How do I pull a memorable senior prank?

Ah, the senior prank. The last of three huge cornerstones in a young adult’s life. The first two of course being earning the fireworks show after entering a castle in Super Mario Bros. and watching a Christopher Guest movie.

But the time is upon you! Seventeen and eighteen year olds commit countless senior pranks, so what can you do to set yourself apart? Unfortunately, I cannot guide you directly, for a true memorable prank cannot be taught because it comes from the heart. I will however, recount my own senior prank in exquisite detail so you can take the necessary wisdom from it and apply it to your own escapades. The name of my epic prank? The Ol’ Switcheroo.

The Prelude

This prank required some planning beforehand, and in order to fully understand the genius behind it, I will be more than happy to include the planning procedure.

Mr. O’Malley was a Korean War vet who lived a few towns over and ran his own butcher shop. During the war, Mr. O’Malley took friendly fire to his lower back. Given the immediate medical attention he received, the wound was not life threatening, but it caused him to live with constant lower back pain. The young Private who wounded O’Malley was barely eighteen years old, and despite O’Malley being a young man himself, the incident caused him to develop a strong distaste for teenagers of any generation.

I had to befriend this man, for this plan required the use of his butcher’s shop. I made small talk with him every other day, and offered to do odd jobs around the shop without payment. Eventually, he stopped being standoffish and a nice relationship blossomed. Mission 1 of 2 accomplished.

The other crucial part of the plan was finding a teacher I didn’t like who had a son or daughter that attended school nearby. Fortunately for me, my biology teacher, Mr. Stansick had a daughter named Christina that attended the same school where her father taught.

The Prank in Action

Christina usually hung out in front of school with her friends till about 3:45 and got a ride with her dad. On the days her father was staying later after school, she would walk over to her aunt’s about 12 blocks away. I waited for one of the walking days.

Christina knew me from a few classes, and we exchanged pleasantries once in a while, which made the next step very easy.

As she was walking to her aunt’s house, I nervously bumped into her. I began to awkwardly stammer slowly working toward the fact I was trying to ask her out. My nonsocial babbling allowed my friends to get into position. Before she could turn me down, my friends leaped into action and threw a burlap sack over her head and began to haul her towards the trunk of my car. She started to scream, but my buddy Ron broke her nose and that shut her up right quick. In hindsight, I’m not even sure if he broke her nose, because it was hard to tell with the bag over her head, but he really started wailing on what we believed to be the head portion of the sack.

We then drove a few towns over to O’Malley’s butcher shop. I already gave him the 411 about the plan and he was extremely excited about the whole thing since he was in a position to change his store location, so he already put the store up for sale, and given the poor state of the market at the time, it wasn’t going to sell anytime soon. We dumped her in the back of the butcher shop, still in the bag, locked it up tight and got the hell out of there and never looked back.

Sometimes we look back and laugh about ol' Christina still trapped in O’Malley’s old butcher shop with only the cold, unforgiving embrace of meat hooks to keep her company.

In retrospect, calling it The Ol’ Switcheroo doesn’t make much sense, since we didn’t really replace her with anything, but we were young and careless.