Pranks

Once, a teacher challenged me to make an assignment as difficult to grade as possible. What he failed to remember is that I am a programmer. It was quite a simple program, taking my answers, translating them into morse code, and spitting them out. Oh, and repeats were allowed. By my calculations, it would have taken him at least 8 hours to grade, and could last for days.

You see, the monotony of life is enough to drive a girl crazy. Everyone copes with this with some activity. I keep sane with pranks.

There was the time, for example, that my AP World History teacher gave us an assignment to write a letter home in the perspective of a Chinese immigrant in the 19th century. I did exactly what she asked, and in the proper language, too. Mandarin.

A good prank requires creativity, hard work, and a sense of humor. Without creativity, it’ll be boring. If the prank is half-assed, there’s really no point to it. A sense of humor is important on all parts; it’s not a prank if it’s not funny. I also dislike malicious intent; unless the victim is challenging the prankster, pranks should be harmless and all parties involved should be able to have a good laugh.

Sometimes my pranks are elaborate and require a lot of research and time. One example is “Autonomous Program 5,” a robot that would bust out a perfect rendition of All Star by Smash Mouth by beeping out the pitches. I spent hours for that one learning how pitches and their durations translated into code, but it was worth it in the end. Because Smash Mouth.

Some of my pranks are aimed to correct my greatest pet peeve: improper grammar. On a quiet autumn afternoon, when I should have been studying for a calculus test, I received a text that shook my world to pieces. “hey can u giv me sum notecard pls”. Blinded with rage, I snatched a notecard from my bag. There was a notecard. She wanted “sum notecard”. I ripped the card in half and scratched a plus sign on one of the disembodied halves. “Here you go,” I snarled as I reached her desk. “Your ‘sum notecard’.” She’s texted me with proper grammar ever since.

Alright, I concede, perhaps it wasn’t that dramatic. Some may argue that it isn’t even a prank, though I see a prank as any action that mildly inconveniences, annoys, or scares the victims in a way that all parties can laugh about later. With this definition, language pranks would be ones where I make a point to take improper grammar as literally as possible. That usually cures improper grammar tendencies.

“Elaine, please stack the chairs on the table.”

“Okay, will do. Wait… table?”

The teacher returned half an hour later to find all 28 chairs in the classroom Tetris’d to perfection on the center table. With an exasperated sigh, she looked at me and said, “Elaine, you know what I meant.” Then we laughed until I thought I was going to die of asphyxiation and I stacked the chairs on their respective tables.

So, why do I do this? Sometimes, it’s educational. Other times, it’s just for laughs. In some cases, I’m just trying to show off. There is one underlying similarity in all of my pranks though: they’re done in good fun when life falls into a predictable routine, which drives me insane. I despise feeling like a broken computer program running an infinite while-loop. If all I can do is run the same actions again and again to the end of time, I might as well merely be a series of zeros and ones. My pranks shake up the world around me for a bit, just enough for people in my immediate vicinity and I to laugh, and remember that despite our structured lives, we are still human.