Alternative College Prospectus
Beer #1 - Phantom exam
Beer #2 - Phantom injury
Beer #3 - Stealth Beer
Beer #4 - Strawberry hangover
Cafeterias #1 - Don juan
Cafeterias #2 - Cling film
Dismantling
Don't Swim In Lumpy Water!
Dormitories #1 - Dealing with the spoilsport
Dormitories #2 - Spiderman
Dormitories #3 - Strange Bed
Dormitories #4 - Strange Bedfellows
Druggies #1 - Grade A stuff
Druggies #2 - Apparition
Fanatics
Men At Work #1 - Traditional version
Men At Work #2 - Variation
Mickey Mouse
Rock Climbers #1 - Going down
Rock Climbers #2 - Going up
Sleepers #1 - Hot between the sheets
Sleepers #2 - Wake up call
Soapsuds
Telephones
Alternative College Prospectus
At a school that was about 4:1 male to female, one of the best pranks was actually an idea for a video project:
Place a video team in hiding, along the route taken by freshmen orientation tours. Plant a nice, sweet, cute-looking woman pretending to be a prospective student in the tour group.
As the tour group approaches the video team, several large males swoop down on the tour group, yelling incoherently, grab the woman planted in the tour, and run off yelling "WE GOT ONE! WE GOT ONE!"
Film reactions, and prepare for lots of flak.
I made it a point when approaching a tour group to suddenly switch the conversation and say something, as we were passing the group, about rats in the cafeteria or roaches in the rooms
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Beer #1 - Phantom exam
A college student had been drinking too much on Friday night. Some of his "friends" woke him very early Saturday morning and convinced him that it was Friday morning and he had an exam in ten minutes. Being hopelessly hung-over and half-awake, he believed them and departed for campus. A few hours later he was found asleep at the bottom of a stairwell.
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Beer #2 - Phantom injury
"A friend at school drank way too much one night, to the point of not only passing out, but not waking up when we put a plaster cast on his right arm. The next morning we told him that he got in a fight, we took him to the hospital, and the doctor put on a cast. This was right before Thanksgiving. We called his parents to let them know what was happening, so they could go along with it (and not get upset about a broken arm). No harm done, and funnier than hell!"
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Beer #3 - Stealth Beer
To open a beverage can "silently:" Cough or sneeze while you pop the top. An Austrian visitor who demonstrated this technique says, "This is how we drink beer in class!" It also works well in theatres and public meetings.
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Beer #4 - Strawberry hangover
"If the mark drinks to the point of passing out, pull out the permanent markers and tattoo his back, or any other place. I did this to a guy who had an interview the next day. Once we got started it was hard to stop; we drew all over his face, arms, back... He spent a few hours in the shower scrubbing. When he came out, he looked like a strawberry and you could still see the outline of what used to be there. And no, he didn't get the job!"
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Warning: Novice drunks who lose consciousness can die from alcohol poisoning or by choking on vomit. It happens frequently at colleges. Do not leave them unattended. It would be really embarrassing to have "tattooed" a dead mark!
Cafeterias #1 - Don juan
We once sent a guy dressed in a tux, with a red rose clasped to his chest, through the conveyor belt which carried dirty trays into the dining-commons kitchen wash area. They screamed, and he continued on into the Hobart which, fortunately, was not operating.
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Cafeterias #2 - Cling film
We pulled this when I worked in the dorm cafeteria: Cover the top of a drinking glass with the clear plastic used for wrapping food. After spilling their drinks around the sides of the glass or bouncing their ice cubes, marks react in various ways-- some of them turn the glass over and try again.
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Dismantling
I dismantled a toilet stall and reassembled it attached to the outside of an RA's door, so that when he came out in the morning he was inside a bathroom stall.
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Don't Swim In Lumpy Water!
"I dropped a "Baby Ruth" candy bar in the swimming pool. They thought it was a turd... I did it again the next day... After they caught on, I used a real turd and the lifeguard grabbed it!"
