Practical Jokes PG5

I was party once to an attempt at humorous cow placement. I attended a boarding school that actually had a dairy farm ( George School, Pa. - The farm is since defunct ) We thought it would be a simple matter to coax a cow over to the main building.

Cows, however, live a life of routine, to which they adhere tenaciously. I'll never forget the sight of that cow placidly loping back to the barn with two or three upperclassmen dangling from it.

Another idea for a practical joke is to put goldfish in all the toilets. I haven't tried this, but it should be interesting to see what people do.

An acquaintance of mine and his friend were once asked to leave a rather posh country club for what they considered innocent fun-loving behavior. To get revenge for their inconvenience and show what truly obnoxious behavior is like, on their way out the door they went into the coat room, and exchanged all the keyrings they could find in people's jacket pockets for similarly shaped keyrings from other pockets.

Then they sat in their car in the parking lot and enjoyed their revenge! It was evidently quite a show.

In view of the large number of recent postings of college practical jokes, I'll 'fess up that some friends and I were the instigators of many a prank while undergraduates in college. The following are some of the better pranks:

• I lived in a three-story dorm during my freshman year. Most everyone listened to the same radio station, which played the National Anthem at the stroke of midnight every night. It occured to my roommate and I that there should be some kind of stunt that could be arranged which could use the playing of the National Anthem as a coordinating cue. Finally, we hit upon the answer: at the stroke of midnight everyone in the dorm would flush their toilet! Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view), all of their toilets were of the tank variety so that a simultaneous "flush" would guarantee a copious discharge of water into the sewer. We really didn't know what would happen when The Time arrived; bets ranged from "no event" to blowing the basement rec room toilets off the floor. The Time was a Monday evening, and I figure we had about a 90% participation rate. The results were not disappointing: a cleanout plug (which upon retrospection must not have been properly secured) blew out of the floor in a basement utility room, resulting in about 1/2 inch of water over the basement floor. The campus maintenance people went apeshit the next day trying to figure out what happened; as far as I know, no one ever told them the truth.

• It somehow came to our attention that most of the campus street and walkway lighting came on _simultaneously_ each night, the actual time being based upon the actual level of ambient light. It was obvious that there was a central control point with a photoelectric sensor somewhere. After a few exploratory tours of the campus, we came upon a likely location: two photoelectric controls mounted on the roof of a service building directly across from the campus electrical substation. After "borrowing" an extension ladder from a telephone company truck (which was always left parked near a service building), one Friday night about 10:00 PM (peak campus traffic time) we climbed on the roof of the service building and taped flashlights to each of the two photoelectric sensors. Instant blackness! Actually, the most amazing part was that it took OVER ONE HOUR for the campus maintenance people to restore the lights! I would have thought there to be some kind of manual override for the photoelectric cells, but perhaps the maintenance people thought there was some kind of underground cable fault so they didn't rashly restore power.

• My father managed a soap manufacturing company ever since I was a little kid, so I grew up with some knowledge of soap formulation chemistry. There was a civic building near the campus with a large outdoor fountain, and it occurred to be that the water in this fountain needed "treatment" when the fountain was turned on in the spring. While home for spring break, I swiped from my father's plant two gallons of a surfactant called Triton X-100 (a tradename of Rohm & Haas). This surfactant _really_ foams; like a few drops will fill a bathtub with suds. So one night, some friends and I carefully filled some thin plastic bags with the surfactant, and then casually threw the bags into the fountain (the bags broke upon impact). The next morning, the fountain was a mass of soapsuds. The next evening, the picture of the fountain made the front page of the local newspaper. The caption beneath the picture attributed the soapsuds to college "spring fever". Since we weren't caught, I wonder how they knew that???

• The father of my dorm roommate worked as a repairman for the Otis Elevator Company. One weekend, I stayed with my roommate at his parent's home. While talking with his father, we learned an _amazing_ fact: almost all escalators are reversible for use in breakdowns or emergencies; there is usually a key-operated reversing switch located under the handrail at each end of the escalator. We also learned a second _amazing_ fact: most all Otis elevators and escalators use the _same_ key. While my roommate's father went out for the evening, we swiped his work keys, and were able to get many of them duplicated.

