This is one of those things that "seemed like a good idea at the time" even though it is probably the worst idea that anyone could ever come up with. Fortunately no one was injured or killed, but holy shit, this is the dumbest thing I have ever done.

The Date = Late 80s

The Mark = Lindy

The Pranksters = Sam, Max and myself

The Ruse = To scare Lindy by faking a slasher movie style home invasion. What could go wrong?

Note: We were all in high school at this point. I was the youngest (a freshman), Sam and Max (seniors), and Lindy (a junior) ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

My friend Sam came up with this idea to scare our other friend Lindy one night. Lindy lived in a huge house overlooking the rest of the town that we lived in. Her parents are rich and they would often leave here alone. Sam and Lindy have been friends since kindergarten. When her parents were out of town Sam would hang out with her. They would cook diner and watch movies.

So Sam knew Lindy's parents were out of town and they had planned on doing one of their dinner/movie nights. He recruited myself and our good friend Max to come up to the house at a specific time and scare them. His plan was that he would go take the phone off the hook in one of the spare bedrooms, so that no one would be able to call out. Then he would unlock the back door by the mud room which led into the kitchen. Then we were to freak them out while they were doing dishes.

So Max and I gear up. I was Jason Voorhees for Halloween the previous year so I had a set of gnarly looking coveralls, a hockey mask, and a machete. Max Just had some black clothes and a latex Yoda Halloween mask. We grabbed our shit and headed up to the house. We parked 1/4 mile away and walked so as to not alert them. We made it into the back yard and donned our gear. We thought it might work better if she thought there was only one of us, so we decided to have only one of us visible at a time.

We Peered into the kitchen window and saw Lindy rinsing some dishes off in the sink. She did not see us.

We took turns trying to subtly get her attention. We moved closer. And closer. Still no reaction.

We got to the point where I was standing directly in front of the window, hockey mask and all, starring directly at her and she still couldn't see me. So I tapped on the glass with the machete.

A scream and panic. She backed off and ran down the hallway toward her room. Sam, acting incredulous, asked her what was wrong. She screamed back that there was someone out there wearing a mask. Sam followed her to her room.

I looked at Max an we decided to try the mudroom door. It was unlocked.

We waited a few minutes and then entered the house and thought about our next move. We set up a bit of a homebase in the guestroom at the back of the house, where we could discuss. We thought it would be scary if they knew that we were in the house. We found some laundry in the utility room and balled up a few socks. We would periodically throw a sock ball at her bedroom door.

Thump Scream!

Wait a minute or two...

Thump Scream!

We did this for -- I'm not sure how long.10 minutes or so.

Then I thought it would really be scary if we shook the knob on her door. Max stayed back at the homebase as I approached the door. As I came within a few feet of her door I could hear her frantically talking on the phone to someone. Sam was trying to calm her down. After listening for a minute I gathered that she had called her best friend, Sarah. Oh shit! That wasn't supposed to happen.

The problem, I was quickly beginning to realize, was that we had never really established a definitive end game for our little scenario. I mean Sam had said that at some point he would give Lindy the "Smile, you're on Candid Camera" routine. He seemed to not be doing that. I think that he was too scared of the reaction it would cause. Now that Lindy had somehow managed to get through to someone, the situation was a bit more complicated. As I was about to make my way back to homebase to tell Max what I had learned, I heard Sam shout "SARA'S MOM IS ON HER WAY UP HERE RIGHT NOW?! GOOD! I HOPE WHOEVER THOSE GUYS ARE JUST LEAVE BEFORE SHE GETS HERE!" We needed to get the fuck out of that house. ASAP.

Problem was, Sara's mom had left couple of minutes minutes before I had even approached the door. By the time I made it to the living room I noticed a car on the way up. Oh shit I ran into the homebase and told Max what was up. While I was explaining, we heard the front door open.

Enter Mrs. Erickson. Mrs. Erickson, in addition to being Sara's mother was a teacher at the junior high. She was in fact, my teacher for several classes. She liked me a lot. I was an honor student. My mother was a teacher. My mother is a friend of Mrs. Erickson. This was bad! This was so bad!

Sam and Lindy ran out to the living room when they heard the front door open. Max and I were stuck in that back bedroom The only means of egress were past the living room. Past them.

