Face, I'd like to introduce you to Palm.
Back in the days of prep school, we still had marvellous old desks with holes for inkwells, slots for pencils, and colonies of chewing-gum creatures lurking on their undersides. The tops of these desks were battered, splintered, covered in scrawls, and were generally used as unofficial message-boards for declaring one's love/loathing for other individuals:

"BD *hearts* FH"
"TH is a wet and a weed and cannot sing for toffee"
"Mr Grimal smells of cheese"

You get the idea.

Now, at the age of 10, I'd never added my own personal voice to these boards; I really wanted to, but was afraid of getting caught and being in trouble. So when one day a rumour went around that the school was getting rid of the scabby old desks over the summer holidays to replace them with shiny new ones, I knew that my time had come. On the last day of term, I poured my heart out onto my desk. Who I fancied, who I hated, who I thought smelled of cheese, what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was quite an essay. But the desks were being thrown away, no-one would ever know, mwahahahaaaa! Delighting in the delicious feeling of naughtiness at my daring and the knowledge that the desks would never been seen again, I merrily skipped my way home and promptly forgot about it for two months.

On the first day back in the Michaelmas term, in a new form room, I was taken aback when three different people came up to me, sniggered "I hear you fancy so-and-so, what a geek!" and gaily tripped away again. How the hell did they know? I was very confused, I'd never told anyone about the object of my affections. Until I walked into my English lesson in the room that had been my form room the previous year, and saw the desks. The familiar, scabby old desks. The desks that obviously hadn't been replaced. The one with my essay of love, hate and life on. The one that I then got a massive bollocking about from the English teacher, and which I had to spend a lunchtime sanding down to clean it up. The one about which I had the piss ripped out of me for the rest of term. The one reason I've never graffiti'd anything ever again.

The one I'd signed with my full name, age and date of birth.
*facepalm*
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Thu 7 Oct 2010, 17:46, Reply)