Don’t Mess With Mr. Scott
“One of the big, over six foot ‘tough’ students who had a bit of a reputation as a bully and troublemaker decided he was going to try and intimidate one of the art teachers. This kid was under the mistaken impression that just because Mr. Scott was only 5’5” in his socks and 120 pounds sopping wet, he would be a pushover.
He didn’t know that before Mr. Scott trained to be a teacher, he was in the army, and during his service, he was the divisional weight champion for boxing in Australia. He tried to push Mr. Scott out of the way and when that didn’t work, he tried to punch him. In an act of self-defense, Mr. Scott punched him in the jaw and knocked him out.
These days, Mr. Scott probably would have been fired, but this happened in 1977, when my school still had corporal punishment, so teachers could and would smack you ’round the head if you were being a jerk. You certainly never ever laid a hand on a teacher and talking back got you the cane or ruler. But I still never saw a teacher wreck someone as hard and Mr. Scott did.”
No One Expected The Horror That Soup Could Bring
“My junior year, a sophomore guy put a sealed container of chicken noodle soup in an empty locker next to the chemistry room. It sat there for at least five or six months until somebody thought about it again. It was brought up in my chemistry class and our teacher took a pair of tongs to the locker and planned to dispose of it once and for all. But his hands were too shaky that day and as soon as he lifted it out of the locker, it fell, spilling the entire cesspool that the chicken noodle soup had become. He immediately ran back to his room, screaming, ‘Oh God, shut the doors! Shut the doors!’ and hilarity ensued.
The smell was indescribable. Raw sewage, rotten chicken, and fermented noodles all mixed into one. I have never and probably will never smell anything remotely close to it again. The smell permeated the entire floor and even seeped down a stairwell next to the spill to the classrooms immediately below.
The day of the disaster, everyone gagged as they traveled through the halls. Luckily it happened during 8th period, which was the last period before we went home. An actual hazmat team was called to take care of the spill, just in case there were airborne diseases.
For the rest of the school year, the teachers lit candles in the hallways and in their classrooms, but the smell never left us. It stayed all summer and even into the next school year, until it finally went away altogether.
The chemistry teacher who dropped the soup is actually now my stepfather and we recount this story at least once a year and laugh our butts off. It’s one of my best memories of high school.”
He Couldn’t Have Fathomed How Out Of Hand The Prank Would Get
“It all started when I took a computer science class my sophomore year. It was my first time doing any real coding outside of HTML and it really opened up a world of possibilities. I got bored with the stuff they were assigning us and decided I would create something interesting. As a kid I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny/cool if I tricked people into giving me their computer passwords?’ There was a few seniors in my class that constantly bullied me, so I figured it would be a good way to get back at them.
I recreated the Windows XP login screen and set it so that the login button saved the username and password onto my network drive. It worked gloriously, except the kids in my class weren’t dumb, so they would press ctrl+alt+delete and realize it was just an app running.
Then I found a script that restarted the computer and called it whenever someone clicked login (so they’d reboot right back to the real login screen and not realize I had just stolen their password). It was surprisingly advanced, so even the techy guys didn’t realize they were being baited. No one was able to tell anymore and my product was complete. I found (I assumed) a major Windows vulnerability using a stupid restart script in a phishing app. I was ready for the adrenaline.
I went to the library after school and logged into all 20 computers, loaded my app, then took a computer in the corner and quietly watched. By the end, I had a notepad file with 30 username/password combinations. I even got passwords for some teachers; I felt like a god. I then logged in to my bullies’ accounts and deleted EVERYTHING: essays, homework assignments, whatever.
Back then, ytmnd.com was really popular, and computer science kids would use it to make fun of each other. It’s basically a site where you can create a page using a gif loop and audio, often to hilarious effect. Anyway, I got a picture of the worst of the bullies and used Denis Leary’s song about jerks as the backdrop, and then put a link to that page in everyone’s network drives.
The next day in class, everyone was quiet; I felt the tension in the air and couldn’t have possibly been more smug with myself. I quietly sat down and did some work. I heard some whispering, and then one of the guys started talking to himself, ‘Oh my God, my essay is gone!’ I started to feel bad at that point, but there was no turning back. Everyone knew it was me, but nobody said a word to me. The YTMND page I made quickly got around, and my point was firmly made.
The shenanigans didn’t end there, and I later hacked the network admin password by crafting up some more devious code. Through all my tinkering I didn’t realize that I unlocked a network drive that only me and the network admin could see. I used it to store files when my own drive ran out of space, which obviously raised suspicion. The real admin went through my drive and found a list of passwords, the program I’d made, and a bunch of other shady apps I created during my run. I was boned.
