Reader Survey – IOTW Report

Reader Survey

Saturday, 24 February 2018, 21:00 Claudia Uncategorized 77

…with one question:

Have you ever gotten yourself into a little (or a lot of) mischief?

I’ll give you an example from my life. I was reminded of this from one of the “Guess the Reader” posts from yesterday.

———————————————

One Saturday, when I was about 10 or 11, my dad was working in the attic only accessible by a ladder. My brother and I came home from playing outside and saw the ladder. Dad knew that he better do something to prevent disaster, so he told us to NOT go up there. He was going to take a break and watch the baseball game on TV.

We waited about 15 seconds and I was the first one up the ladder. It was a cheap house and the ceiling was only plasterboard with no insulation. We were hopping from beam to beam from the back of the house to the front.

Well, my foot slipped and the next thing I realized was my leg hanging below the ceiling. OVER THE TV where my dad was watching the ballgame. I looked down to see my dad’s face get red, open his mouth to yell, and the next thing, I was flying down the ladder and out the back door.

I stayed out for just an hour because I wanted to get back when the game was still on. The Tigers must have been winning because he only yelled once during a commercial. I survived.

———————————————

So, what’s your story?

77 Comments on Reader Survey

  1. Much more dangerous one, Claudia! From about eighteen to age twenty, I hitchhiked — alone — all over the place, but, especially to and from the University of Michigan library, about sixty miles away.

    I was never picked up by any man who did not begin the lecture, “You are soooo lucky it was me! You remind me of my…… sister, daughter, niece, girlfriend….. Promise me you will never do this again!”

    And, they’d drive miles out of their way to make certain I was safe, ok.

    I never once had a hint of a problem and I just believed that driving me places was one of the best reasons God made men. ….smile….
    …..Lady in Red

  2. Between myself and my three brothers I am amazed our parents survived raising us…
    Broken bones, concussions, emergency room calls in the middle of the night…(no arrests, though).

  7. I BLEW UP THE KITCHEN WITH ONE IF THOSE CHEMICAL KITS THAT WERE LEGAL LONG AGO – ALL WINDOWS GONE, PERMANENT PURPLE SPOTS ON THE CEILING AND ALL WALLS!!!

    I WAS 8 YRS OLD, CAN STILL FEEL THE BELT BUCKLE WELTS!!

    I HAVE MANY MORE, BUT WILL QUIT WHILE I’M AHEAD!!!

  8. The very last day of senior year in high school.
    My cousin opens up his backpack an shows me a BRICK of firecrackers – at least one thousand.
    He dares me to light it.
    We are next to the cafeteria during lunch. I grab the door and hold the brick while he lights the fuse. I swing the door open with the plan to throw it along the floor into the center of the cafeteria, but there is the vice principle standing there, staring me face to face.
    The fireworks start going off in my hand and I am frozen. I panic and drop them. He yells “COME WITH ME!”. I follow him to the office while they are still bursting on the floor. He asks if anyone is home. I say maybe my Mom. He calls, but nobody is home. Then we hear some other fireworks going off somewhere else in the building (thanks cuz!). He asks if I have a car. I say yes. He says “Walk right to that car and go home and wait. Do not stop at your locker or anywhere else on campus”.
    I went right home and waited by the phone. He never called again. The next day was graduation day. He never said anything to me or my parents.

  11. I SET THE RECORD FOR SWATS @ PACIFIC PALISADES HIGH SCHOOL WITH 37!! THE OTHER CHOICE WAS TO HAVE MY PARENTS VISIT WITH THE VP!!!
    NO FUCKING WAY, ENJOYED HAVING THE OPTION!!

  13. I lived in San Francisco, and at the time it was cheap to ride the cable car. I hopped on (I was only 18) and decided to hang from the side looking backwards while holding onto the bar. This man jerked me backwards practically choking me. If he hadn’t of done that I would have been decapitated by a double parked truck. When I got my composure and stood up to thank him, he wasn’t there! Was he my Guardian Angel? I have cheated death 3 times in my life, that was #1.

