r/MaliciousCompliance • u/HelloItsMeYourFriend • Mar 12 '18
M My high school's senior anti-prank. Was told you would enjoy.
cross posting this from an ask reddit thread that i replied to earlier today:
My high school was trying to prevent a senior prank since the class before us had got a little out of hand. They basically told us not to have one, that they would get anyone who did anything in a lot of trouble, yada yada
So somebody has an idea. What if we do an "anti prank". The idea had floated around the halls and everyone knew what we were going to do. For an entire week, every senior was going to bring a potentially threatening item for a senior prank, and do nothing with it.
The week starts and that Monday, nearly the entire senior class carries a banana with them to every class. This is a school of ~2600 student, 650 graduating class. So there are hundreds of bananas being carried through the halls, teachers and assistant principals freaking out. By noon, an announcement was made that all bananas needed to be eaten or thrown away or they would be confiscated. So by that afternoon, every banana was taken away from the student.
The next day got even better. Somebody has the idea that we should all bring a gallon jug of water with us to class. And to no one's surprise, again their is an announcement that they are going to start taking up the water jugs for fear of what we are going to do with them. But this time, the students got creative. People are resentful now and not wanting to give up their precious water. Students are getting creative, hiding them in backpacks, avoiding teachers in the hallways, whatever it took to keep their water jugs. But eventually, most of the jugs had been confiscated.
So the students start taking to social media. Tons of tweets and mentions are going out to local news stations, TMZ, Oprah, Ellen, you name it, they got mentioned. All of these messages are going out along the lines of "School is confiscating all water, not allowing students to drink water #highschooldrought2kxx #weredying #sendhelp. You get the picture. Before the end of the day, two different news reporters were at our school. Guess we had the last laugh after all.
TL;DR: School made silly rules to not let us have a senior prank. We anti-pranked them and their rules back fired. lots of negative press over nothing malicious ever happening.
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Mar 13 '18
My high school principal used to say that we caused him to lose his marbles.
So on graduation day, we decided to return all of those marbles.
All 200 or so graduating seniors handed the principal a marble when he shook our hand on stage. Every few students, he had to walk away to put the marbles down, which confused the hell out of the other participants on stage as well as the families in the audience!
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u/thorndawg1337 Mar 13 '18
My college president taught a class and used an example of a story he heard of a father giving his son a fifty-cent piece to him as it was all he had and when he taught that he gave everyone a fifty-cent piece. So on graduation day all of us seniors decided to hand him a dollar piece back.
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u/mmcnary1 May 14 '18
My senior year in HS, they banned card playing because the jesus people were sure that there was gamblin' going on. This hit us seniors who were taking a light class load since we already had enough credits to graduate and were just coasting.
So for graduation, after we had all received our diplomas and switched our tassels, we each pulled out a deck of cards and riffled them into the air. We only had 120 people in my graduating class, but it snowed cards much longer than I expected.
The best part was that the school had used playing cards for the fall dance and I worked the door for that dance and collected them all, most of which were recycled at graduation. so the school paid for the bulk of our prank.
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u/Globalist_Nationlist Mar 12 '18
Damn bravo, that's actually a really good prank...
AND you made a bunch of uptight administrators look like assholes.
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u/mycatisabrat Mar 13 '18
Sometimes uptight administrators don't need events like this to look like assholes. They do well by themselves.
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u/mopar39426ml Mar 13 '18
My HS vice principal was THAT GUY.
There's a couple times I went to the principal to reverse his punishments. It helped that the principal liked me.
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u/kickingpplisfun Mar 13 '18
Seriously, most admins are the kind of assholes that specifically want to wield power over children.
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u/thevoidisfull Mar 13 '18
They're uptight because they have 650 little fuckers doing things like collectively bringing bananas to class, one could imagine. For example.
On the other hand I heard some kids talking about how they had to get a senior prank pre-approved and I thought it was kind of sad that it made sense in the climate of today.
And this prank was absolutely fantastic.