After an emotionally grueling interrogation by my vice principal, they suspended me for 21 days and banned me from playing sports (Ha). I had been a straight A student my whole life and broke down, thinking my life was over. Hilarious in retrospect, but I was a total mess.
A week after my suspension, I was chilling at home and a friend IMed me. ‘DUDE YOU’RE FAMOUS.’ What? He sent me a dozen links. Word got around that I ‘hacked the school’ and people made websites in my honor. ‘FREE AARON,’ ‘AARON FOR PRESIDENT,’ ‘JUSTICE FOR AARON.’ I became a meme and the whole school knew my face, as my picture was photoshopped on picket signs and billboards in solidarity. Even my bullies came around and we all became good friends.
When I came back from school after 21 days, everyone was expecting me. Random people waved to me in the hallways and I was still in shock and in disbelief. There were flyers of me plastered in computer labs and in random corners in the hall. That was the ‘incident’ that everyone talked about for years until I graduated.”
The Poor Teacher Must’ve Been Terribly Embarassed
“When I was in high school, we had an ‘outdoor discovery’ class that was basically just a giant ropes course. The teacher for that class was a nice middle-aged man. One day, he decided to take a shower in the locker room between periods and had a stroke. Now, I don’t know why this stroke was different, but it made him decide he needed to go for a jog, around the high school and middle school, naked as the day he was born.
So he was butt naked, sprinting past classroom windows in just his socks and sneakers, which he somehow thought to put on, when a sub went outside to see what was going on. The outdoor teacher ran over and basically started playing a game of ‘catch me if you can’ until the ambulance arrived. Yeah, it was was a very odd day. But he was back to work a couple weeks later, making kids swing from ropes and climb over logs like normal.”
Their Tawdry Affair Was The Talk Of The Town
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“Senior year of high school, a starting football player was allegedly getting it on with a married teacher who had a kid enrolled there. The yearbook/school newspaper photographer geek (a Jehovah’s Witness), who didn’t like said teacher, was on the case. He got wind that the teacher had written a love letter (seriously) to the football player, who in the middle of class tore it into hundreds of little tiny pieces and dumped them in a garbage can.
The Jehovah’s Witness went to the classroom where the letter was thrown away, got every scrap, and spent a day or two taping every single piece together. It was incriminating. Embarrassingly incriminating. Salacious details, teenage desire (from her), descriptions of body parts, graphic depictions of past encounters, extreme (for the time, it was late 80s) intimate acts, the works. Did the photographer keep it to himself? Of course not! He made hundreds of copies.
On the day he showed up to distribute them like all over school, he got them confiscated by the principal, who was trying desperately to keep it out of the news. But he didn’t get every copy. The original made it around to enough hands that the grapevine did everything else. The letter was discovered on Monday, taped together Wednesday, copies confiscated on Thursday, and Friday there was a pep rally in the gym. That’s when it all went down.
At the gym, all the football players were lined up, getting cheers, rah rah yay. The little skit they put together, which usually has teachers involved in shooting free throws against team captains or showing up in their alma mater’s football jersey and having people line up with them in order of popularity or some such, took a turn for the surreal.
It was the district championship that night, and we needed S-P-I-R-I-T. This time, the teachers came out, each one in a white trash bag with arm and neck holes cut out, one for each letter of the town’s name (eight teachers in all). Each teacher had a football player in front of them, lined up purely at random, and each player had a whipped cream pie. I was watching this unfold from the side as a team captain, and I was horrified to see that the football player in question had somehow been lined up right in front of the teacher he was banging, she with a big ‘A’ on the front of her garbage bag poncho. The only thing missing was that it was not red.
Then, in some truly cursed alignment of the stars, it was announced that whichever pair got the loudest cheer, the player will throw the pie into that teacher’s face. They are dead last in line. As they went to each pair, only clueless underclassmen and those that knew nothing about the note cheered. It was unbelievably quiet. Not quiet for a pep rally, quiet for the library. Seven sets of feeble and half-hearted cheers happen. I was thrashing and screaming inside, sunk into all the nightmarish works of existentialism and Russian justice literature, because I saw it all like a plague, spreading to a lethal finale.
Last pair’s turn and the football player was looking like he was about to have to kill his childhood dog with a claw hammer, and she was crying blatant, bitter, shameful tears, too late to repent. Nobody could stop it, because it was all set up before any of the drama (I was on the planning committee). To stop it would have been an official acknowledgment, and the show had to go on.
The principal, also crying but choking it back, stood behind the star-crossed lovers, held his hand over the strapping young man that was watching his soul be stripped of him, and the room exploded. Seven hundred kids screamed their throats into spasms: screaming for blood, for entertainment, for revenge against teachers, and just for the heck of it. The pair was the obvious winner and without any more of the hesitation that his brawny chest could no longer hold, he threw the pie, fast-balled it really, hitting her dead in the front of her skull and creaming shut her face.