  14. LIT MY GRANDFATHER’S RANCH ON FIRE PLAYING WITH MATCHES, AND PRETENDED TO BE THE HERO!!! MY TWO JIMA MEDIC UNCLE FIGURED IT OUT AN WHOOPED MY ASS BEHIND THE BARN!!!

    WANT MORE??? I HAVE LOTS!!!

  18. I’ve had several experiences that can be very damning…..some of which I’m afraid may not be included in the ‘statute of limitations’.
    No one was seriously hurt and certainly NO one was killed but I have the right to stand on the 5th. And…..I have out grown the stupidity of being so ignorant.
    At least I hope I have.

  20. Near death? I was a very sophisticated and savvy high school junior at a college frat party where most folk were chugging beers. Not me. “Come on,” my date said.

    “Nope, I don’t like beer.”

    “Ok. I’ll find you something else” and in the almost totally empty kitchen cabinets he found a quart bottle of Kessler’s (rot gut) Whiskey and poured me a twelve ounce tumbler. I chugged — and beat him.

    Fortunately, I vomited — a lot. That was the end of the party, as they walked me around and around the block, with coffee and water and…. …tried to get me home, safely….. worried for my safety — and theirs: my father was the Dean of Students. ….smile…

    That much booze could have killed me. ….Lady in Red

  21. Forty-plus years ago I attended a university (which shall remain nameless) and majored in sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll. My grades were atrocious. As luck would have it, a few years later I found myself employed by that same U as computer operations supervisor / systems programmer. Using a low-level system utility, I edited the master disk file containing my records and changed all those ugly Fs to As, and then requested a transcript from the registrar. Yep, those lovely As were still there. I chickened out, though, and changed them back to their original values a few days later. I had a pretty good idea that I’d never be relying on transcripts and GPA in my heavily specialized high-tech career, and that turned out to be true.

    Any old IBM mainframers here? I used DEBE to read/edit 3330 disk using CCHHRR addressing. Dang – I still remember that a 3330 had 404 cylinders, 15 tracks per cylinder, and 19,069 bytes per track. That’s about 115 MB and it took a box two feet square and three feet high to house the disk. These days you can get a microSD card half the size of your little fingernail and it holds more than 2,000 times as much data.

  22. ARRESTED FOR GETTING DRUNK AND SNEAKING INTO THE HUGHES MARKET FRIDGE BEHIND THE MILK AND DAIRY, SUCKING THE TOPS OFF OF A CASE OF WHIPPING CREAM FOR THE LAUGHING GAS EFFECT, LAUGHED ALL THE WAY TO THE WEST LA PRECINCT!!!

  24. As a youngster, I quickly gave up stealing. I was 10 years old when I stole a package of b-bs and I completely got away with it but my conscience bothered me so damn much I never did it again.
    Unfortunately, I pursued other illegal activities….. fortunately, none of which were severally detrimental to life nor property.

  27. Zonga – ouch!
    Benito the Bombed Beaner – Sabo, is that you?

    I didn’t get into mischief when I was a kid. I saved all my troublemaking for when I was an adult. By the grace of G_d, I made it without a blemish on my record. Probably because nothing was premeditated.

  28. We grew up with slings, and sling shots after losing our B.B. guns (another story). One day we got blamed for shooting a plate glass window across the street with a bbgun, and $90 of 1980 dollars came out of our asses.

    We waited a month for that window to be replaced for that small B.B. hole. Never happened.

    A week later I put a 351 caliber musket ball I poured through the center of that fucker (slingshot) and nothing was ever said.

    Favorite childhood toys? Naphtha, black powder, cannon fuse, M-80s, model D rocket engines just to name a few.

  30. When I was 10 and my parents were out of town celebrating their anniversary, my 16 year old sister and her best friend were left “In Charge”. There was a dispute over the home made Chef Boyardee pizza so I told them I was going to run away from home. I hid under my bed for about 6 hours and I came out just before they called the Police! Thank God my sister got senile and doesn’t rememer that shit or she’d kick my ass.

  31. I worked hard to be an average student. That was my crime growing up. Didn’t give a flying fuck the best possible. The more my parents pushed the more I fucked off.

    It took a LOT of hardship and incomplete work to pull off a C average. The A would have been a hell of a lot easier.

