The year before I entered high school, a group of seniors at my high school to be misinterpreted the word “prank” for “vandalism.” The day before graduation, they broke into the school and used frozen fish to break glass trophy cases, causing what apparently amounted to thousands of dollars of damage. The students, unsurprisingly, were expelled and not allowed to graduate. No explanation was given as to why frozen fish were the weapon of choice. The years following saw a lack of senior pranks, much to my dismay, as it only served to confirm my suspicion that I was going to school in a hellhole. Every now and then whispers of a prank would appear; a random intercom in the middle of the day or a few people disappearing every now it then. It made me want to pull a prank of my own; to show people how it's done. But what to do?

Thankfully, my friends shared a similar goal as my own, and come junior year, we began deliberations on what we could do for our senior prank. At the outset, a few rules were set. For one, it couldn't be illegal or lead to our arrest. Two, it had to be relatively cheap; we had pretty much no budget to work with. And three, we had to be able to set it up really quickly. So basically, we had the same rules that hackers use at MIT. And with these set in place, we began to brainstorm.

Being the nerds that we were, our first idea was not only improbable, but terribly nerdy at the same time. The idea was to convert our school's flagpole into a giant electromagnet by wrapping it in probably several hundred feet of wire, hooked up to a car battery. We weren't exactly sure what would happen as a result, but we dearly hoped that it would mean people would become unnaturally drawn towards the flagpole if carrying enough metal on them. Perhaps we could have demagnitized everyone's credit cards and caused a great degree of chaos. Unfortunately, this idea fell victim to the budget rule of pranking, as it turned out large quantities of electrical wiring added up, and we would probably get in serious trouble for demagnetizing everyone's credit cards, particularly the principal's.

We then considered filling some school space with something; balloons, foam, cardboard hexagons, among other things. But the more we looked into it, the more this idea seemed uninspired; it was as if everyone has tried to fill a locker hall or classroom with one thing or another in the past. And while we weren't all that concerned with the mess we'd make or the inevitable cleanup, we figured that if we were going to pull off a prank, it should at least be something that few people have pulled off. Otherwise, why bother?

So then we thought to ourselves, what would be memorable? Throwing a brick of sodium metal into the school pool? (Remember, we're nerds) Orchestrating a large Diet Coke and Mentos experiment? A friend of ours had managed to buy a brick of pure sodium off of eBay, of all places, and thrown a large chunk of it into the local park pond, with explosive results. Thankfully, no animals were harmed in the orchestration of that stunt. But the real problem with these pranks was they were so short term; there would need to be a large crowd witnessing it to make the effort worthwhile. That, and our cover would be blown.

And so we reached our coup de grace, the one prank we agreed on; find a farm willing to rent out their animals for the day, and release them in the school. More specifically, release a calf on the second story of our school's new administration building, hopefully ensuring that the calf would be hanging around for quite a few hours while someone figured out how to get it down (you can lead a calf up stairs, but it's damn near impossible to lead them down). In addition, we pondered releasing two piglets that would be labeled “1” and “3,” respectively, with the hope that this would lead to a schoolwide search for the nonexistant “2.” Having passed our test for an appropriate amount of chaos caused, we then needed to check what could happen if we were caught. And it is here that we unfortunately hit a snag, as we discovered that the city did not allow livestock within city limits, punishable by a surprisingly high fine. And so it was back to the drawing board, though with the limited amount of time left in the school year, the last three months passed with no new efforts on our part, and particularly dumb efforts by other individuals, including spray painting phallic symbols on a math teacher's door and turning the school intercom on and off. And so our pranking dreams came to a close for high school, and we left it to others to take up the task we so regretfully left behind.