She turned, wiping whipped cream from her eyes in a tragicomic parody of his seed that she wrote about loving to have on her face, bawling the whole time. The principal was crying, the player was crying, and she was dying in public, covered in his cream in front of 700 yowling, yelling, laughing, mocking teen voices. She was on fire, she was shattered, she was dying in front of my eyes.
And as she turned, starting to lower her head in a way that she would keep lowered for the rest of her life, there was the photographer boy, camera at the ready, and he took the shot that still sits on one of the back pages of my yearbook, an agent of God there to record their guilty shame. The kid that hated them, that worked so hard to elucidate their guilt, that I think maybe prayed to God that brutal justice be done and then got the chance to stand and deliver it, caught the moment perfectly. He was a rather good photographer who wound up shooting for the Associated Press later in life, and the black and white print he hand-developed was a masterpiece of action, pathos, and crushing omniscience, a record that won’t be forgotten until every yearbook is dust, and the people that remember it are too.
Me? I was the yearbook editor. I couldn’t NOT put it in. I had to. I still know everyone involved. She quit teaching, got divorced, lost the house, and her son would never talk to her again. The football player went to college. Everybody moved on. Sort of. But I didn’t. I sometimes want to ask someone if that really happened, if it really went down like that as a perfectly horrific amorality play. But I don’t need to, I know it did, I was there. I couldn’t have made it up if I wanted to.”
He Wanted To Defend Himself, But He Injured An Innocent
“One of my friends brought a weapon to school because he was having problems with some kid. The other kid was in a gang and he feared that he would be jumped or worse. So he decided to carry it in his jacket pocket at school.
He was sitting in the first class of the day, started messing with it, and it went off. Everyone reacted to the noise but apparently, no one figured out what it was. It was a small .22, which isn’t super loud, but I’m still baffled to this day how no one realized what had happened. The bell rang and everyone continued on to their next class.
Later that day, a girl showed up to the nurse complaining of a burning pain in her lower back. It turned out she was shot when the weapon went off. The cops were called and everyone was called back to the classroom. They figured out that it was my friend who had the weapon, so he was arrested and ended up in a juvenile detention center.
About a year later, I was leaving school and bumped into him. I said hi and asked how he’s doing. He said he was doing better and then asked if I wanted to buy any hallucinogens. I told him I was good and kept walking. That was over 10 years ago and I haven’t heard about him since. I hope he turned things around. Also, a few years later I ended up working with the girl that was shot. She had a gnarly scar where the bullet hit and apparently, it required surgery to remove as it had done some internal damage.”
They Thought He Was A Good Man, Until He Was Arrested
“I went to Catholic school, so we had a school chaplain who was essentially some sort of ‘friend to the kids.’ It sounds really creepy when you say it like that, but the dude was amazing. He talked multiple students out of suicide and helped tons of kids come to terms with and overcome bullying, harassment, and domestic abuse. He was always encouraging every single student to reach for their dreams.
He once went the extra mile for a VERY troubled family at my school. The two kids in question were adopted brothers and both incredibly unstable. The brothers would be your best friend one second, and then suddenly fly off the handle the next, making you literally fear for your life. Knowing their family problems, the school chaplain volunteered to become the two boys’ godfather in order to legally be able to help the family out with their finances.
About a year after I finished school, the school chaplain appeared in the local newspapers; he had been arrested and imprisoned for assaulting the older of the two lads. For most people that was enough to condemn him, but a lot of the people I went to school with found the whole thing to be somewhat suspicious. Whenever someone encountered one of the two boys, they would instantly launch into a step by step recount of what exactly happened, as if desperate to convince everyone they knew that they were telling the truth.
The only thing wrong was that these step by step recounts were usually vastly different each time they were told, as if poorly thought out. Regardless, the chaplain was imprisoned and eventually died of cancer while still inside. It was only after his death that it finally came out that the assault never happened. The chaplain had run into financial trouble himself and so was unable to keep giving the boy’s family money. As punishment, the whole family (the parents were the ones to come up with the idea) invented the assault story to ‘teach him a lesson.’ The guy was a hero who once helped my girlfriend get through her parents’ divorce in one piece, and yet his lot in life wound up with him sad, forgotten, and alone.”
A Contest Of Wills Took A Turn For The Nasty
“In high school gym class, we had tiered locker baskets where each row belonged to one period (so if you were in third period, there were two lockers above yours). I knew the guy whose locker was above mine and he used to mess with my locker in various ways, sometimes leaving a big gob of applesauce on my lock, sometimes drawing on the numbers with a Sharpie, etc. I finally got fed up with it, so one night I jacked off into a film canister and the next day I drizzled my seed all over his lock like maple syrup. I couldn’t help but brag to the horrified people around me as I performed the awful deed, so naturally word got to him about what I’d done. It really honked him off and he kept saying he’d get me back for it in a big way.