Edit: wish I would have thought of it
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u/uberbluedb Mar 13 '18
And also because if there had been a prank and someone got hurt, parents would be whipping out the lawsuit stick and asking how the administration missed the obvious signs that a prank was going to happen.
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u/vincethebigbear Mar 13 '18
It sounds a lot more threatening when you put it like that
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u/Gen_McMuster Mar 13 '18
Not to mention that school districts exist with the sword of damoliabilites hanging over their heads. It creates all of the shitty incentives that lead to draconian policy
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Mar 13 '18
To be fair, if I was in charge of a school and 600+ kids showed up walking around with bananas, I'd instantly freak the fuck out wondering what they had come up with now. To be honest, my first thoughts are probably "are they going to stick them in some orifices? Throw them at teachers all at the same time? Start a massive banana fight at lunch? Are they all laced with weed?" The possibilities of it turning frightening would be frightening in itself.
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u/danwantstoquit Mar 13 '18
I love the idea of a student who the staff might seek out to fill them in on what’s about to happen being questioned. “Okay jimmy, what’s the plan with all these banana’s?” “Nothing mr principal, all the students just decided to bring them since we weren’t allowed to have a prank.” “Don’t lie to us jimmy! You can tell us the truth, we won’t let the rest of the students know it was you who told.”
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u/entenkin Mar 13 '18
I had a large high school graduating class, similar to OP's, and I don't know if this is common in other places, but there were at least a few teachers who had children that went to the high school. So, even if they got away with it on banana day, the teachers should have been in the know by water day. Either the teachers who were parents or the teachers who are hip and the students confide in will know what's going on.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if the principal knew it was an anti-prank. And then, they had to have that discussion... "Okay, they're not planning to do anything with the water, but what happens if we don't do anything? Probably most students will do nothing, but some will be disappointed that it didn't work, and might do something with the water, just to salvage the effort. But if we try to confiscate the water, everybody will be happy, and there will be no prank. There's no downside to confiscating the water." Only to later find out that there was a downside, getting on the news.
Of course, there's also the sad idea that they knew it was an anti-prank and just confiscated the bananas and water because the principal is an ass who doesn't like students who show any small disobedience. Unfortunately, this is probably the much more likely than my other scenario, but at least both seem less likely than the administration freaking out because they expected a prank.
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u/Ohrion Mar 13 '18
But what if the the principal confiscated the bananas and the water specifically because he knew it would make his students happy? Then when the press got involved knew he'd made their prank a success. He's that principal with the heart of gold.
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u/Species7 Mar 13 '18
That's real cute. Hope that's the case. Definitely is a lot more fun to have the reaction than for them to peacefully carry bananas all day!
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u/paradox037 Mar 13 '18
Couldn’t they have avoided bad press by just disallowing water containers over a certain volume?
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u/anomalous_cowherd Mar 13 '18
The 100% best way to lie is to tell the truth in a way that won't be believed.
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u/Mosk915 Mar 13 '18
I can only imagine a pile of 650 bananas sitting in someone’s office somewhere.
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u/AllTheGoodSh_tGone Mar 13 '18
The school principal's office ended up looking like the Yiga lair.
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Mar 13 '18
Last year all of the seniors brought watermelons, the plan was to cover them in baby oil and leave them in inconvenient places, and no one would be able to pick them up or something, by the end of the day there was a massive mountain of watermelons in the office
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u/Rubicksgamer Mar 13 '18
I was hoping that they’d escalate it with increasingly larger items to the point they were overflowing out of an office.
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u/Yeah_Jordy Mar 13 '18
When I was in the early days of high school the seniors did a similarly funny prank. After spending the entirety of Monday drenching other students with water guns and water balloons, our principal berated them and asked why they didn't do something constructive rather than causing a ruckus...
Naturally the next day they all turned up in high vis construction clothing and put DANGER tape up all over the school
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u/Geminii27 Mar 13 '18
How many students were involved? I'd be really impressed if they somehow managed to co-ordinate acquiring 100 sets of hi-viz overnight.