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Dormitories #1 - Dealing with the spoilsport
Freshman dormitories are infamous for immature novice drunks who puke on the walls and disturb their neighbours at late hours.
We had a guy who was obnoxious in the opposite way: He always went to bed at 9 PM and complained abusively if anyone made noise after that hour.
"Mr. Clean" always arose very early. One night (with the help of his roommate) we set his clock two hours ahead. We set the hall clock likewise. He sacked out at 7:00.
Next morning, his alarm went off at 4AM. Thinking it was 6:00 in the winter morning darkness, he got up and showered.
He didn't discover the trick until he phoned his girlfriend to join him for breakfast.
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Dormitories #2 - Spiderman
Dorm hallways are usually so narrow that one can place his hands against one wall and his feet against the other wall, and climb to the ceiling by the mountaineering technique known as "chimneying." Climb above the mark's door, reach down and knock. The mark will open the door and look every direction except up. As soon as the mark closes the door, knock again!
James Bond used a variation of this trick to escape the bad guys in the movie, Goldfinger.
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Dormitories #3 - Strange Bed
Lift the mark's bed while he is asleep, place a beer bottle under each leg. Let the bed gently down onto the bottles and leave.
Sometime later when the mark turns or shifts his weight, the bed will crash 8 inches to the floor and bottles will be flying.
Nobody will be around. I defy any mark to figure out what happened!
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Dormitories #4 - Strange Bedfellows
A rubber condom will hold nearly 5 gallons of water... ,br>
It can be transported on a greased sheet of cardboard and (with practice) slid onto the mark's bed.
From there, it cannot be moved without breaking!
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Druggies #1 - Grade A stuff
My neighbour and I once had a mutual acquaintance who was forever bragging in lengthy detail about all the exotic dope he smoked.
My neighbour had a couple of goats, which were nice critters except for a few obnoxious habits, like leaving their little round droppings everywhere.
We selected a dried goat dropping, sliced it into cube shape with a razor blade, and wrapped it in aluminium foil.
We gave it to Mr. Cool Dope Freak and told him it was Hash. He stuffed it into his pipe, lit up, took a big puff, placed his hand on his chest and went "Ahhhh!"
A few minutes later, my friend remarked, "Wow, man, that must be really good shit!" I cracked up laughing, and the mark turned green and made gagging sounds.
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Druggies #2 - Apparition
Our dorm room doors had ventilation slats at about nose level.
One night I was walking down the hall and saw this weird purple glow coming from the slats in someone's door.
Looking up through the slats, I saw that he had replaced his ceiling lights with black lights, the walls were papered with florescent posters, and there was a party going on, with fumes of that wacky tobaccy drifting into the hall.
I went back to my room and got a plastic squeeze-bottle of fluorescent dust that I'd bought from Edmund several years before. (I don't remember why I had it at school...) I shook it up well, and squirted a hefty stream through the slats in the door.
This stuff is fine, like talcum powder, and will hang in the air for almost a minute. Under black lights it looks like a huge, green glowing apparition has just come through the door and is hanging in the centre of the room, tentacles trailing off in odd directions where little clumps of powder have dropped, trailing dust behind them. ("Oh, wow, do you see it too?")
None of the marks were in any mental condition to deal with the situation. I had returned the bottle of dust to my room and was halfway back before any of them managed to make it out the door.
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Fanatics
It is a service to all concerned to demonstrate that the universe is not as screwed-up as these folks imagine.
One doofus on our dorm floor was a real [fundie]. He was always trying to convert everybody, lecturing about sin, and making a pest of himself.
We told him that on the Judgement Day he would go straight to Hell for making God look stupid and making people think that you have to be an asshole to be religious--
That was ineffective; he thrived on abuse.
Being a fundamentalist, he not only believed in The Rapture (where God will beam-up all good Christians directly to Heaven and leave the riffraff), but believed that its time was near.
