It's all about shit, when you get down to it......
I may have, in the mists of b3ta-time, once posted a story about my time in the army. It involved a (so he said) well endowed mate, underpant failure, a spade, a field latrine, khak-kleptomania, slapstick and ultimately lots of running around aimlessly because sergeants-major take a dim view of the use of HM entrenching tools being used to nick shit.... This is not that tale.

This tale is oh so different, but then again, not.

I was, a long time ago, one of the most inept cadets at a certain military academy. And it is upon my lot that this utterly appalling prank was played.
To go into the details of inter-squadron rivalry as existed at the time would take more typing than I am man for. (Let's put it this way, one of my English lecturers - who bore a staggering resemblance to Tim Brooke-Taylor - was a lexicographer. He managed to produce a 1000 page dictionary devoted wholly to our own internal jargon. Over 40 pages alone were devoted to derivatives of the word 'fuck', and this thing was written in font 12. It was an academic text, not one written in crayon for us mud-crawlers.)
Our buildings (blocks) consisted of two towers, each of three levels, joined on the first floor by a communal area, consisting of rec-room, kitchen, bathroom, IT geekery area, etc etc etc. Think H-blocks from the Maze, but vertically oriented. As our building was built on a hill, the downhill tower had a fourth level, a basement. Access to this was through a manhole cover. (Bear with me, it's seriously worth it - length joke at the end*). As going down there was expressly forbidden we turned it into our very own secret squirrel hideaway and did all sorts of naughty naughty things down there. Think ironing badly, not polishing your boots, push ups where your chest didn't get low enough - oh ok, think pissing idiotry of the highest order. Anyway, as hip clubs do, it went out of fashion.
Alpha squadron ('the relaxed professionals' was their ethic, the rest of us just thought they were lazy cunts) were, as a result of a block re-org, required to give up one of their buildings. The mighty Bravo moved their noble lads into the block. It was a great place to live. Nearest the mess, nearest the gym, nearest the lecture theatres, the seconds that saved on a daily basis were worth gold, and the alpha-twats knew it.
One great tradition, now sadly dead, was the 'bish'. In essence it meant destroying things others hold valuable. We raided one another constantly - think the Vietnam war, but with shaving cream, fire extinguishers and mud, rather than napalm and american ineptituder. The value that the departing squadron placed on the building meant that sabotage was the order of the day on handover. The hated incomers wouldn't get it without a fight. On move in day we searched the building for all booby traps.
Nothing.
A year later final exams were drawing to a close...
Summer was upon us. We had free time. The officers in charge posted to this career cul-de-sac were going back to the real world and couldn't have given a butter-greased prison-daddy style grudge fuck what the student monkeys did with themselves now. So we partied. And that led to Golf section getting its grand reopening.
So we prepared a decent load of contraband and prized open the manhole cover. Drunk already, the first of our number jumped in and we heard the most almighty commotion. Splashing, gasping - the sounds of someone in utter misery.
It turned out that the fuckers who had been required to vacate the premesis had been down and unhooked the u-bends from the toilets upstairs. So our mate found himself three feet deep in putrefying shit dating back over a year.

I defy hell to be worse.....


*legnth joke (sorry, my fingers are tired)
(InfiniteMonkey, Sun 16 Dec 2007, 2:38, Reply)