The Top 3 Greatest Pranks Ever Performed by Me – In Honor of April Fools Day

In honor of yesterday being the amazing holiday of April Fool’s day, I figured I would take you through a quick jaunt of some of my favorite pranks that I have been associated with!

It’s been a long while since my best friend Lindsay and I have gotten to share a date for April Fools and I feel like, with the graduation of high school and our focus on the future, I convinced myself that I left behind those mischievous pranks of my youth. Let’s be honest though, I am just biding my time for the most perfect opportunity to strike back. It’s just in my nature to be a prankster but it’s also a big part of my nature to be a strategist. I think the best strategy for me right now is that I am lulling everybody into a sense of false security before I hit again.

1. The Room Closed Prank – I went to a very small elementary school growing up, so small in fact that, in order to stay open, we had started to combine our classes so as to cut down on extra teachers. I was a 7th grader at the time and they took 12 of us 7th graders to be in a class with the 15 or so 8th graders. I guess we could have looked at it like we were better than the rest of our classmates, as the rest of them were put in a class with 6th graders, but we didn’t. Why? Because everyday we got put down as being the “little kids” of the class, whereas the other half of our class was hailed as the “big kids” of their class. The classroom that we were in was this old mobile unit modular. It was disgustingly filthy but we adored it. We were confined to the main part of the classroom but the 8th graders were given free rein of the other side of the modular as their kingdom and boy did they take full advantage of it. Nobody was allowed in and even the teacher respected that. They seemed to have their own cult in there where they did their homework, projects, and whatever else. By the time that March rolled around they wouldn’t even leave their kingdom for lunch. I figured that I had had about enough. We had all been re-named as some sort of animal (I was lucky because their was an 8th grader I did horse 4H with, I was a Fjord) and some of the kids weren’t too lucky with the names “Slug”, “Moose”, “Cricket”, “Manatee”, etc. It wasn’t that I was mad, it was all in good fun and I was aware of that, but I decided that it was time to exact some revenge by having a little fun of my own. Thus the big room prank began. My first ally was a girl named Claire, we had gone to school together since 1st grade and she was a flipping genius. She was always my go to for schoolwork help because I knew she would either know the answers OR she wouldn’t be afraid to ask the teacher for help (something that scared me half to death). She was all for it. We passed a note around the class alerting the rest of the 7th graders in our split class of the idea and the last day of March… we were all back at school. The best part about this was that our teacher, Mr. Larrowe, who (I had thought) hated us because we were the children in the class and he wanted to be teaching at the high school, thought our idea was genius and was all over helping us. As we efficiently work to stack every desk, table, decoration, etc. behind the modular unit I realized that he just had a huge love of pranks. He was listing off all the pranks he had ever done at all the big schools he had been too and I had a higher appreciation for him. Not just that but a higher appreciation for myself was probably gained by him; all in the name of a well thought out prank. The final touches was a big “condemned” sign on the outside of the door alerting the 8th graders that the Kingdom had been invaded and shut down by a higher force. The morning of April Fool’s dawned bright and clear, I was so excited that I had barely slept a wink the night before. The first thing the 8th graders did was not believe us, it was April Fool’s day after all. Then they opened the door to see that the entire room had been vacated. With the help of the janitor we had even gotten some sawdust, sawhorses, and boards in the room like it was under construction. At first nothing happened and then, when they came out of the Kingdom to take their appropriate seats in the main classroom and saw all of us lounging around nonchalantly in the room, it began to sink in that they were, dare I say it? Normal. The sight of Claire, lounged back in her chair with her feet up on another desk, coyly looking over and saying, “Well, well, well… looks like you are one of us now.” That put them over the edge! A class mainly of girls it took only one weak link to start crying before the flood gates opened up. We all sat there awkwardly, trying our hardest not to laugh. Mr. Larrowe thought it was so hilarious that he actually had to step out of the classroom numerous times. Our productivity for the day was near impossible as it was identical to a funeral in our modular. Many of the 8th graders actually tried to go home early, they were that grieved and depressed from the news. At the end of the day Mr. Larrowe announced that he had had enough and had an announcement to make about our modular, he proceeded to get them with the classic “April Fools!” You should have heard the uproar when the 8th graders realized not only had then been pranked but that they had literally spent a whole day crying over the prank. We took them to the back behind the modular where there was a note and decorations on their desks and items stating that it was, in fact, and April Fool’s prank. We actually all became better friends after the fact as we helped them move all their stuff back and re-decorate their room. It turned into a fun room for everyone and we started our own game of points (good deeds equaled positive and bad deeds equaled negative). I was never out of the negative points, all because they found out from Mr. Larrowe that I was the instigator behind the prank. I always knew he didn’t like me….