  35. I can’t divulge detailed information. I might get a retro active court martial.

    Suffice to say it involved some gun powder obtained from live 20 mm F-4 Phantom cartridges on a USAF Bombing Range in Arizona.

  36. Uncle All-started at STC right out of the Navy when the 3330s were giving way to the 3350.

    Now for the stupid. Drove a 60 Plymouth with bias-ply tires, one of which was showing the bias-ply, at over 100 MPH. And that’s the only one I can tell.

  37. Does driving an unregistered car with a plate I found at a swap meet count? Not that I would do that.
    Back in the 60’s my friends, who worked at a garage, went to an empty box store parking lot after work and while one drove, the other leaned out of the passenger side window holding on to a shopping cart. They got it going about 30 MPH and then let it go. Officer O Malley saw them and they were busted. At the station as they were being booked, the desk Sargent asked them how much they weighed. They replied and he then asked, “Is that with or with out the grease?”

  38. VietVet….. You are correct: I am not alive today because I tiptoed through life with the caution my mother always wished. I’ve done hand-to-hand combat with a 6’5″ mugger because he was *not* getting my purse….. …..and I stood in the center of my street waving down a burglar being carried away on the hood of an on-coming car. I was mad! It was only at the last seconds the pleadings from my husband, in the snow, down the street, kinda made sense. “Please, please get out of the street!” …and I did.

    Some kids get bombed at the junior prom, flip the convertible and all four innocents are killed. Some are lucky, over and over. I’ve been lucky. (At the same time, I am still dangerous.) ….Lady in Red

  39. I was a life guard and saw a toddler fall into his family’s pool. No one around.
    So I ran 1000 feet to there pool dove in and pulled him out.
    Problem was the kid could swim. Not well but he was swimming 6 feet under water.
    I was at a friends house on there balcony.
    The people were not happy I was in their yard in the pool with a 5 year old. I was 18.
    The cops were called and a report was taken. Nothing came of it.
    The cops dropped it. Never again.

  40. Elaboration #1: first time I ever got drunk was back around 1965 when I was in 8th grade. My buddies (Chris, Randy & Alan) & myself discovered, through my older cousin, that if you paid the drunks behind the ‘Town Hall Liquor Store’ for a bottle of MD 20 20, he’d buy you a couple of pints of liquor for you. We went down after school & found a rummy who held out for a 6-pack of Carling & a chicken box at the Convenience Store (go figure!). We paid up (& to my surprise) & he delivered us 2 pints of ‘Old FrothingSlosh’ (or some other rot-gut cheap whiskey; might have been Seagrams, lol)
    Anyway, we got a sack of burgers at Little Tavern & proceeded to hike back to town. We met after dark at a place we called ‘the gravestones’ because of the vast amount of concrete slabs dumped during the after-war efforts of construction. We sat among the ‘tombstones’ & drank, between the 4 of us, the 2 pints, I remember Alan getting so drunk he could barely walk. We staggrarlly dragged Alan to his back porch, knocked on the door & ran behind the bushes where we watched Alan’s dad come to the door, see his drunken son in a drunken heap & angrily drag him, noisily cursing all the way, to throw him in the upstairs shower.
    Chris, Randy & I laughed for about 20 minutes until we realized we had to go home ourselves, in a drunken stupor, & face our parental retribution. I staggered home through the back door & realized that one of my favorite Aunt & Uncle were visiting! Just great. Fan fuquing Tastic! I quickly stooped over & mumbled that I must have eaten some bad chicken at the Convenience Store & just needed to go lie down. As I quickly went up the stairs I noticed my Uncle chuckling to himself. I looked him straight in the eye & winked … he smiled & winked back.
    … I fooled no one

  42. The very first time my parents trusted my older sister to babysit, they nervously backed out of the driveway and yelled, “just don’t burn down the house”!

    Well, some huge blackbirds has built a nest in the gutter were dive bombing our neighbors cat. Sis was so upset she stormed in the house and found some cherry bombs in the bottom drawer of dads gun cabinet. She lit one, tossed it up in the gutter and screamed RUN!

    Blew the whole damn gutter and down spout clean off the house. That was the last time sister babysat.

  43. I rode the hood of a car through my college campus one night – SOBER AS THE JUDGE, no less. And I was TWENTY FIVE!!!

    I just KNEW, when we got back to my dorm, a campus cop was gonna be there… AND he was. :doh: BECAUSE I was sober (NONE of us had been drinking – just a dumb Tuesday night DARE 🙄 ), I just got off with a warning. 😳

    You have no IDEA how fast 35mph IS, until you’re ON the HOOD of the car! 😮

  44. @ jellybean. Hey, now. I didn’t say there wasn’t a bit of step-lively going on now and again. I had a great chemistry set in the basement. On a sheet of asbestos. It was a pretty comprehensive source of what-ifs.

  45. I didn’t exactly get in trouble for it, but one really bitter winter it was freezing in our two-gas-heater crackerbox house and the toilet happened to clog up (which it frequently did) with paper. Since my parents weren’t at home, smart 12-year-old me figured the best way to get it working again was to pour some extra water in the bowl, as we normally did. Hot water. As soon as it hit that cold porcelain, CRACK! – the bowl broke. I didn’t know what to think, except that I was in deep doodoo. My mother came home soon thereafter, immediately went into the bathroom, and when she saw the commode she thought it had cracked from the extreme cold. Which it kinda sorta had, and I saw no benefit in elaborating on any contributing factors. I mean, it’s not like my confession was going to restore the toilet to working order or anything like that, right? Well, it turned out the landlord had been planning to replace the toilet anyway because it was so old and troublesome, so ultimately no harm was done.

    I never said anything. For years my mother told the story of the one winter it got so cold the toilet broke.

    😉

  46. Elaboration #2: Why is it my fault that raw sewage blew all over the vehicles traveling southbound on I-295 through DC because I turned on all the pumps at the Sewage Pumping Station at full speed & the Force Main blowoff’s tripped open… I told them that it was gonna happen … but they insisted!

  47. As a young man I worked on the very bottom level of the underground command post at Strategic Air Command Headquarters on Offutt AFB near Omaha, Nebraska. I worked in the ultra-secret room where the photo interpreter was sitting when he discovered the nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. We were using satellite imagery to spy on the Soviet Union. A guy next to my work station smoked like a chimney and didn’t care who was bothered by it. One day, I took his pack of cigarettes and brought them home with me. I loaded one of the cigarettes with those little exploding sticks and brought the pack back the next day and returned them to his desk. He was supposed to bring them home and have it blow up in his face. Those things were pretty powerful and much fun was supposed to ensue. The next morning he didn’t mention anything and it became apparent that he had not taken that pack home with him as it was his pack for work. Later, I watched as he was speaking with a colonel about something serious and as he spoke, he reached into his pocket and offered the colonel a cigarette and took one for himself. I hauled ass out of there like a monkey with his balls on fire and proceeded through many layers of armed security guards to the upper levels of Building 500 which
    is the SAC headquarters building. I waited in the cafeteria for the Strategic Air Command Elite Guards to locate me and place me under arrest. They never came. I eventually proceeded back to the vault where I worked which was next to the war room where the giant screens with rows of generals sat near red telephones waiting for the word to launch a nuclear strike upon the USSR. Luckily, he had not grabbed the loaded cigarette. I told him the truth and we both sat there as white as ghosts thinking about what would have happened if the cigarette had blown up in the colonel’s face. He would have been screwed because nobody knew I had loaded the cigarette and I wasn’t telling a soul. You have to know how to keep a secret in the spy business after all.

  48. Hmm, let’s see… Lit a long-disused ballfield on fire playing with matches; played Frisbee with hubcaps off the police cars, landing 100+ of them in the marshes behind the station; stole a friends truck (but he was out and it WAS to rescue his relatives who were coming to visit but broke down 70 miles out of town – the cops were not convinced until I presented said relatives). The best should probably remain unsaid; after all, I AM a Republican.

  49. Hmmm…
    I was probably 13 and my little sister only 3. I was lying on my stomach and my little sister was fooling around on the couch around me. Then she landed on my calf and it was as painful as the holocaust. I shouted, “Fuck! Fuck!”. My dad was in the room and he lifted me up by the collar and smacked me so hard that the calf pain became secondary.

