They’ll Figure It Out In Time

(In eighth grade, my class decides to pull an April Fool’s Day prank. I go to a small private school that is pre-K through eighth grade, and our class only has about twenty of us. We also have a bit of a reputation as troublemakers. Most of us arrange somehow to be at school early on the morning of April 1st. If you arrive at school before eight, you are supposed to check yourself into the daycare facility, but they don’t really care if the older kids do or not, plus kids rarely arrive early, anyway. All the teachers hang out in the office and teacher’s lounge at this time of the morning so the whole school is basically empty. We split into pairs and go through every classroom, the library, the music room, the computer lab, etc., and steal every single clock. We meet in the cafeteria where we hide them all in a storage closet behind some chairs. By the time we are done, other students have begun to arrive, and we act as though everything is normal. Early in the day, our teacher has a bemused look when she looks to see the time and the clock is missing. Shortly after, another teacher wanders in, looking at where the clock should be, before returning to her room, but nothing is said about the missing clocks. I assume a search is conducted at some point in the day once they realize all the clocks are gone. A half-hour before school lets out, our teacher is in the middle of giving a lesson when we hear the secretary’s voice over the speaker.)

Secretary: “Will the students who took the clocks please return them? If all the clocks are back in place by the time school lets out, there will be no punishments.”

Our Teacher: “Just go.”

(She gave up on her lesson and went to sit at her desk. Half the class stood up and walked out of the room. We did return all the clocks by the end of the day and no one was angry. The principal even chuckled about it.)