(My house phone has been receiving lots of calls from scammers and telemarketers lately. I’ve gotten bored of simply hanging up on them. One day, I get a call from a number that I instantly recognize as a Windows scam number, and I get an idea. I pull up a YouTube video and hold the receiver to the computer speaker.)

Scammer: “Hi, this is [Scammer] with Windows Technical department.”

Video: “We’re sorry. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.”

(He hangs up. Incredibly, he calls again five minutes later…)

Scammer: “Hello, this is—“

Video: “We’re sorry. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.”

Scammer: *click*

(This repeated a couple more times before he finally gave up, and I had a huge troll-face on the entire time. I now do this every time a telemarketer or scammer calls my house phone and I’m near my computer. The calls haven’t stopped completely, but they have become far less frequent.)

(My team acquires five members. All of them are people in their late teens or early twenties who often go out drinking and clubbing together. As one of the more senior members of the team, I’m not so fussed about this and I prefer hanging with friends than going out on the town. Because of this, I don’t socialize with them outside of work and a couple of them seem to really dislike me for this. Two of them are guys who come across as rather arrogant and boorish along with being rather shifty. The younger team members seem to be following their lead on most things and it’s been causing issues. Often they show up to work hungover or occasionally still drunk from the night before. I casually warn them not to do this as management has zero tolerance against this kind of thing. Soon after, some of my colleagues tell me that these kids have begun to mock me behind my back and are making comments about boring they think I am. Not bothered with them, I shrug these off as they are a bunch of immature kids. One day, one of the two shifty guys asks me to come out to dinner with them after work. Immediately, I’m suspicious as they wouldn’t normally wouldn’t give me the time of day. However, he is insistent and claims they want to get to know me better. At dinner, it becomes pretty clear they don’t mean to pay me any attention, and whenever I try talking they just ignore more or talk over me. Fed up, I get up to go to the toilet, and the group doesn’t seem to notice. While I’m in one of the stalls in there I hear the two shifty guys plus one other come in, laughing loudly.)

Guy #1: “F*** me, did you see Captain Boring’s face? Mate, he just sits there with a stick up his a**!”

Guy #3: “Why the f*** did you invite that guy? He’s so bloody dull! Rice pudding is more exciting than him!”

(All three of burst out laughing. I just roll my eyes.)

Guy #2: “Well, someone has the pay the bill for us, don’t they?”

Guy #3: “You what?”

Guy #2: “In a while, we’re going to sneak off for a cig, then ditch him with the bill!”

Guy #3: “NO F****** WAY! MATE, THAT’S F****** COLD!”

(Again, they burst into fits of laughter and I can hear them high-fiving and commenting on how hilarious my face will look.)

Guy #1: “Well, that’ll teach the c*** for being such a f****** wet blanket, won’t it?!”

(I am incensed, but rather than rushing back to the table and confronting them, I decide to give them a dose of their own medicine and sneak out a back exit. Later, I get several angry texts, insisting that I owe people money and calling me derogatory names. On Monday, I get into work early and give my boss a heads up about this. Soon after, the two ringleaders come in, looking furious.)

Guy #1: “Oi! C***!” *shoves me* “You f****** owe us money, you mugging little s***!”

Guy #2: “Yeah, what the f***, mate?!”

(Immediately, our manager pulled us into a team meeting. Here, I told the team that I’d overheard their plan to ditch me with the bill and that I thought they were all pathetic morons for sinking so low. Initially, they tried to play it off as a “misunderstanding,” but my manager dismissed it, and after some back and forth the two ringleaders eventually confessed that they were going to do it. Apparently, it was to teach me “not to be so boring.” My manager then proceeded to angrily chew them out and told them they’d acted like immature morons and got what they deserved. I informed the group that I certainly wouldn’t be paying them back after that stunt. For the rest of the day, it was very awkward. However, a day or so later, the dream team was broken up and sent to different departments and were strongly advised that any revenge acts would be severely punished. A few weeks afterward, I saw the two shifty guys being escorted out in handcuffs by the police. They had been selling drugs to different staff members through the company’s instant messaging system. They are apparently facing prison time for their actions. A few of the other members of that gang did actually apologize to me, and they told me that they weren’t aware of the plot until after I left and they felt guilty about the way those two had mocked me. I accepted their apology, but I can’t feel too sorry for the two shifty guys.)

(A chat comes in from Turkey, which raises flags right away as we only have services in the US. This “customer” establishes themselves immediately as a troll. They say not to feed them, but a kick in the troll’s shorts, closing chat, and banning them for life seems better.)

Me: “Welcome to [local ISP]. How may I help you?”

Customer: “STFU maybe?”

Me: “I am sorry; we don’t offer that.”

Customer: “Shut up, b****.”

Me: “I am sorry; we, again, don’t offer that. But if you check with your mother, I am sure she does.”

Customer: *closes the chat*

Me: *bans user until 2999*

(It is a slow day, and my coworkers and I are clustered around my desk, talking. Slowly, the topic drifts around to workplace pranks. One of my coworkers has the following story:)

Coworker: “At my last job, we all kept playing pranks on each other. One day, I got the idea to put anchovies in people’s drinks. This one guy got like, three-quarters of the way through his drink before he saw the anchovies at the bottom. Then he puked, so he got sent home. I got that guy a whole day off of work. Somehow, he didn’t want to thank me.”

In Germany, it’s custom that after their finals, the graduates will play a prank on the school and teachers. In my father’s year, however, they get a new principal with no sense of humour whatsoever and they’re forbidden to do so. The graduates decide that only makes it even more fun.

The father of one of the graduates owns the local junkyard. The father of another one owns a construction company. My father’s mother has a beverage store.

They meet up with some other graduates at the junkyard on a Friday night. My father brings some crates of beer, and the construction company owner’s son brings welding equipment, angle grinders and such, and a small excavator. Someone else brings a tractor with a large trailer; it’s a fairly rural area. They then spend the night building a huge statue from junk, randomly cutting and welding things together. Before sunrise, they bring it to the school with the tractor. They dig a huge hole in the school’s front yard and cement the statue two meters deep in the ground.

When the principal discovers the statue on Monday morning, he’s furious. He gets a shovel and tries to dig it out himself. When that fails, he calls a construction company. Spoiler: The statue is still there today.

He then threatens to withhold all the graduation certificates if the culprits are not turned in, but it turns out that’s not legal. In the end, the prom is cancelled as a punishment.

But the story does not end there. Some younger students still have classes. An arts teacher decides to make the prank the subject of her next exam and asks her students to write an interpretation of the statue’s composition and the “artist’s” intentions. My father’s little sister is in her class and writes, “It was late. There was beer. They just welded together whatever they found. There was no planning beforehand and the message it’s intended to convey is ‘suck our d***s, [Principal].'” While that was 100% accurate, it was not what the teacher wanted to read, and my aunt got an F.

Every year since then, the graduates at this school have built a statue and displayed it at the schoolyard. When my cousin graduated from there a few years ago, I visited the school for the first time and she showed me their impressive “statue yard” behind the actual schoolyard. They make sure now to actually plan the statue and design it to convey a more elaborate message, though, because that arts exam has become a tradition, too.