We were very proud of the following practical joke. When we were juniors at Williams, I lived in Agard House with three friends of mine. Several large and loud boors who lived there as well were always taking over the TV when we were watching it (to the point of them physically throwing one of us out of the TV room when he was in there watching something they didn't want to watch ... that is, something that wasn't a sporting event). They would sometimes call important house meetings without telling us, and so on. Suffice it to say, we didn't get along with them. Anyway, we got them back in the following way. The remote control in the TV room was usually ignored, because it was always getting lost. So a couple of weeks before the Super Bowl, we purloined it. We bought some supplies and set it up so that an infrared (?) emitting diode was behind a curtain in the back of the room, connected via wiring outside the house (which we strung) to the lounge next door, where we sat with the remote control. We listened to the game on a radio, and every time something dramatic would happen... "He's at the twenty! The fifteen! The ten! The ..." ZAP! Masterpiece Theater! They would all immediately charge down to the cable hookup in the basement, but no-one was there. They'd look in the lounge and there we were, studying quietly. Ah, it was great. (The remote control was discreetly hidden by a window-drape.) When they told us about this mysterious phenomenon, we said, "You know, the same thing was happening to us the other day. Hmm, I wonder what could be wrong." They were sure we had done it, but couldn't prove it. They kept trying to goad us into revealing it, for example: "No, they couldn't've done it; they're not smart enough". We kept our mouths shut and just grinned.

My undergraduate advisor told me that when he was an undergrad at MIT, he and his floormates performed this trick on a particularly obnoxious guy who lived there. The guy would regularly go down to the power box and kill everyone's power, just for jollies. Well, they papered his room one day, and when he opened the door, he calmly lit a match, threw it in, and left. The building did not burn down but the student was ejected. He had been failing out anyway.

This reminds me of another newspaper prank, which I heard of from an old friend who attended the U. of Rochester in NY. A guy who lived on their floor had the Wall Street Journal delivered to his door every day, and the others on the floor decided to poke fun at this upscale practice by sealing off his door (from the outside) with sheets of the Journal. Every morning, the guy would open his door, see the doorway blocked by the sheets, and leap through. This became a morning ritual. One day, somebody got the bright idea to put a Coke machine on the other side of the papers, and the guy got a concussion when he tried to go through.

Something similar happened to me. The phone rings at 3:30am the night before my calculus exam, the following conversation takes place: Hello

Let me speak to Cindy

Who?

I said put Cindy on the phone

Sorry but you have the wrong number

Look asshole, put Cindy on the phone NOW

There is no Cindy here, what number are you trying to reach?

You fucking bustard, I know where you live, now let me talk to her.

Ok, Ok (long pause) can she call you back, she's in the shower with my roomate. CLICK.

This can be taken to the extreme. Once at Carleton U. an entire floor received a "leaner" as we call it. There are three elevators, and late at night another held all three elevators, placed trash cans filled with water and leaning outward in each. Then they pressed 4 and slipped out. The result: a big mess on the 4th floor. Unfortunately the water also went pouring down the elevators and caused some damage. Housing was not amused.

1) Take your Video camera (take someone elses if you don't have one) 2) Enter your toilet room 3) From the other side of the room to the toilet, stand on a chair and video a shot from near the ceiling of your toilet seat (about 5 mins should do) 4) Have a party !! 5) When someone leaves the room to visit the lav. put the cassette in your vid player. 6) Just before the person re-enters the room start playing the tape - with everyone in the room laughing at the TV screen. 7) WATCH THE FACE OF THE PERSON RE-ENTERING THE ROOM !! :-)

A practical joke I was witness to at Lancaster involved moving the entire contents of some-one room. The peron concerned was taken out for the night by his 'mates', who duly got him very drunk. A few of his other mates moved the entire contents of his room from the top floor of the residential block to an identical room on the ground floor. At the end of the night, all the merry souls came back from the bar, carrying their, now ,very drunk friend. An arguement broke out, and the friends grabbed hold of the drunkard, opened the window and threw him out of the window. Imagine his alarm, he thought he was three floors up!