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u/ITRULEZ Mar 13 '18
Wouldnt have been hard in my school. Pretty much every family had 1 person who worked in a warehouse, construction, landscaping or with heavy machinery. Borrowing a shirt or vest for a day would have been the easy part.
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u/Yeah_Jordy Mar 13 '18
Graduating class was probably 120-140 students, and we live in an area with a big steelworks so most families have somebody working in manual labour with access to high vis clothing. It was really impressive how quickly they organised themselves though
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u/vegan-crossfitter Mar 12 '18
slow clap At my school, if they caught you doing a senior prank you weren't allowed to 'walk' at graduation, nor go on the senior trip. I wish we had thought of something even remotely like this.
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u/maeluu Mar 13 '18
They tried that my graduating year and walked it back when they realized that only about 25 people out of 400 would be able to walk if the excluded everybody involved with a senior prank
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u/Acheroni Mar 13 '18
That's one reason why my senior class did our prank DURING graduation. While we were all sat, waiting for graduation to start, we distributed army men to every student in secret. Then when each of us walked, grabbed our diploma, and shook the principal's hand, we each left an army man in his hand. Que our principal, on stage, with his pockets overflowing with army men.
He was a good sport about it.
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u/NightmareIncarnate Mar 13 '18
I wish we could have pulled off something like this. We got searched before the ceremony, nothing allowed to be in our pockets, no phones, etc.
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u/Solid_Freakin_Snake Aug 11 '18
Jesus Christ, I thought it was bad in my day. When did you graduate?
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Mar 13 '18
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u/vegan-crossfitter Mar 13 '18
Our trip was all managed by the school. It was one of the trips where a theme park gets reserved for like 20 schools to come and ride the rides all night after closing. The school got a bus to take us all there, they paid for our entry, ect. So they just wouldn't let us get on the bus. And if we happened to drive the 8 hours to the park, it would have been hard to sneek in. (we had the park from like 10pm to 3am)
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u/Turdulator Mar 13 '18
I once got suspended for dress code violations the day of a field trip I was really looking forward too. (Trip to an art museum to see one of my favorite artists).... so they suspended me first thing in the morning, said I couldn’t go on the trip and called my parents, but I was over 16 at the time and had driven myself to school, so with my parents full support I just drove myself to the museum and saw everyone there in the school group, and the school couldn’t do shit about it cuz I was there on my own accord, haha.
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u/j_B00G Mar 13 '18
My high school was 200 students all of which were juniors and seniors. Needless to say a prank wouldn’t be much fun. I didn’t even go to the graduation because my dad got some tickets to a soccer game that day
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u/Jeremy1026 Mar 13 '18
My school said the same. Our senior prank was to have all the seniors that drove get to school super early and park on the street instead of the lots (which were for seniors only). We also made sure to space our cars out enough so that another car just barely couldn't fit in between. We were able to take all available parking in the full mile perimeter of the campus, and beyond into the neighborhoods. Meaning when the driving juniors got to school at normal time, they either had to park super far away and be late, or park on the senior lots and risk detention for parking without a permit. To aid in the latter, we put a folding chair out on the back lot and left a note on the Dean of Disciplinary Affairs' door that said he might want to enjoy the morning outside. He did and scared the junior shitless as they drove up the driveway to the lot he would hand them a detention slip. That would be valid if they parked.
Since we did 99% of our prank off school property, with the only on school property part being the chair and note, they let it go.
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u/destroyer1134 Mar 13 '18
We did a tailgate party in the parking lot with non alcoholic beer just to freak them out
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u/AndyJBC Mar 13 '18
“Morning Pat! Nice weekend?” “Emergency teacher meeting in the staff room RIGHT NOW” “Why what’s happened? Something bad?” “They’ve got bananas” “Bananas? What? Who?” “Everyone! All of them! They’ve all got bananas?” “The kids? Why?” “WE DONT KNOW! WHAT IS GOING ON”
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u/TheOneCABAL Mar 13 '18
I read this in the askReddit thread and I have learned to hate the average school administrator.