Lindy was crying and just wanted to GTFO but Mrs. Erickson insisted on checking the house. Well that's just perfect!

Here is where I note that at the time of this little event I was about 6'3" and 260 pounds. Max was 6'1" and a very slender 160 pounds.

Max looked at me and whisper/screamed, "We have to hide!" In one swift motion he jumped inside a large laundry hamper, squatted down and closed the lid. Completely hidden. Watching him do that so effortlessly made me hate him, for a brief moment, as much as I have ever hated anyone. Give or take. There were assuredly not many places for ME to hide. I checked the closet. It was full of stuff. I looked under the bed. Empty but there was no way I was fitting under there. I went into the bathroom and decided that the tub/shower was my best bet. I climbed in and closed the curtain.

All I could do was wait. I was sweating profusely. My heart was beating like one of Dave Lombardo's kick drums. A torrent of anxiety was washing over me as though it were spaying out of the shower head and my ears were ringing like I had just gotten out of a concert.

I heard footsteps approaching the bedroom that we were in. The bedroom light flicked on. A pause of tedious silence. Then the footsteps continued to the bathroom.

I couldn't see her but I could hear her as she stood just inside the bathroom -- staring at the curtain. That thin, opaque sheet of plastic, with me, my mask and my machete on the other side. The moment that she took, looking at the curtain, seemed to go on for ages. In actuality it was probably just a few seconds. For whatever reason she decided not to open the shower curtain. Thank fuck!

She made her way out of the bedroom and out to the car where Sam and Lindy were waiting. Whew!

Max and I made an expedient retreat and hiked back down to his car. At some point, Sam convinced Mrs. Erickson to drop them back at his house. Once they were there, Sam finally spilled the beans about our "prank." Our prank which had morphed a sadistic mental torture session. Although honestly it was that from the moment of inception. Cooler heads prevailed and that was more or less the end of it.

I do often think of what would have happened if poor Mrs. Erickson had opened that curtain. Drawn it wide to reveal a large man in a hockey mask with a machete wearing murder clothes. The stuff of nightmares.

1) This is a boom pole. On the end is what we call a zeppelin. you put your microphone in there. You use it to record audio of people in movies and terrible reality television shows.

This is a house fly.

If you put a house fly in a zeppelin you can really frustrate sound mixers. Or so I've heard.

2) This is a Yamaha PM4000. It has lots of knobs. It is used for mixing many, many channels of audio.

This is a Yamaha DM2000. It has even more knobs than a PM4000, but since it's digital all the knobs are hidden in arcane menus written by the Japanese for people that are not only technical, but think like Japanese console manufacturers.

On large-scale reality television shows it's not uncommon for multiple mixers to trade off extremely complex sessions as shift work. On these large-scale reality television shows one occasionally finds sound mixers pranking each other by, say, sidechaining a pitch-shifter inline with the host's microphone such that, say, Dr. Phil only goes an octave deeper when he shouts. And since the effects are buried deep in a section of the console you never, EVER use you might find that it takes 10 minutes to fix. On one of the most stressful sets in television. Unfortunately it's also easy to think that you're "pranking" someone when in fact you're sabotaging their mix. By, say, cracking open the microphone in the bathroom over someone's channel.

Or so I've seen.

3) When one works on large-scale reality TV shows one is often exposed to technical directors and other professionals whose careers are long and amazing. It's not exactly uncommon to find terrible films and shows and add them to their IMDb profiles in moments of boredom. Or so I've heard.

Me? I don't prank. Part of it is I recognize it only leads to escalation. Part of it is my parents grew up in Los Alamos, NM during the height of the Cold War and they didn't play.

My father was a cigarettes-in-the-sleeve, lead-sled-driving, slicked-hair thug. He and his buddy owned the auto shop in school. When they graduated, they welded the doors shut. Prank.

My mom's best friend (and my guidance counselor in high school - fuck small worlds) used to go underneath the guard towers and whisper Russian to each other until they'd drawn fire from the soldiers above. Prank.

And as far as senior pranks go, Somebody managed to remove a 60 ft flag pole (complete with 9' diameter 2 ton concrete base) and place it in the middle of the hallway of an entire wing of class. The mystery remains unsolved. They had to demo a concrete wall and cut the pole into sections to get it out because they didn't know how it was done. Prank.