  As soon as we returned to campus on Sunday evening, we went in search of an Otis Elevator (we didn't have to go far - our dorm had one). Sure enough, we had The Key. Over the next few days, we found that The Key worked on every Otis Elevator that we tried on campus.

  We were now ready for en escalator (there were none on campus), and we readily found one in a five-floor department store in the heart of the downtown shopping district. It was an Otis, and sure 'nuff it had a reversing switch at each end beneath the handrail.

  We came back on Wednesday night, which was the peak shopping night of the week. There were two pairs of escalators - one at each end of the store. After nervously waiting for the right moment when no one was on the UP escalator, and no one was looking, my roommate inserted The Key, and turned it. Grrr-klunk-grrr. The UP escalator came to a halt, and reversed direction - it was now going DOWN! We quickly went to the other escalator pair, and I got the honor of inserting the key.

  We now had an increasingly crowded department store with four escalators on the main floor, all going down! We tried to act inconspicuous as possible (not easy with half dozen 18-19 year-olds sporadically going into fits of hysterical laughter!) and watch the action. People would step on the UP escalator without looking at direction, and then step back in shock. Then shock would change to disbelief: an UP escalator going DOWN - impossible! People in the store were forming an oval as they traveled from the front escalators to the rear and back, trying to figure out how to get to the second floor. After about ten minutes of this, with the main floor crowd growing larger, a _very_ agitated person wearing a suit (must have been the manager) came by with a big ring of keys, frantically trying each key in the escalator until he found the right one to operate the key switch. Since the manager was eying us suspiciously, we didn't stick around to find out any more about the situation.

The apocryphal friend-of-a-friend brought a can of chunky beef stew on board an airliner. At some point he emptied the contents into the barf bag. Later during some minor turbulence he pantomined using the bag in the conventional way. When the flight attendant asked if she could dispose of the bag for him, he replied, "Not yet, there are some choice bits that I haven't finished with yet," and proceded to pick out chunks from the bag and eat them. According to my informant, everyone nearby immediately tossed their cookies.

Here's another way to have Fun with Sound:

Several years ago, a friend who manages a large retail store gave me an electronic bird call used to add "realism" to store displays. This device was about 4 inches in diameter and 2 inches high, with a speaker on the top. It was powered by a 9-volt battery, and had two controls: a 5-position "voice" selector, and a time delay control to set the interval between calls (up to 60 seconds). For a device which used just discrete transistor circuitry, the bird calls were amazingly realistic - especially if the time interval was long between calls. I have had much fun with this gadget, especially planting it in people's houses (basement and garages are good places). The unsuspecting victims really believe that there is a bird trapped in their house - and go ape trying to find it. If anyone wants one of these devices, they can be purchased from any company which sells retail store display fixtures; I don't believe they cost much money.

Another good practical joke taken from the "Tippy Turtle" series on Saturday Night Live is as follows:

Take one of those musical grreting cards (the type that play a song when opened) and carefully rip out the part that actually plays the music. This is only about the size of a quarter. When the victim isn't watching, plant this somwhere near him/her. Since it is so small, it is relatively easy to hide in a pocket, purse, etc. Afterwards, watch the victim become maddened by the recurrence of Jingle Bells, Happy Birthday, etc. in the background.

I was a victim of this one, and at first I thought I was hearing the muzak at the restaurant I was eating at. After I was done, I returned to my car and the music followed me. I thought I was going insane.

My sister was the butt on this one.... She had a box turtle who lived in a terrarium in her room. I haunted pet shops and bought a series of turtles, as identical as possible, but getting smaller and smaller. She was quite concerned....

After a while, I got tired of the game, so I reversed the process till she had the original (who was bigger by now) back, and took the rest down to the woods and let them loose.

STella Calvert

Love is the law, love under will!

Gather a bunch of freshmen together at a party, telling them the punch is spiked. Observe for about half an hour while some of them get high on the sugar. Then bring out a couple of bottles of Everclear and dump them in. People will sober suddenly, then dip in and rapidly get silly. Let simmer for about an hour, preferably taking pictures. Then announce that there is still no alcohol in the punch. Make sure that film is safe first. Everyone goes home safe and sober.