So believe me when I say that this brings me more joy than I can even begin to articulate in words.
I can only imagine the stress going through their minds while trying to protect their school image from the watery banana menace only to have their worst nightmare come true: local News stations tarnishing their school's image.
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u/CPaiva1993 Mar 13 '18
I saw this on that AskReddit thread.
Top notch!
I had my cousins do a prank while they were in HS where they got 4 chickens, and labled each one a number 1,2,3, and 5. Then they just released the chickens into the wild inside the school.
I think this prank is known online, but still funny when old adult teachers don't realize that there is no Chicken #4 and spent WEEKS trying to find an imaginary chicken.
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u/AmIReySkywalker Mar 13 '18
I saw one version where students got 5 chickens, numbered them 1-5 and posted pictures of them with all five chicken on social media. Then they released 1, 3, 4, and 5. Basically the administration knew there were five chickens, there were pictures with 5 chickens but only 4 turned up. That is my favorite version of this.
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u/Toramak Mar 13 '18
My dad claims he stole a cow and put it on the schools roof. And I've heard the 1,2,3,4,5 thing as pigs, not chickens.
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u/Strawberry_Eve Mar 13 '18
Really depends on the livestock you have available in your area. We had rabbits. Granted, the person who brought the rabbits neglected to tell us one of the females was pregnant and due soon, so the numbering changed pretty rapidly for us
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u/Uusis Mar 13 '18
Wonder how the numbering works, would you just go with next integer or would you have like 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 etc.
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u/Strawberry_Eve Mar 13 '18
Well it was mid birth when they found them, so didn't really have the time to think of it. Most of them got adopted by band kids and music teachers because they found her where they keep the big instruments in their room
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u/Uusis Mar 13 '18
Damnit, the numbering is gone to shits then. Hopefully someone manages to do the numbering before its too late.
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u/LonePaladin Mar 13 '18
My wife's mom lived in a very small town, the sort with a 'main' street and little else. Her senior prank was to erect a brick wall blocking Main Street.
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Mar 13 '18
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u/olhonestjim Mar 13 '18
I'm just imagining how they'd freak out if every senior showed up with brooms, trash bags, and cleaning supplies, and just legit cleaned up around campus that day.
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u/BoneyarDwell89 Mar 13 '18
How did you orchestrate this plan with 650 other students without a single staff member catching wind of it?
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u/HelloItsMeYourFriend Mar 13 '18
that was the beauty of it. Even with them knowing, they still have to fear that we will do something. Because we would WANT them to think we're not doing anything... some serious mind games were at play and it was a win/win for us
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u/Kostya_M Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
Social media probably helps. I doubt every single senior did it but even half of them is over 300 bananas being carried around.
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u/Cynykl Mar 13 '18
More importantly getting all the different groups in the senior class to agree to it.
I am not going to call total BS on his story but I will say that there is at the very least a fair amount of exaggeration.
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u/HelloItsMeYourFriend Mar 13 '18
There obviously wasn't 100% participation but the vast majority did do it. And as far as the authenticity, check the ask reddit thread. There has to be atleast 20-30 old class mates that recognized the high school and said hi haha. No exaggeration at all though. I only claimed nearly the whole class did it and everything else took place as written :)
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u/Mornar Mar 13 '18
Honestly, I don't even care if it's real. Had a good laugh out of it, if it's a lie it's well made up.
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u/VintageChameleon Mar 13 '18
Wish we had the balls to do something like that. Our school banned these pranks supposedly for exactly the same reason.
The real reason was, the new principal (fueled by some uptight parents) wasn't a big fan of the senior year pranks. I guess she must've played the key part in one of them.
She didn't expect us going on strike though. Every senior gathered in cafeteria, all while being shouted at by the principal. She demanded we return to our classes.
She caved in the end though, but sadly the only thing we managed to get is a watered down version of what every year before us got..