  54. MERRYMOUSE, WENT TO PP ELEMENTARY, MARQUEZ ELEMENTARY, PAUL REVERE, PALI, PEPPERDINE MALIBU, SMC, AND UCLA!! USED TO FIGHT AT THE BIG OAK TREE AFTER SCHOOL AT PALI!! LEFT A LOT OF BLOOD THERE!!

  55. @Uncle Al (at 10:54 pm) – You might appreciate this. During my (very) brief stint as a systems programmer, it was noticed that a lot of the programmers in the user areas were having trouble working with IBM utilities. I mean, it’s not like IBM manuals were hard to understand or anything. Just because some of them might as well have been written in hieroglyphics is no excuse, right?

    Well anyway, in part because of all the assistance we were having to provide, we decided to create a simplified in-house guide to the most commonly used IBM utilities, in plain language, with easy-to-use examples, and it was very well received by those who needed it.

    One day, however, one of our guys got a call from an applications programmer complaining that he had noticed many occurrences of an IBM program in his department’s procs that we hadn’t bothered to include in our writeup, and on which he had no documentation whatsoever.

    The program?

    IEFBR14.

    🙂

  57. I started young, Dad brought back a Japanese rifle back from the war in the pacific. I was in second grade and I poured shellac down the barrel and it hardened to the point it was inoperable. I was scared shitless, Dad was a strict disciplinarian. He never said a word, but got rid of the rifle..
    That was my first offence stating at age 8
    50 years later he gave me the bayonet and mentioned he used to have a Rifle that the bayonet fit on and he just stared at me. I admitted my deed and apologized. After 50 years of self guilt, He said It was OK.

  58. 1974ish ….

    Me and a bud took up a fad spreading through the country and streaked through our local high school. The acapella choir was recording an album the night we did it. We went in the band hall/choir door and exited via a gym door. To this day when I’m in the school standing by the trophy cases by the gym I’m overwhelmed with a bit of PTSD because as we were running down that hall towards the exit doors all I could think was, “I hope those are one way doors”, because if they weren’t this wasn’t going to end well.
    They were. We hoped in the get away car and the driver started speeding out. We were in a hatch back setting land speed records getting dressed. A choir member jumped on the back of the vehicle as the driver fish tailed throwing the choir member off and sent him skidding across the parking lot hitting his hit as he stopped.
    We got out… Took 10 minutes for the jumper to awaken and shake off being knocked out… Police were not called. We all laughed and left..
    Next school day: Wasn’t called to the office. (I lived in the office in high school) Nobody stopped me in the hall and said, “Hey, Guess what I heard?” NOTHING… it was as though it never happened.. It ceased to be.

    I retired from those endeavors that night..

    Some weeks later my bud and few other guys did it in the neighborhood at the choir directors house. Didn’t end well, His daughter came to the door.. They went to jail, counseling, and probation…
    As for me it was as though it never happened until…..

    27 years later…. My daughter is about two months from graduation class of 2001. Someone came up to her and asked, “Is it true that your father streaked through the high school?”

    When she asked me this, I freaked out… WHAT? Am I walking through stores in town and are people whispering and pointing, “That’s him.. Right over there.”

    2012.. My daughter is about to be married and we are to meet the his parents. He tells his mother that we are booth professionals, exceptional cooks, and are very faithful in our local church..

    His mother said, “Isn’t he the one that streaked though the high school?”

    Told my daughter… No pressure.. I just show up in clothes and it’s nowhere but up from there..

  59. @Vietvet – Heh! Sounds like we could be swapping BOFH stories for days…!

    I’ll never forget the HR weenie who complained one day that he didn’t get all of his standard weekly reports. It seems one of his applications had been generating 0c4 dumps for months and somebody finally fixed it.

  60. Pipe bombs out of 2 inch galvanized plumbing pipe 12 inches long packed with black powder.
    Made a black powder canon out of a 55mm pom pom anti aircraft gun shot it off across from Portland airport all most sunk a sailboat 1 mile away on the Columbia river. Lots of fun being young.

  62. @Uncle Al: Just one more and I’ll quit, I promise. From my 1401 days, when all clerical output was on paper:

    A manager from the user area calls up, demanding that we change one of his area’s programs immediately. Says his people can’t perform their jobs because the totals produced by the program are insufficient to do their balancing procedures properly. They need it NOW, not tomorrow.

    I dropped everything, added a bunch of new totals with cross-balancing, etc., and even printed them on a separate page so they wouldn’t get lost among the detail pages and old totals. Assembled, tested, and placed in production. All was apparently well with no complaints afterward.

    Three months go by. I get called down to the user area to help resolve a problem. I realize that in this situation the new totals I added would be a great help, so I ask to see them. The clerks tell me they don’t have them, they only work with the report. They direct me to another clerk who does the balancing. I go and ask her about them and she gives me the old totals. I say no, there’s some new totals that should be coming out on a separate page. She says, “Oh, those started coming out about three months ago and I didn’t know what to do with them, so I’ve just been throwing them in the trash.”

  63. I’m gonna bookmark this page for when I have time to read the entire thing. 😀

    I didn’t do much bad stuff because My dad was military and my mom was lightning with a switch. LOL.
    One summer when we lived in Japan, me and some neighborhood kids decided to jump off the roofs of sheds and the one story apartment building. Why? Who knows! This went on for a few days and when my mom saw me, she read me the riot act. Later on, I decided to go for a jump again. This time, I hit the ground hard and twisted both my ankles. I had just enough juice to waddle home on 2 fucked up feet, where I got yelled at by my mom. Something about “I told you so” or whatever, in 2 languages. Anyway, I was sitting on my ass for 2 weeks after that. Could barely walk. I ate a lot of beef jerky, cheese puffs, and watched tons of cartoons that summer.

  64. I wasn’t an instigator of stuff but my best friend in junior high was “a bad influence.” We never got into bad trouble, just stuff we’d do to fuel our creative writing impulses. I had too much compassion for my mom to do anything that would disappoint her. I was number four of six kids and there were already three ahead of me who diminished her quality of life, particularly my older sister who made enough mischief for a dozen people.

  65. I was a pretty good kid so I doubt Benito and I ever went out, but we were at a lot of the same places. Class of 66. You weren’t caught smuggling dope on your sailboat were you?

  66. I am going to cop out on most of them, a funny one.
    Late 1973, like Groucho says, streaking was sweeping the country.
    My brother 16, talked me into driving while he and a buddy streaked the Holiday Inn.
    I let them off and went to the end of the hall they were to exit, shoulda seen the look on their face when the door was locked, it was glass, Laughed so hard I couldn’t drive.
    Busted, they got out, I picked them up, my tag was noted.
    Dad talked the cops out of doing anything: “He just got back from V/Nam, nobody got hurt.”
    That’s one of the milder ones.
    Thanks Dad.

  67. Toilet papered the principal’s front yard on a Friday night in high school. Pretty extensive job, with about a dozen of us tossing multiple rolls through the trees. Next door neighbor’s porch light came on and we all ran for the 2 cars we had parked a few houses down and just managed to exit the street right as the cop car was coming in. That’s when one of the guys says, “I dropped my hat!” which he ALWAYS wore. If he went to school without it, we knew we’d all be busted. So, had to drive him to the mall the next day to get a replacement.
    Lived in so much fear of being found out for a mild if annoying prank, I realized I didn’t want to bother with the really cool crimes of drinking and drugs so, I remained pretty popular as the designated driver for my more daring friends for the rest of high school.

  68. If I did this today, I’d be fired and prosecuted to be sure. Another systems programmer gig, this one at GEICO. My boss was a wise guy always playing GOTCHA! tricks. Harmless but annoying. I modified his computer login to run my own front end to the standard interface (TSO/ISPF for Vietvet). In order to run a program, you’d issue the command SUBMIT and then you’d see a message telling you what the job name/ID was. My front end was triggered by this command, and checked the Seconds value of the system clock. If that value was any number other than 22, things would work normally. But if that value WAS 22 he would type in

    SUBMIT

    and then see the message

    NOT TONIGHT DEAR, I HAVE A HEADACHE

    So, one time out of a hundred, this would happen. He knew he’d been GOTCHAed, but it took him a couple of weeks to figure out how. He was both amused and pissed off.

