Note*: this takes a lot of setup, but I hope the setup is entertaining for some of you. You can get the gist by reading the intro below and number #3.
The setup:
I was able to gain access to my neighbor’s room in college (a good friend of mine). He was compulsive about locking his door; the kid would go to the bathroom and lock his door behind him. This bothered my flatmate and me. He put such high value on access to his room that my flatmate and I were forced to find a way to break in as we pleased. We lived on the fourth floor of a four-floor dormitory and the fire escape could only be accessed through his door. Therefore, the lock was a magnet that would be activated when a circuit was closed (locked). To close and open the circuit this neighbor would turn a keyhole just like every other door. It was trivial to get in to the room. We opened the panel that framed the keyhole and rearranged the wiring so that pushing hard on one corner of the panel would open the circuit and open the door at any time. Of course, the neighbor was a friend of ours so we had no intention of robbing him. Instead, over the course of an entire term we effected a number of annoying ruses. Here are a few: 1) The alarm clock. He usually woke up at 10 on the weekends so we should sneak in there on a Friday to set his alarm for 5:53 AM to wake up ridiculously early on Saturday. He made his hatred of this well known. Soon, part of his methodical bedtime ritual became checking his alarm clock to see if the alarm indicator light was on and would turn it off if it were in fact lit. So, the next weekend we opened the door, went in, a performed delicate surgery on the circuit board in the clock to disable the light from ever telling him. To be particularly aggravating, this time we set the alarm at 4:43 AM to make the awakening even ruder. After this, we could wake him up whenever we wanted to--and we did. 2) Refrigerator-content explosions. This one was simple but the look of bewilderment on his face was classic. We would take coke cans in his fridge, put them in garbage bags, throw them at the ground so they burst open (thus in a natural looking way, not with a giant stab wound, for example), then pour coke all over the place in that fridge and place the coke can where it had been. It became routine for him to show up at dinner ranting about the integrity of those goddamned coke cans. 3) The radiator. Winter in the northeast chills like the proverbial witch's tit. It isn't the nippy cold of the West but a penetrating ache like a full-body brain freeze. Well, we could break into the neighbor's room, so we invited Mother Nature as well. Our procedure was threefold: turn the radiator off, crack the windows, and--my personal favorite--douse the carpet surrounding the radiator with water. The first two did their job; they made it cold as shit in that room. The third step was to create the impression that the radiator was experiencing serious malfunction, i.e. shutting off and leaking. He made several calls to the on-call plumbing service only to be told that it worked perfectly. It helped that the neighbor below our neighbor would complain about leakage from the ceiling from our doing, so they together gave the plumbers a nightmare. As for explaining the windows being cracked... 4) We told him we were getting in through his windows. After all of the tiny things (which I won't detail here, e.g. putting an entire bag of cheetos through his fan one by one and blowing the crumbs everywhere) he knew we were getting in, but not how. There were large windows and the roof up there was flat enough to walk on and get over to the adjacent room, so it was highly believable that we had pulled the ol' reverse defenestration trick to gain entry. We were happy to have him believe this. He duct taped the living shit out of that window, not to mention barricading it with furniture and other things. Of course, we continued entering his room through the door with the same level of difficulty of pressing an elevator button. And we kept screwing with him, too. Forced to wake up at 5:53 AM? Window needs more tape. Can't sleep because it is too cold? Better put one more stack of books in front of the window. You get the idea. Eventually, of course, it became clear to him that it couldn't be the window... One day my flatmate and I were chilling in the place when our door creaked open to reveal our neighbor who said, "Fuck it. You guys are getting in. I know you are. It CANNOT be through the window. I may as well not even lock my door anymore, I guess." My flatmate and I began a slow, slow clap.
Where it all went wrong:
A week or two pass. My neighbor knows peace in his life once more, modulo one important detail. He knew that we were the ones opening his windows to make it so cold but he did not know that we were the ones causing his radiator (read #3) to 'malfunction.' So, he still thought this to be an idiosyncrasy of his room (i.e. that every couple of days the radiator valve would flip shut and it would spray water all over the floor. It really was possible for it to do this on their own, they were not high quality). So I would be in his room every few days to keep the inveiglement going. At one point, I was in his room pouring water over the radiator--minding my own business, heh--and then a loud knocking started at the door. My heart jumped into my throat and I went to the door--pitcher in hand--totally unprepared to deal with the circumstances. When I opened the door, there was a disgruntled plumber.
"Is there a toilet leaking in here?" he asked.
"No," I responded hoping to dissuade him from coming in to examine the place. He explained that the person in the room below had water coming into their room through the ceiling for weeks and that a pocket of water had finally burst and soaked the place. Oops. Best of all, though, is that he thought it was my room. I just wanted to get the Hell out of that place and never return to face the consequences. So,
"Go in, look around, I am not sure where it is coming from if it is this room that is causing the problem. I really have to run now I have class in a minute," I explained.
So I dart out and the plumber went into my neighbor's room. When my neighbor got back, he was greeted by a pissed off plumber. One important thing is that he had been living in the room alone but it was meant for two people and still had another guy's stuff, so the plumber naturally assumed I was the roommate and was not privy to the stupidity (i.e. pouring water down the radiator) going on in the other room.
The plumber could prove that the radiator was working perfectly and that he had caused all of the damage. My neighbor was told to vacate the room (and go to a temporary dorm) in order to fix the water damage.
In the end, all I could do was help him move.
tl;dr I was pranking my neighbor but the water damage caused him to be kicked out of the room.
Submitted July 06, 2016 at 05:46AM by Galwahwah http://ift.tt/29v8opQ tifu
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