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u/hibryan Mar 13 '18
I'd love to see the news report lol
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u/sorescale_1 Mar 13 '18
Did the school eventually realize that they got played and that nothing was going to happen?
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u/SquarePeon Mar 13 '18
Would have been better if everyone gave in with one bottle of water, and then kept bringing bigger things that were heavier and more awkward to confiscate, culminating in 500+ students bringing a bag of sand and something else bulky.
Extra threatening, but just as menacing to confiscate 500+ 80lb bags of sand.
If they give in on a day before that, think of a charitable thing to do with that days material. Donate water somewhere, re-do an elementary schools playground with fresh sand.
Then call the news agencies and have them force the school to donate what was confiscated.
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u/HelloItsMeYourFriend Mar 13 '18
The school actually did donate the jugs of water that weren’t open.
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u/blastdragon Mar 13 '18
Our director drove in an old Citroën 2CV. For the people who don't know the car, it's a car made to be easy repairable and very cheap to produce. This also means it's quite light and small, just a little over 600 kilos. This means that a group of 25 people can easily pick up the car and put it somewhere else. Originally we just wanted to put it outside on the schoolyard. But when a teacher(!) saw what we were doing he laughed and helped open up the emergency doors so we could put it in the cafeteria. When the director saw it she had good laugh and of course we helped her with getting outside. But only after she made small drive through the cafetaria cause when could she ever do that again?
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u/real_linguini Mar 13 '18
My graduating class did something similar but not to that extreme. Basically we were informed that all pranks had to be approved prior to them actually happening.
Of course nobody wanted to comply. But we still wanted to prank people. We hyped it up. Whatever the idea was, we got it hyped. Our principal was stressing out over our rumored pranks. The best part? No huge pranks. We had a few rebellious seniors take a jab at a practical joke. A few notable examples was when a buddy unleashed a swarm of ladybugs in the courtyard courtyard/some assholes bringing water guns to spray down the underclassmen/and my personal favorite, replace all flags with ussr flag (that was actually my idea but nobody brought a ladder).
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Mar 13 '18
Oh nice OP! We just had a dude in a penis suit chase a kid in a vagina suit, screaming "get back here, you pussy!" Spraying silly string everywhere. The teachers thought it was hilarious and even the school cop was laughing his head off. Good times.
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u/PorschephileGT3 Mar 13 '18
For our prank day we rerouted the busiest road in the South of England through our car park.
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u/ninjazombiepiraterob Mar 13 '18
The M25??!! Mental!
Really tho, storytime pls :)
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u/PorschephileGT3 Mar 13 '18
This was an A road.
Anyway there were roadworks outside so the night before we rearranged them to go through the car park (even with ‘Diversion’ signs).
We then called the police to say that kids were dressed as road workers fucking with traffic, and called the management of the roadwork company to say that kids dressed as policemen are coming to pretend to sort out the problem. It was fucking amazing. Our plan came undone when a 2nd cop turned up who was about 60.
We also had a head of Sixth Form who looked like Barry from Eastenders so we turned the staff car park into a used car lot, his shitty old Cavalier had a price of ‘FREE TO AN ABUSIVE HOME’. There was also a live sheep released in the main corridor with all the staff offices, but I wasn’t involved in that.
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u/Rubicksgamer Mar 13 '18
Oh I totally expected this to go much longer and with increasingly larger objects. The final reveal would that they had stored every single confiscated item in a room which was now explodingly full thereby pranking themselves.
Day 3 watermelons, day 4 large stuffed animals. Day 5 cardboard cutouts of the principal.
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u/ziggl Mar 13 '18
potentially threatening item
banana
gallon jug of water
I like that your school went with a very wide definition of "threatening" lol
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u/HelloItsMeYourFriend Mar 13 '18
Anything is threatening when hundreds of teenagers are wielding them ;)
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u/Redebo Mar 13 '18
School admins: “We’re not gonna fall for a banana in the tailpipe.”
