You got me good, payback is coming

I love a good prank. If I’m on the receiving end, I can appreciate a well thought-out gag. But, of course, nothing is funnier to me than executing a good prank. I’ve written about a few now and then in some of my columns.

I think the last good prank I got over on Glenny was thanks to these new smartphones. While she was in the bathroom, I quickly downloaded some sounds onto her phone. Then I selected an alarm for 20 minutes into the future. The chosen sound? Hank Hill hollering. Finally, I placed her phone in her pillow case. It was hard not to snicker after she finally turned out the lights and came to bed. When it finally went off and she jumped up out of the bed shrieking, I was absolutely dying in laughing.

I got a punch in the arm over it, but it was sooooo worth it. It was basically a modern update on my old gag from the 1990s where I would set the timer on my pager, put it on vibrate and slip it into her coat pocket while we were out shopping. Watching somebody whoop and holler as they danced around in the middle of a store, convinced there was some small animal inside her jacket? Priceless.

So as the family sat around the other day and my kids brought up all the old jokes and gags over the years, I was reminded how kids remember things you forget. Forever. For instance, there was the time a young relative was living with us and couldn’t remember to pick up after herself, especially after taking a shower. One night, after walking into the bathroom and finding her old clothes all over the floor for the umpteenth time, I decided to enact my revenge. Ever so silently, I crept into her room and carefully placed her panties over her head like a hat while she slept. The next morning, after waking up and groggily making her way to the kitchen table for breakfast, she was looking around at the rest of the family in confusion — with the panties still perched high up on her head. She couldn’t figure out why we were all laughing so hard.

As a young man it was the classic jokes that I loved most — disconnecting a wire from somebody’s brake lights (just one, not both of course) and re-hooking it up to the horn.

“Why does my horn keep honking every time I hit the brakes?”

For a while back in the ’80s, they were designing small, irritating back-up alarms that you could easily screw into the back-up light sockets on a car. I guess the idea was to put a cheap back-up alarm on grandpa’s ’73 Maverick. The neat part was that they used the old, tried-and-true 1157 bulb sockets, which was often the same as the dome light on many cars. So, providing your friend or relative didn’t lock the doors on their car, it took mere moments to snap in the shrill alarm inside the car where it would howl every time they opened the door. Ah, good stuff.

Of course, pranks can sometimes go too far. And yes, I’m guilty of crossing the line sometimes. A few years back when I was working at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard as a shipwright, we were building scaffolding up and over the island on an aircraft carrier. Considering the aircraft carrier was in dry-dock, this meant the scaffolding was well over 200 feet up. We were working extended shifts so we were in bright and early in the morning, well before most of the other workers and before the Navy had begun its workday.

It was a lot of work, but I tied the full-body CPR dummy onto my back and lugged it all the way up to the top. We kept it dressed in full overalls and a hardhat (you know what’s coming next, but bear with me). I propped him up in the corner and went to work. And waited. Finally, around 8 a.m., when the regular-shift workers were all milling about and the Navy guys had mustered by department on the flight deck, I made my move.

Yelling, “AHHHHH!!!” I pitched him off the scaffolding and watched the dummy play plinko all the way down the scaffolding (I checked first to make sure there was nobody working beneath us). His hard hat blew off and finally … SMACK! … the dummy hit the flight deck. Oh how I thought that was funny. For a split-second. Then I saw some of the sailors getting sick, others running for the dummy, still others sinking to their knees. And after the first few reached the CPR dummy and looked up at me, suddenly it didn’t seem like such a good idea.

When I heard the sirens, saw the lights and every supervisor running for my dry dock, I started wondering how I was going to explain my recent job loss to the wife. Thank God that up until then I had been the golden boy of the shop. I cashed in every chip I had, groveled, apologized and kept my job. Of course, I was off the prestigious carrier job that day and spent the next six months working in the slag and filth of the cut-ups (ships that had been decommissioned and were being recycled). Guess I deserved that.

Years later, I’m finally able to re-tell that story to friends and family. Seems to get the same response every time: a mix of “that’s horrible!” while they hold their hands over their mouths laughing hysterically at the same time. Truly a bad idea, that prank was. Learned my lesson about thinking them out a little more in the future. Stick with the harmless ones.

Like the one my friends pulled on me recently wherein, with the help of my children, they placed a life-sized Obama cardboard cutout in my bedroom shortly before I got home. I dragged my tired self home, shuffled downstairs and into my room like I always do at the end of a long day in order to drop my coat, wallet, boots, etc. And before I could turn on the light, I spotted the silhouette of the man standing by my bed, hands on his hips in a challenging pose. I backpedaled out of my room so fast I almost tripped. And heard my family upstairs dying with laughter. Good one, guys. You got me. You got me good. Payback is coming, and the circle continues.

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.