Later that week, something weird started happening in the locker room. It smelled horrible and it wasn’t just the collective stench of forty adolescent boys. It smelled like rotting meat. I asked the guy if he knew about the smell, and with a devious grin he told me he had placed a slab of raw venison in one of the lockers (his family was wealthy and they regularly went deer hunting, which might seem pedestrian in other places but in San Diego it’s not common for a person to have a dead deer in their freezer). He wouldn’t tell me which one it was, but he said it was near mine and he had bought a new lock just to use on the basket the venison was in so that nobody without the combination could open it.
At first, the other guys in the locker room thought it was hilarious. We’d hold our noses, squint, and talk about how nasty it smelled. But that didn’t last long. The thing about rotting meat is, stuff marinates in its smell. We kept our gym clothes in the locker room, and before long our clothes started smelling like it, and then our bodies started smelling like it.
People began losing their patience. Fights broke out in the locker room more and more often. Kids were generally ticked off that they had to come into the locker room. But since the coaches didn’t know where the smell was coming from, the meat remained untouched. They couldn’t go around indiscriminately cutting off people’s locks to find it, because people owned those locks and they’d have to be reimbursed. So for about two and a half months that meat fermented in the locker room, and whenever the coaches demanded to know if anyone knew anything about it, I just held my tongue, partly because I didn’t want to get counter-snitched and partly because I’d become fascinated with the effects the smell was having on social life in the locker room.
Then one day we reached the tipping point. It started with a shoe. I was changing my clothes when a shoe landed next to me. I thought to myself, ‘Someone from the row over must’ve lost their shoe,’ so I tossed it back. But it came right back at me a lot harder. Everyone in my row made eye contact, and the battle began.
You know how a locker room is set up, with different aisles and a bench running down the center of each one. Pro-tip: it makes them a perfect venue for trench warfare. Shoes started flying hither and thither. Then people upgraded to deodorant cans and whatever was in their backpacks. Once they’d exhausted that supply, they started throwing their MasterLocks, at which point the fight officially became dangerous.
We slammed up against our lockers and covered our heads for dear life. Then people started literally tearing their lockers out and throwing those. Finally someone picked up a big trash can in the corner of the room and hurled it overhead, Do The Right Thing-style. I swear, for that moment, everything seemed to go into slow motion. Trash rained down over all of us as we looked up in awe. Expended deodorant cans, torn boxer-briefs, and empty water bottles hailed down over us, and I couldn’t help but believe that that torrent of squalor and debris was a metaphor for us, what we’d become, and what I had unwittingly made us.
Once word reached the administration, we spent the next straight week running laps around the football field. At that point, the PE teachers realized that conditions were going critical, and started indiscriminately (and illegally) cutting off everyone’s locks to get to the source of the smell. When they finally found the locker basket in question (which, it turned out, was the one right next to mine), they threw it on the ground outside the locker room.
We all crowded around to get a look inside at the source of our despair. Whatever was in there, it had been meat once, but it wasn’t anymore. It was a reddish, blackish paste that had congealed on the walls of the locker. It was covered in these…I don’t even think I can call them maggots because I genuinely cannot believe maggots can grow to be that size (they were about as big as my thumb). The inside of the basket was stained with this meaty slime the likes of which should never have left its place in the Port-a-Johns of the underworld. Some people couldn’t help but laugh hysterically at the sheer grotesqueness of it. Others could only hang their heads in a muted relief.
Despite how my nostrils welcomed the change, I was very disappointed. I missed the degradation of humanity that occurred every day at 10:30 am in that locker room, that five minutes each day when the normally content looks of those forty faces turned into contorted visages of agony. I missed what I had created through inaction, and I remembered that old mantra about all which is necessary for evil. Maybe I was just an innocent bystander who refused to take action, and everyone else was collateral damage for unjust punishment that a villain exacted upon me. Or maybe I was the villain all along.”
She Confronted The Rumors Head On
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“A girl in our school just disappeared one day. Naturally, there were rumors that she was pregnant and such. The funny thing was that some glitch in the system had her on the honor roll every semester, so they’d call her name in assembly every time.
Well, I knew her, and she wasn’t pregnant, she just dropped out. When I told her that she kept getting called for honors, she thought it would be hilarious to actually show up and collect her gift cards (that was the prize).
So she did…with a fake baby in her arms. After she received her gift cards, she epically spiked the baby hard in the middle of the stage and everyone in the crowd went absolutely nuts.”
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