July 31, 2008

Prank #4: Ms. Ribberta Froggy

Now for one of my pranks. This is unfortunately one of the dumber ones I did, and it didn’t even work as intended. In hindsight, it could have probably gotten me into a bit of trouble; and I suspect if someone attempted a similar prank in this day and age they would probably face a much harsher punishment than I would have if caught.

This one involves my good friend Kevin. (Sorry no alias for you Kevin, but at least you were just on the receiving end. Lol!) In high school being the über nerds/geeks that we were, we of course didn’t have any girlfriends or even remote prospects of finding any. This led to no end of ribbing one another over said deficiency. Anything from tongue-in-cheek verbal insults to elaborate comics/drawings demonstrated our ineptness with women. Here is just a small sampling of the drawings:

(Typically, Kevin would draw me, and I would draw him. You’ll notice that there are more examples of Kevin than me, but hey it’s my blog. :) )

We could sooner build a Bride of Frankenstein-esque mate than find an actual girlfriend, and that’s a good introduction to the joke I took a little bit too far…

So this was back in high school when I was taking Biology. Most of the kids in my grade level were taking a science class one below mine in the course schedule. For instance in 9th grade, most folks were taking a different class than me called Physical Science (or something similar). The option to skip Physical Science was available to kids coming out of the middle school’s enrichment program and/or that had a high enough average entering high school (I can’t remember the exact details). While you might think I was trying to be a nerd show-off or overachiever by taking advantage of this option, I had a much more pragmatic motive: I figured out that I could avoid doing a science project if I skipped Physical Science because that was the only basic-level science class that required it! The science project was this multi-week assignment students had to do outside of class and sounded like quite a chore. The real show-off/smarty pants skipped Physical Science to HONORS Biology, but I avoided that one because it DID have the science project requirement.

In any case, I found myself in way over my head. It was quite difficult and I was always studying for it and it was probably detrimental to my grades in other classes. My plan for avoiding the science project turned out to not save me any effort after all, like a lot of my harebrained schemes. Now by skipping Physical Science, that also meant that I must later take AP Biology to get enough science credits. That class was even harder.

So back to the prank. In both Biology and AP Biology, we would learn about various critters that we had to dissect. I would meticulously slice open formaldehyde-drenched worms, starfish, fish, whatever and then try to identify various organs from the mush found within. I’d do all this while trying not to breathe in any of the stinky carcinogenic fumes or get any goo on my hands.

I can’t remember if my prank took place during AP or regular Biology, but we dissected a frog at some point in one of the classes. The frog seemed to have much more distinguishable organs inside and was all-around easier to work with than previous critters. It even looked a bit human inside, or at least what I thought a human might look like under the skin. I could see well-defined muscles, bones, and internal organs. I couldn’t peel the skin away from the lips or eye sockets due to some difficult connective tissue that kept the skin tightly attached. So those parts of the skin remained attached. This resulted in the head of the frog having a sort of bizarre human look to it in a Kafka meets Dali and has a love child sort of way. I think it took nearly a week to do the dissection, study it, and finally a lab practical quiz to identify different frog parts according to little tooth pick flags with numbers written on them. These toothpicks were stabbed into the various organs of everyone’s frogs by the instructor like it was a sampler of little gross-out hors d’oeuvres.

Once we were done with the quiz, we were supposed to dispose of the frog in some standardized and sanitary procedure. I think the frog was supposed to go in a bucket or something with other embalmed critters and eventually a hazardous waste disposal service would come pick it up.

Unfortunately, I had the bright idea of using my vaguely human looking and skinless frog in a prank on Kevin before I disposed of it. The idea was this: I was going to break into Kevin’s locker and put the frog inside along with a sign that said in so many words that I found a girlfriend for him. The sign may have even said, “How about a ‘nice wet lickery kiss,’” in reference to Mouth on The Goonies.

Before I continue, here’s a not so short digression about locker pranks: Kevin and I worked hard not to be seen entering our combination lock code at our lockers by one another or other “friends.” Another guy we knew already had his deciphered and was regularly pranked, and that was motivation enough for us to avoid falling to a similar fate. Regardless I eventually picked up enough fleeting glimpses of Kevin’s combo that I could occasionally get his locker open. However, the last two numbers I had were only accurate to about plus or minus 5 and I’d often have to enter the numbers many, many times to get it open. One day I was making attempts to break in for a different prank but I had a particularly bad streak of luck opening it…

Uh oh! A janitor spotted me at the locker…What do I do? OK, I’ll pretend to be at my own locker and just work slowly on the combo hoping he will walk on by…Uh oh! He’s standing right next to me and holding some clipboard. I look slowly over, thinking I’m about to be in big trouble. He says, “What combination do you have?” Gulp. “I have 32, 24, 16,” I say picking numbers around the sweet spot of the range of numbers I would use when trying to break in. (Man, my mom is going to kill me if I go to detention.) He looks at the locker and the “192” that identifies it. He then starts flipping through the pages clamped in his clipboard, runs his finger down a page, and stops. He says, “Well, you’re off a little bit on two of your numbers. It’s 32, 25, 14. Give that a try.” He then waits for me to open the locker. The code works! I say thanks and then take something randomly out of Kevin’s locker to continue to play along like I’m at the right place. The janitor then says, “You’re very welcome,” and continues his walk down the hallway. Phew!

And that’s the story of how I got Kevin’s locker combination. :) Kevin wasn’t too happy about me figuring out his combination as demonstrated by this comic he drew of me:

So yet again, back to the frog prank. I skipped the frog disposal knowing that the goo bucket wasn’t going anywhere and I could always dispose of Ms. Ribberta Froggy later. I then went home and looked for various props to dress the frog up to have a feminine appearance. I actually raided my sister’s old toy dolls and found a little dress and bonnet on one of the dolls. I took these along with some materials to make the sign with me to school the next day.

In homeroom I worked on the sign. One of the guys in my homeroom noticed me working on it and I had to explain it to him. The mistake of being seen making the sign turned out to be my downfall. This guy shall remain nameless but he’s an Italian/Russian with a dark tan, striking good looks, and a last name start with a “V”. So I told him all about the prank and he actually seemed to think it was pretty funny rather than turning me in to the Funny Farm.

I continued on with the plan. I would go to biology class, sneak the frog into my bag and covertly “dress” the frog up. Then I would go to Kevin’s locker when I knew he wouldn’t be around and place inside the little Bride of Frankenstein girlfriend and sign right where he could see it. Next, I would casually meet up with Kevin later as he walked to his locker to exchange books. I figured I needed to be there both to enjoy watching his response as well as to manage the situation so that it didn’t blow up and get a teacher involved.

I met up with Kevin like planned, but he seemed a bit odd. I stood behind him to observe and also serve as a shield with my back so no one else could see the monstrosity waiting inside. He opened the locker and said something in monotone like, “Nice, Jeff.” He was completely unphased by the prank! It was as if he already knew it was coming.

Sure enough, Kevin then proceeded to tell me he was sitting in another class and he overheard Mr. V. telling some other kid about my prank. All that preparation and planning went down the drain. Oh well, and probably just as well. Otherwise, Kevin might have suffered permanent mental scaring.

So I had to take the frog, remove the formaldehyde-soaked doll clothes and drop the frog in the biology goo bucket. Good riddance.

FYI, I am a very stable person and no longer exhibit any activities that could be construed as a “warning sign” for sociopathic behavior. Honest. :)

Oh, and Ms. Ribberta Froggy did occasionally come back to visit Kevin in comic form.

And Kevin made references to my failed prank in his comics as retaliation: