P is for Prankster

As a participant in the A to Z Blogging Challenge, I will be making my way through the alphabet all month.

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As someone who loves a good prank, I enjoy April Fool's Day. I should have written about April Fool's Day on April 1 for A, but didn't think of it in time. April Fool's is my favorite day of the year and it time to pull out all the stops on my creativity. I have pulled my share of pranks over the years, both on this glorious day and throughout the rest of the year.

• Several years ago, a few of us went out the night before the first day of college classes to prank several of our professors. Using a car jack and some bricks, we raised their car axles just high enough that the tires were not touching the ground. The car appeared normal, but did not move when they stepped on the gas. Five professors were late to school the next morning.

• A college friend, Jayson Ferguson, later that year discovered a professor working late in his office one night. Upon leaving the building, he found a pile of cinder blocks to be used for a construction project starting the next day. A few quick phone calls provided the number of people necessary to haul the bricks into the building and block the prof in his office. Since his door opened inward, when he opened it to leave, he was met with a brick wall.

•  When my son Christian was eight years old, he wanted to go TP-ing for Halloween. We lived about 20 miles from town, which was too far to go buy any, and did not have toilet paper to spare. He and I walked to a neighbor's house, broke in, stole their toilet paper and then TP-ed their house with it.

• As a teenager, I had a friend that lived in a trailer with a flat roof. While he was at work, a few of us broke into his house and arranged the contents of his home onto his roof exactly as it was when it was inside the house. This included big items like the couch, entertainment center, beds, and dresser drawers. We even set the table for dinner.

• When my nephew was younger, he was fascinated with chickens. For his eighth birthday, when he opened his gift from me, a live chicken jumped out and started running around the room. It was a huge hit with the kids. The adults were not as amused.

• In college, when a neighbor went on vacation with his family one summer, a group of us broke into their house (yes, breaking and entering again), dug out their Christmas decorations and decorated their house. We put the lights up outside and erected the tree fully decorated. We used every item we found and turned the lights on. Their house was lit up for a week before they came home. It was July.

•  I had a job as a dishwasher at Bonanza when I was sixteen. One night while training a new employee, I warned him about the dangers of getting dish lung. I told him that the industrial strength dishwasher put so much water vapor in the air that breathing it for hours a day would cause a build up of water in your lungs making you drown when you laid down for bed. I explained that standing on his head at the end of each shift would drain his lungs and prevent a possible death. I demonstrated and dribbled water out of my mouth. As I explained, a co-worker in on the joke started coughing and spit up a bunch of water he had discreetly put in his mouth. The trainee quit that night.

•  In high school, our principal drove a tiny Mazda Fiat convertible. At lunchtime one day, when a guy making fun of the size of the car lifted the rear wheels off the ground, we decided to see if we could lift it completely off the ground. Discovering that we could, we placed it sideways in a nearby alley. The walls were less than six inches from the bumpers on each side.

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I learned this behavior from my father. One year after a fishing trip, after cleaning and gutting all the fish, he went to a friend's house and put the guts in the garden just outside their windows. He covered them with dirt just enough that they could not be seen. In a few days, their entire house stunk.

He terrorized his high school by burying a road-killed skunk in the window flower box of the English room. The stench got so bad the teacher opened the window to air out the room. Of course, this made it worse since it was just outside.

He also taped the hammers together inside the piano right before his graduation ceremony. When the class musician went to play, all the hammers struck at once. After a confused look, he tried again with the same result.

As you can see, I inherited this behavior. It is not my fault. It's just part of my genes. There's nothing I can do about it. Not that I want to.