An epic prank, so please excuse the length...
As a teenager, I had the joy of attending a rural secondary school, with beautiful big playing fields and a metric shitload of nasty chavs bussed in from a number of downtrodden suburbs on the edge of town. These kids were seriously evil: in my first ever home economics class, a charming young gentleman called Barry threw a pan of boiling milk over another pupil’s head because he wanted to share the cooker. Another time my sister witnessed a gang of bullies pin a kid to the floor and say to him “We’re going to twist your ankle until it snaps,” and they did. The most sickening thing was when four guys from my school nicked a car, but then two of them double-crossed partners in crime and made off with the stolen car, wanting to keep it just for themselves. When the other two kids caught up with them, they beat them until they were unconscious, placed their heads on the kerb and then drove a car over them. One of them died instantly, and as far as I know the other is still in a coma.

The reason I have recounted the above is so that, when I tell you that the worst thing about the school was not in fact the kids but the management, you will have some perspective on the matter. It was not their sheer incompetence or their complete lack of control which got to me, but the way in which they actively promoted a policy of “attackers and bullies are victims too”. Whenever something bad happened, the management would attempt to create a dialogue between those involved and do their very best to make the victim of the attack or bullying realise that it was in fact mostly their fault: violent attackers and bullies apparently can’t help what they do, because they are the victims of their own making, and need understanding, patience and respect. Wrong. What they need is six shotgun blasts to the chest, but I digress.

So, anyway, when I finally left the school, a couple of friends and I decided to perform a prank of epic proportions to give the management a major headache. It was the time of the Foot and Mouth epidemic, and there happened to be a large farm bordering the school premises, so you might be able to see where this is going. We hacked into the school computers in the Design & Technology department and stole the school letterhead, before writing an extremely convincing letter, explaining to parents that because Foot and Mouth had infected the neighbouring farm, the school had to be closed for two weeks of decontamination. We made it as realistic as possible: we copied the headteacher’s pompous style, highlighted the urgent need to find alternative teaching venues for exam yeargroups, and finished it off with a photocopied signature. Having created our masterpiece, we printed off over a thousand copies between us and placed them in the school registers at lunchtime, so that they would get handed out by the register monitors after lunchbreak.

To say that chaos reigned would not even describe the half of it. All of a sudden, kids began to burst out of classrooms, whooping for joy and running home, gleefully clutching the letter. The staff reacted in a number different ways: some laughed, some ran around desperately trying to stop kids from leaving, others called the police, and more than a few saw the opportunity to skive a few days and legged home it themselves. About half the school failed to turn up for afternoon lessons, and the senior staff spent the rest of the day going around every remaining class to try and debunk the hoax. The headteacher ended up having to write another letter to inform parents that the previous one was fake, and even made an announcement on the local radio station to inform people that the school was definitely open and that there was no Foot and Mouth in the area. In short, it was absolutely brilliant!

However, soon enough we got caught, and it looked bad: the first thing that the headteacher told us when he saw us was that we were all going to be expelled for having committed forgery and fraud. However, he didn’t know who we were at that point, and when he found out that we were among the few good students at his school, and that by expelling us he would probably halve the GCSE pass rate that year, he backed down and instead gave us 24 hours litter duty each. However, the really great thing was that some of the teachers were on our side, including my absolute legend of a French teacher, Sprakey. The first thing he said to me when he saw me picking up litter on the first day of the punishment was “I knew it had to be you! There are only about five people in this whole school who can actually read and write, and that’s including the staff! Good job!” He then let me empty all the bins in the French block into my litter picking bag so that it would look like I’d done several hours’ work, and let me stay in his office for a chat while it pissed it down outside. The second day was even better: at the time there was also a huge epidemic of myxomatosis, and the playing field was littered with dead rabbits. We loaded up the bin bags full of dead rabbits and took them back to the teacher who had been designated to oversee our punishment. She demanded to check the contents of the bags so she would know we had really been picking up litter, but that was a mistake, because all she found were dozens of dead half-rotten rabbits. She gagged, and then told us that she did not think we needed to report in for litter duty again because we had learned our lesson. And that was that. Good times!
(dart, Wed 4 Feb 2009, 14:07, 1 reply)

Quite right there about management being worse than the kids.

( idonthaveafunnynickname Drink-Aware? Sure. I'm aware I want another drink., Wed 4 Feb 2009, 21:33, closed)