My mother was a grad student at the University of New Mexico in the early '70s. One of her weekend pastimes was going out into the desert and burning down billboards.

In 1975 Edward Abbey published the seminal "Monkey Wrench Gang," which starts out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It contains this passage:

The Highway Patrol arrived promptly fifteen minutes late, radioing the report of an inexplicable billboard fire to a causally scornful dispatcher at headquarters, then ejecting self from vehicle, extinguisher in gloved hand, to ply the flames for a while with little limp gushes of liquid sodium hydrochloride to the pyre. Dehydrated by months, sometimes years of desert winds and thirsty desert air, the pine and paper of the noblest most magnificent of billboards yearned in every molecule for quick combustion, wrapped itself in fire with the mad lust, the rapt intensity, of lovers fecundating.

Doc Sarvis by this time had descended the crumbly bank of the roadside under a billowing glare from his handiwork, dumped his gas can into trunk of car, slammed the lid and slumped down in the front seat beside his driver. “Next?” she [Abbzug] says.

Not exactly a prank but it certainly instills an ethic of "go hard or go home" and "going hard" is often pretty goddamn destructive.

Oh wow. So, my last job was at a software startup. Me and a coworker (who worked at the other end of the office, out of sight & hearing range of me) were constantly "harassing" each other. One day, I took all the wheels off his chair. He makes a point of limping by my desk, and tells me he hurt his leg falling out of the chair. 10 minutes later, my boss comes out and asks who hurt my coworker "because we don't have health insurance, also he's old and doesn't heal very quickly". I spent the afternoon feeling awful.

Fucker faked the whole thing & got our boss in on it.

This same guy also snapped out two of the pieces of my Rubik's cube and exchanged them with each other. I couldn't solve it for a month until I realized what had been done.

He had a habit of stealing my Rubik's cube and hiding it around the office. I come in to work one morning, and he's up on a stepladder in the kitchen, at one of the ceiling tiles. Weird, but I don't think to ask what he's doing. An hour later I notice my cube is gone. I start hunting around the office, and he says something along the lines of "You should try praying to your god above". I notice the ceiling tile that's propped up, clue in and get the stepladder. By this point, all my coworkers are watching me. I climb up to get my Rubik's cube back, and... nothing. He played me completely. It was in a potted plant near my desk or something.

I still work with the guy, but he's off on paternity leave right now. That kid's going to have an interesting life...

Another coworker is an amateur runner. A few years ago, he had a really bad day and ran a ridiculously high time on the track (for him)... let's say 10:15 (it's lower, but I don't want any googling to come here :-) ). His friend, another coworker, won't let him forget it. He just ordered the guy a book with the title "10:15". He texts him at 10:15 in the morning. And sometime? He'll wear a shirt with a clock showing "10:15". It's hilarious.

Yeah, more than a few. One that comes to mind, my friend Bryan and I were tired of all the annoying political signs cluttering up the neighborhood during some election, so we stole about 30 or 40 of them and arrayed them on the school's soccer field in an 11 on 11 formation with some spectators. Memorable day for many reasons, not the least of which is that we sort of got caught, ended up in an honest to god car chase with the owner of one of the signs, and after we'd shook her, we rolled up to our school and decided to drive onto the field instead of carrying all those unwieldy signs up the hill ourselves.

Damn, I miss Bryan. We had fun.

We did this in broad daylight, because we were high, and basically avoided getting arrested on a lucky, hilarious fluke -- turns out stealing political signs is a little serious. We were taking a stance on campaign financing, of course, so I don't feel too bad.

EDIT: you could make the case that we were blurring the line between 'prank' and 'crime'.

One Christmas my brother decided to make a list of what he wanted and who should get it for him. I thought he was being a little shit so I bought a dollar store Barbie doll and stuck whatever Mortal Kombat game he wanted me to buy him inside the packaging. He was probably about 13-14 and his reaction was a priceless and angry toss of the doll to the floor that you'd sooner expect from a seven year old.

Kinda lame unless you know him.

I dunno about pranks, but I troll quite a bit on Reddit.

The funniest thing I pulled off all year was when I parodied the 'Brian's Novel' scene from Family Guy when addressing a Carbine employee on /r/Wildstar, talking about all the bug fixes, content patches, and AMD optimizations the game still didn't have several months into launch.

That enraged the entire subreddit and I easily accumulated around 80 downvotes.