Early one morning we placed carefully-arranged piles of clothes on the hall floor as if their wearers had suddenly evaporated.
We used dry ice and incense to make a Stephen Spielberg fog in the hall, then we blew a very loud Freon horn outside his door, threw some non-electric flashcubes against the wall, screamed a lot, and assumed prenatal positions.
When he came out, everybody acted stunned and yelled "What's going on? There was a big light and a noise and those guys just disappeared!
For several minutes, we had him believing he had been left behind with us sinners!
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Men At Work #1 - Traditional version
The "fake workmen digging the street" trick is a college classic.
In its original risky form, you masquerade as real workmen, dig a hole in the street, and leave.
When first done in New York in the '50s, days passed before anybody realised that something was wrong, and traffic was a disaster until the street department patched the hole.
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Men At Work #2 - Variation
In this modern take on the prank, tricksters observed real workmen digging the street and reported to the police that college students were again digging up the street as a joke.
The cops thanked the caller and headed for the dig.
Meanwhile, the jokers approached the workmen and told them that college freshmen dressed as cops, as part of fraternity initiation, would be around soon to give the workmen a hard time.
The workmen thought this was great and agreed to give the "cops" a hard time back.
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Mickey Mouse
This classic college prank is still appropriate and effective:
Very large clocks are found in towers on courthouses, college campuses and other institutions, although public clocks have been obsolete for nearly a century.
Make a cardboard cut-out of Mickey Mouse, minus arms, and install it on the clock face, along with white gloves on the clock hands.
Make the installation at night. Success requires careful preplanning and teamwork, often with Ninjitsu or mountaineering skills and equipment.
Rehearsal is recommended.
A string may be placed over the building beforehand, to be used to haul a climbing rope.
Post lookouts, and monitor the appropriate police radio.
Institutional wall-clocks are even easier to modify; most simply hang on hooks and are plugged into recessed power-outlets.
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Rock Climbers #1 - Going down
"Another fun joke was to rig a climbing rope from the fifth floor lounge balcony, rappel off over someone's room, and hang upside-down staring in their window or pretending to be dead.
This required precise teamwork to de-rig the rope and hide before the campus cops showed up.
More than once we were gratified with terrified screaming from inside."
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Rock Climbers #2 - Going up
Being rock climbers, we hung out in the corridors and stair wells quite a bit, chimneying up and down.
One favourite prank was to chimney up to the ceiling of the hall, hide behind an overhead beam, and wait up there until a mark walked by, at which point we would let go and fall to the floor immediately behind them, dragging finger tips down their back and growling.
People came up with the most expressive responses!
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Sleepers #1 - Hot between the sheets
During the day, switch the electric blanket cords so the top bunk's control is connected to the bottom bunk's blanket, and vice-versa.
When the marks turn their blankets on, they will try to adjust their controls to their comfort.
One will turn his up, heating other who will turn his down, resulting in both wondering what the heck is wrong with their blankets.
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Sleepers #2 - Wake up call
It was pretty warm at night and most people would leave their dorm room windows open to get some air (there weren't any screens in most).
I was on the third floor... After the marks below us went to sleep, we would get a piece of string (or thread) and measure the distance to the middle of the open window below.
Then we would mark the spot, pull it back in, tie a firecracker on the end of the string, light it, drop it, and swing it in...
Pull the string in quickly and nobody is the wiser.
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Soapsuds
Put dry ice in a toilet, add bubble-bath, then cut a Cyalume(tm) chemical light stick open (carefully) and pour the contents into the now-frothing brew.
Unscrew the bathroom lightbulb.
Imagine the surprise of a mark who, coming into the darkened bathroom late at night and perhaps drunk, finds a horrible, green, glowing, frothing mass pouring from the john...
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Telephones
The mark lived in a room next to the study lounge.
The night before finals, I invited him up to my room and then phoned his room, letting the phone ring until the angry mob in the study lounge broke down the door and ripped his phone off the wall.
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