  70. When I was 4 or 5, my cousin and I flooded his upstairs bathroom. We wanted to go swimming. So, being avid cartoon watchers, thought that letting the tub and sink overflow would fill the bathroom.

    My Aunt and mom came running when the water started flowing down the stairs. When we told them why we did that, they laughed their asses off. Was much better than us getting our asses spanked off!

  71. @Uncle Al: I once had a boss who was a certified a-hole. Surprised he didn’t have a diploma for it on the wall. One day he really pissed me off, and I remembered I had one of those “scratch and sniff”-type pamphlets in my desk that the gas company used to include in the bill to educate their customers. When you pulled it open, it released the odor of the chemical that they add to natural gas (Mercaptan) so that you are able to detect it. It read, “If you smell this odor, contact us immediately”…, etc., etc.

    I activated it and taped it to the bottom of my boss’s desk drawer when he was out of his (small) room, then closed the door. When he came back and smelled it he freaked. Called building maintenance and told them they had to get up there right away because there was a big gas leak somewhere near his office. They tried to explain to him that there were no gas lines on the floor, but he said, “You come up right now and smell it for yourselves and tell me that!” He then left his office, fearing an explosion, and went to wait for the maintenance guys by the elevator. In the meantime I went back in the office and removed the pamphlet.

    By the time the maintenance guys got there to check out the problem the smell was gone. They didn’t say it, but you could tell they thought he was nuts.

    Payback’s a mofo, as they say.

    🙂

  72. Much mischief zero convictions.

    We used to go to every concert that came to town. Back then, if you wanted floor seats you camped out in front of the record store of choice (Tigers Records for right side of stage, Capers Corners for left side) for front row tickets. In 1979 we had front row tickets to see Yes, but the night before the show the roof of Kemper Arena collapsed because of a heavy snow. The Yes show was canceled, and the next show scheduled was a Kansas concert. Promoters moved the Kansas concert to Municipal Auditorium, a much smaller venue, and announced that the show would be general admission and anyone who did not get in could have their money refunded.
    Having already secured front row seats for Kansas at Kemper, we were bound and determined to be in the front row no matter where they put on the show. We spent two nights in front of Municipal to guarantee we were the first in the door. The second night there were more than 100 people with the same thought so it turned into a big all night party. There were several port-a-pottys set up but because of the crowd size they were overflowing.
    A couple of hours before they were to open the doors a buddy and I decided to find a place to go to the bathroom and walked around the auditorium to see what we could find. What we found was a back entrance to loading area for another venue inside Municipal called the Music Hall. We snuck in and after finding a bathroom we snuck through the hallways and positioned ourselves in Municipal where we could sprint to the front row as soon as we saw the crowd being let in. While we were waiting a big SGT from the KCPD saw us and grabbed us both, saying we were going to jail. I was able to convince him we just went in to use a bathroom and got lost looking for the way out. Instead of taking us to jail, he said he would just make sure we left the premises so he escorted us to the door to throw us out. As soon as he opened the door, someone in the crowd shouted “THEY ARE OPENING THE DOORS” and the floodgates were opened and KC almost had a Cincinnati Who concert episode. As the crowd surged, Sarge lost his grip on us and we both headed for row one. When we arrived up front we found my brother had beat us there, securing front row for a great show, just a couple hours earlier than expected.

  77. @MJA: I might have, except:

    1.) I didn’t smoke, so I had no cigarettes.
    2.) Smoking had already been banned in the building by then.

    Good idea, though.

    BTW, since I was the default scapegoat for any mischief that occurred around him, I think he suspected that I was somehow involved with the incident. He just couldn’t figure out how I had pulled it off. Never told him either. Bastard deserved everything he got because of all the misery he dealt out. At least two people (that I know of) quit because of him, and I would have too if I didn’t have so much to lose by doing so. Eventually he was moved out to another area where he could torment a whole new group of people. I’m pretty sure that they were thrilled when he finally retired.

    Anyway, I’m watching the obits, and if he dies before I do, I intend to visit his gravesite after drinking a number of beers, in order to properly pay my respects. Same goes for Jane Fonda, if I’m still around and can afford the air fare. And have the stamina to stand in long lines.

    😉

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