2. When you get into high school car pranks become the greatest thing ever because cars are like the only things that really seem to be truly yours. Plus, in high school, your car is something that you have waited a very long time for so the fact that you actually have a bucket of metal that can take you around is such a big deal. So, as a crazy rebellious teenager, what do you do? You prank the thing that is the most important to your friends. I was always very careful with pranks because I LOVED my car and I knew that anything I did to someone else’s car could be improperly reciprocated and there was no way I was changing having something break or my paint pulled off with shaving cream. The most epic of the car pranks was what my friend Lindsay and I did to this poor boy named Nick. Now I’m not sure if Lindsay and Nick were dating as of this point but, either way, they were dating pretty shortly after if they weren’t already. See, car pranks as flirting totally works in high school, it means people like you! Ncik’s car was much nicer than the rest of ours. It was a brand new Jeep Wrangler (2009 edition I believe), silver, and his pride and joy! I was so jealous, I have always had this huge fascination with Jeeps and I’ve always wanted a Wrangler or a Willy’s. Nick was all proud, the Oregon weather was about to finally turn nice and he was going to be able to take the top and doors off of his Jeep and enjoy the crisp, cold, Oregon spring sun. Lindsay was more than ready for this act and she got me in on the plan. Lindsay’s mom was a dentist so she was able to get her hands on THE BIGGEST rolls of cling wrap I have EVER seen. It was amazing! She also went and spent A TON of money on packing peanuts. Then we made a custom bar code packing label, of the giant size of course, and during our autos class (our teacher was as big of a prankster as us) he let the entire class go prank poor Nick’s jeep. We cling wrapped the whole thing so that it was air tight and then filled it to the brim with packing peanuts. Finished it off by attaching the shipping label to the spare tire on the back with the letters addressed “To Nick – From Lindsay”. The look on his face when he came outside was PRICELESS! They happily dated for a few years afterwards.
3. The next prank was another car prank. A fun loving girl in the grade above us was dating one of our favorite auto shop partners named Ty. Ty had gotten poor Ali with some sort of prank so, in order to act the perfect revenge, she went to the best in the business: Katie and Lindsay. It took us quite a while and a lot of research to come up with the best plan for poor Ty but when we finally came up with it Unfortunate Teal (the name of his little Ford Ranger) never stood a chance. We planned the act during an off block and quickly went to work. We secured a large stretch of landscaping fabric to line the bed of his pickup. Then his friend Milan and I spent a good 20 truck loads hauling garbage cans full of water to his pickup. We decorated the bottom with river rock, put some swamp plants in and trailed them over the sides, floated a small cooler in the bag, put a fishing pole in the corner, and wrote “Gone Fishing” on the back window. That’s when Lindsay and Cory got back with the 200 feeder gold fish. Yes, we literally raised the stocks on Wall Street for feeder goldfish with one prank. We then hid in the swampy marshland on the outside of our parking lot while his carpool buddy Ip (okay his name was actually Phillip) sent Ty a text asking him if he could get his wallet out of the glove compartment of Unfortunate Teal because he had to return a book for a project at the library. He walked out…. and oh my gosh … the look on his face was beyond priceless. I remember cowering in the mud there, fist shoved in my mouth trying so hard not to give away our hiding spot by either busting out laughing or by wetting myself from laughing so hard. It was one of those moments where I couldn’t even look at my friends because I knew just one look at Lindsay and I would absolutely die in a fit of giggles. Unfortunate Teal became something of a celebrity that day. Pretty soon not a single car was parked around it in the parking lot and most of the school spent lunch break hanging around watching the fish and feeding them bread crumbs. Overall it was quite the riot! We even made a good deal out of it because we had brought boxes of Ziploc baggies and sold goldfish to people for a $1 a fish. Being feeder goldfish though, I knew they would be pretty quick to die because, besides the rare unicorn of the bunch, getting those suckers to live more than a week is virtually impossible. I will never forget though, how one of the many fish that died in the sun in the back of the pickup ended. It didn’t go down the gutter like the rest of the fish that didn’t make it through that day, Milan, in fact, SWALLOWED IT WHOLE ON A DARE! For lunch. He swallowed it whole for LOCAL BOYZ (but Local Boyz is pretty darn delicious). I still have that charming video, from a very old, poor quality flip phone, that I will always cherish as one of those quality high school memories.

And there you have it ladies and gentleman, the top 3 pranks as of now…. there will be more in the future though! Of that, I am sure!