Not very funny you say? Well, then use real alcohol instead of sugar water and laugh hysterically while people get sick, slip on the stairs, wreck their cars, etc. Great fun.

Way back when, like before electric lights were invented, I worked in an engineering department where the general-use computer was an IBM 10. This was a standalone computer of roughly PDP-11/34 power with a disk, console typewriter, slow line printer. Its primary I/O was a combination card reader/punch. Some things you ought to know before proceeding futher:

• The card reader/punch had one input hopper and two output hoppers. Cards came from the input hopper through the read station, through the punch station, to whichever output hopper was selected. Cards could be read, punched, or both as the program saw fit.

• The CPU had a "bootstrap" mode in which it read one card as the binary image of a program and executed that program. The standard "coldstart" card had enough program on it to read in the operating system's startup block which then got the whole software system going.

• The user community used the machine mostly for applications written in FORTRAN and was largely ignorant of the details of computers and how they work.

Still with me? Good. Naturally, _any_ card without characters printed on it and with lots of holes all through it looked, to the uninitiated, like the "coldstart" card that people placed at the start of their decks. So it was a small matter to leave a few spurious cards around the computer room and wait for the results.

My favorite was the card that just ran the deck through the reader/punch, placing alternate cards in the other output hopper. What a delight with long decks! One fellow was so sure he'd done something wrong that he took his cards, reassembled them into the right order, and ran them through _again_ with the same bogus coldstart card.

I never did work up the nerve to write the one that punched all the holes in all the cards following.

All this talk about practical jokes reminds me of one I heard about in high school. It seems that a psychology class decided to give their new found knowledge of the "power of suggestion" a little test. Some of the students had another class together and decided to play a little trick on their teacher. Whenever the teacher was on the left side of the room, they would act really interested and when he was on the right side of the room, they would act really bored. Well, it seems that this behavior did its job on the teachers sub- conscious and he was practically crawling on the left wall by the end of class.

At my high school (many years ago) over a dozen Polymorphic 88 S-100 computers were used to teach computer lit in the math department. Now I was the curious type and I took to reading the supplementary documentation to the operating system and I implemented a number of nasty suprises for the other students.

NOTE: These changes were never to the boot tape just to the currently running copy, so the changes dissapeared when the system was rebooted.

1. Change the prompt to some strange greek character that no-one knew existed in the machine before.

2. Change the opening logo to something humerious and strange like Muppet Labs Operating System V.5.1

3. Change the (Go to Monitor) command to return. To leave monitor a command must be entered which is terminated by return, which is no longer available from the keyboard and results with the screen clearing and the monitor all fresh and ready to accept a command! Very nasty!

[Englishmania - It's not English, but an INCREDIBLE simulation!]

One that's good for a few chuckles with a new user is, while they're away >from the terminal put a few cute aliases in their .profile, .login, whatever, for example:

alias ls echo 'ls: command not found.' or alias vi rm

(The second one is admittedly a bit nastier).

A simpler variation was played on me when I was but a mere first-year at U of Toronto. One day, I was logged in at a terminal and I left for a few minutes to go collect output from the printer. A friend of mine leapt into action and changed my prompt from $ to 'Login incorrect. Login:'. Then he logged me off. He told me that the daemon had logged me off because I'd been on to long. Needless to say, when I tried (and unbeknownst to me, succeeded) to log on, I was told that I hadn't logged in correctly. Well as I said, I was a first- year and thoroughly unfamiliar with UNIX so I became very confused. My friend did tell me what happened, however, since we were limited to 5 hours a week.

Incidently, he's no longer my friend (oohhh hint hint hint).

Many years ago, when some neighbors moved away and their house was vacant for a few weeks, my brother installed an extra doorbell in the basement, and ran the wires out along the rear sidewalk, terminating them under a flagstone tile by the alley. After the new neighbors moved in, if he was coming home late at night (1 A.M. or later) he'd stop by with a lantern battery and connect it up to the wires. After about 20 seconds you'd see the upstairs bedroom light come on. Another ten seconds later the hall light would come on, then a few lights on the first floor. At this point he'd disconnect the battery and go home, and not repeat it for a couple of weeks. He continued this for a couple of years.

He had also installed a loudspeaker in the attic, running the wires outside, but either they found that one, or the wires broke, so he never got to use it.