful & meticulous stuffing of the Civic.
I once took an entire bin of mini/pie pumpkins and covered someones lawn (and gutters).
At my school, someone sodded a wing of the building.
Someone also erected a brick wall between that wing and the rest of the school.
Someone suspended a VW Beetle over the pool.
They put the school up for sale. That is they found just about every for sale sign in the city and put it on the school lawn, then they took out a house for sale classified ad "House for sale, very large, 438 rooms, 26 bathrooms, two olympic size pools…etc)
An elderly aquaintance of my mother’s had expressed a wish to see video of British Columbia as seen from the air, and so I checked out several videos on the subject.
One of these was a video of a travelogue film made for the Imax theatre on Grouse Mountain, called “Eyes of an Eagle,” or something like that. This film has super pompous-sounding narration, and the first line of it is:
This struck me as so poorly thought out that I couldn’t resist splicing in (immediately after the delivery of that line) a few seconds of Lars Von Trier’s Danish hospital horror TV series The Kingdom, graphically depicting a woman giving birth to a full-grown man, viciously clawing his way out of the womb.
I do feel a bit guilty for vandalizing library material, but at the same time I wish I could have seen the faces of the next few patrons that checked it out.
I was watching Modern Marvels on the making of The Golden Gate Bridge or some other large bridge. One of the workers they interviewed said as a joke he (or someone else, don’t remember) put a pair of shoes, soles out, in one of the molds for one of the columns. That way when they took the form off it looked like someones shoes sticking out and they had to tear the whole thing down to find out who it was.
Perfect Park was a hallowed strip of land in Isla Vista next to UCSB where people gathered to protest the Viet Nam war in 1970. These protests led to the burning of the Bank of America, Ronald Reagan calling out the National Guard, and a kid not involved in the protests being shot to death by the police.
For years people were trying to preserve it as a memorial to a tragic time in America. Random economics allowed the adjacent church to purchase it and turn it into a parking lot. We called it “Perfect Parking Lot”.
Soon after it was paved, a couple of friends and i were drinking heavily. We got the brilliant idea to go and paint names for reserved parking spots in Perfect Parking Lot. We painted “God”, Geezus",and “Goly Boast” (A drunken perversion of “Holy Ghost”) on the parking spaces’ curb, using carefully cut official looking stencils.
The odd and funny thing was that the names were never sandblasted nor painted over. You could still read them up to 3 years later. By the way, the statute of limitations has been over by about 14 years.
Someone repainted the NOT AN OUTLET sign on my street to read NOTAN TOI_|TLET
A couple of kids went around the neighborhood the night before Halloween spraying “Ninja” everywhere. It was when I was in Jr High back in the 80s when ninjas were big.
One time a couple guys from my fraternity launched a couple of Cornish game hens from a surgical tubing slingshot at a neighboring fraternity. One broke a window.
At my school one year the seniors released thousands and thousands and thousands of crickets. They all seemed to find there way to the library and spent a week or behind the books chirping.
When the liberal arts college I attended decided to start a business program, the powers that were couldn’t be satisfied with such a straightforward designation, so they came up with Liberal Arts Management Program, with LAMP as the commonly-used acronym. My friend Barrett and I were struck by the idea that business management was more likely to appeal to right-wingers than to leftists, so we came up with the idea of the Conservative Arts Management Program (CAMP).
This was back in the days of real card catalogs, and plenty of obsolete or mistyped cards were available as “scratch paper” in the library. We grabbed a bunch of cards, folded them into the shape of little tents, and placed them on various out-of-the-way tables and shelves after emblazoning them with various slogans. Some I remember:
*Become a CAMP major and pitch your tent in Joe Smith’s valley of ignorance!
If CAMP is still too liberal, try RAMP (Reactionary Arts Management Program) – a course of study with a slant to the right!**
(Outside) CAMPtown Ladies Sing This Song…
(Inside) I Want To Suck on Joe Smith’s Dong! DOO-DA! DOO-DA!**
(Outside) Hey Joe, can I be a CAMP major?
(Inside) No, Susan, I have to pitch my tent in your valley!***
We eventually heard through the grapevine that Joe had seen some of our handiwork and was none too pleased, but we were never caught.
not his real name
** Joe was rumored to offer selected female students the chance to improve their grades by performing “extra credit” work in the bedroom
*** Susan, who was on the faculty, eventually “shacked up” with Joe
In high school drama class, I was going to be wearing an old wig, badly in need of a trim. My friend and I trimmed off quite a bit of the wig during our after-school rehearsal, turning its long hair into a bob. What to do with the remaining time until I was expected back on stage, and what to do with these handfuls of hair? Put bits of hair in every partially open locker we could find, of course! There were bits of hair all over the floor in the hallways the next day.
Then there was a prank, not quite vandalism, that I’d pulled that I especially liked: my high school principal was of the pompous douchebag variety, so I felt like he needed a bit o’ comeuppance. I searched the internet for all of the mail-order-bride catalog companies I could find, and sent off for a SHIT TON of catalogs to be sent to his home address. I can’t imagine his wife was terribly pleased, and I’d like to hope that at least one member of his congregation (he’s also a preacher, at the most holier-than-thou church in town; for og’s sake, it’s on top of a GIANT HILL) might have seen those catalogs. Damn, now that I think about it, I should’ve sent the catalogs to him at his church. That would’ve been EXTRA classic.
When I was a teenager, we used to sneak into the pool areas of hotels on St. Pete beach and dump a bottle of Mr. Bubble into the hot tub.
It meant “we’re bored teenagers who like to go skinny-dipping in hot tubs full of Mr. Bubble.” We only got caught in the act once, which lead to an exhilarating naked midnight run down the beach, being chased by hotel security. We got away clean.
When we were in high school, a bunch of us went to the school’s soccer fields and stole all eight of the nets out of the goals. We took then to the woods where we regularly had our parties and turned them into a gargantuan system of net ladders and hammocks, extending far up into the trees.
Spending drunken weekends 40’ in the air is reason #36 on my list of why I’m mystified that we all lived to see our 30’s.