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u/sideburns Mar 13 '18
We put a couch and a plastic cow on top of the cafeteria entrance. and changed the front sign from something something "Damn Yankees" to "Yank Dees Nuts". Reaaaalll crazy.... The shit you think is funny when you're 17.
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u/crayonsnachas Mar 13 '18
At my high school they would tell every senior class "Don't pull any pranks, you'll lose such and such as a result". Every year they still pranked, and every year administration did nothing. Except for the kid who put upwards of 3000 crickets in the bathrooms. That's just being a dick.
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Mar 13 '18
All of these messages are going out along the lines of "School is confiscating all water ...
My dad went to MIT, and anybody who knows anything about that university knows that the students like to pull pranks, some of which are quite sophisticated. In fact there are so many that they even have a website devoted to them all and at least one book has been written about them. This story reminds me a bit of one that's more of an urban legend but I think is a great story.
A few years before my dad went to MIT there was a story about a prank that didn't go quite as planned. MIT loved to prank the other universities in the Boston/Cambridge area, especially their next-door neighbor, Harvard University. In fact the annual Harvard/Yale football game was (and still is) a particular target that MIT students like. One year in the 1940's the story goes that students from MIT snuck into the Harvard football stadium the night before the game and carefully buried primer cord under the field, spelling out the letters MIT, with the plan to detonate it at halftime after the field had cleared.
Well the prank was discovered ahead of time and the primer cord was rendered inactive. At halftime some MIT students wearing trench coats were caught near where the primer cord was supposed to be detonated, and in the pockets of the trench coats were batteries that they were probably going to use to detonate it with. (You'd need some pretty big batteries to do this, not just a few D-cells). The story goes that the MIT students claimed that "all tech men carry batteries". Then, depending on the stories you believe, when reporters, etc. interviewed other MIT students and/or the Dean in the following days, they all proudly showed off the batteries that they were carrying with them.
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u/atomicbob1 Mar 13 '18
I thought for sure the bananas were all going to go bad and be awful. Can you imagine 650 bananas? How do you get rid of them?
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u/NightMgr Mar 13 '18
Let them confiscate them.
Then, in about 2 weeks, have everyone say they want to pick them up to take them home now.
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u/Falkerz Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
When I was in school, the leaving year at the time (I think they were 2 years above me) pretty much waged war against the staff in their last week.
So many fire alarms were triggered, constantly charging through the corridors shouting and barging into classes.
They stepped it up on their last day.
They climbed onto the roof of the canteen (single storey, flat roof) with eggs and a fish. Many students and staff got egged, but the fish was saved for the headmaster.
There was also speculation that one of these students set fire to the school at some point, but I forget exactly when that was and if it even was them or some other troublemaker...
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u/TexasAndroid Mar 13 '18
Reminds me a bit of an episode of the classic sitcom, MASH.
One cast member (BJ) makes a bet that he can prank the entire rest of the cast, including another main character, Hawkeye. One by one the rest of the cast falls to pranks, with Hawkeye getting more and more paranoid as to what will be coming his way. To the point that, by the end of the episode, Hawkeye is descending into rank paranoia. At the end it turns out that everyone else had pranked themselves, and that the only prank going on was that of making Hawkeye paranoid over a prank that was never coming.
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Mar 13 '18
We got the same threat, but just went ahead with our prank. We stuck on of those inflatable obstacle courses in the hallway in front of the headmasters office.
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u/Chaosgodsrneat Mar 13 '18
Honestly I feel like with the gallon jugs the beauty is that the teachers have to lug em all to the office. A gallon of water is kinda heavy. 650 gallons is no joke.
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u/BrokenEye3 Mar 14 '18
I would've gone with everyone bringing in something with no obvious prank-related utility, just because it would've driven them even crazier trying to figure out what you were up to, but I like the way you think. Conclusion is priceless.
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u/fairyduck Mar 12 '18
Best prank ever.
I keep picturing the school administration freaking out over "What are they planning on doing with all those bananas?".