The Best Practical Joke I Ever Played

This is one of the funniest (and kind of mean-*cringe*) pratical jokes I have ever played on someone.  In order to set the scene, you have to understand that my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (see this link for a list of Blogs – with links – categorized by the authors MBTI) states that I am an ESFP.  This tells you right up front, what type of personality I am to pull off such a prank.

Knowing from my personality type that I’m usually the last one to leave the party, or the conversation, and I’m also a night owl, it wouldn’t be too hard for you to understand that when I was in college, I would routinely return to my dorm room, to get a couple hours of sleep, around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.

On this particular night, or should I say morning, I came back to my room to find my roommate, Don, sound asleep.  No surprise there.  We barely saw each other due to the fact that he was always asleep when I came in and he always left in the morning before I would regain consciousness.

I decided to turn his alarm clock forward so that he would think it was around 8:00 am instead of 2:00 am.  Once I manipulated his clock I then recruited the help of my willing cohort, Steve, who had just been hanging out with me in the lobby a few minutes earlier. 

I turned the light on, and took my shirt off, so that I could be putting it on as I woke my roommate to ask him if he was going to go to class that day.  He couldn’t believe that he had slept in.  What happened to his alarm clock he wondered.  I could tell be the way he was examining it closely, he was wondering why his alarm had failed him.

Just then, my hired help, Steve, came walking down the hall and poked his head in our room and asked if I was going to breakfast.   I think this was the probably the key factor that caused my roommate (who at this point was worried he was going to be late for class) to jump out of bed and grab his shampoo and towel and head straight down the hall to the showers.

My partner in crime and I couldn’t believe it.  He actually bought it hook, line and sinker.  We were laughing so hard that we had to run down the hall to the other restroom for fear that my roommate would hear us.  OK, so now what.  Don is in the shower.  It wouldn’t be long before he comes back to the room and there we would be guilty as charged.

However, I decided that the best way to handle the situation was to return his clock to the actual position of 2:06 am, turn off the light and hop into my bed.  I had said goodbye to Steve and told him I would fill him in on the details the next day. 

Sure enough, within a few minutes, my roommate returned from the shower.  He opened the door and flipped the light on.  No quicker had he turned the light on, when he flipped it off.  It was the only kind thing to do, since afterall, I was asleep in bed, or so he thought.

Once the light was off, I was able to open my eyes and see what he was up to.  He must have sat there in the dark and stared at his alarm clock for a good 3-4 minutes.  I’m sure that he wondering what had just happened to him.  I didn’t say a word, and he didn’t ask me anything.  He simply took his school clothes off, and crawled back in to bed.

I laid there waiting for the question.  I couldn’t imagine that he wasn’t the least bit curious.  My mind started to wander.   Hmmmm… maybe he was plotting his revenge.  Oh, no, what had I done.   Was I going to, now, have to live in fear that the other shoe was going to drop at any moment.  My mind continued to wander and it wasn’t long before I thought myself to sleep, not realizing that I had even fallen asleep until I aroused the next morning.

Upon regaining my awareness to my surroundings, I look around the room to see if he had set any traps for me.  Hmmm… nothing out of the ordinary.  Was he waiting outside the door?  I slowly opened the door and peeked around the corner.  The hall was empty and all I could her was a couple of buddies chatting it up around the corner.  Don, was no where to be found.

Confused, I jumped in the shower, purposefully checking to make sure that it was shampoo in the bottle and not Nair.  Everything seemed to be perfectly fine.  I arrived at the cafeteria and with normal reckless abandon grabbed a plateful of the most appetizing things available, which usually ended up being a bowl of cereal and some toast or toasted waffles. 

I found a table of some friends and preceeded to tell them what had happened the night before when they all started laughing hysterically.  Now, I thought it funny myself, but not to deserve this reaction.  Curious, I asked, what it was that was so funny.  One of them spoke up and said, “Don, was just here and told us he had a dream last night that it was time to get up and it seemed so real to him that he actually got up and took a shower.  He said it must have been a dream, because when he got back to the room, it was actually just after 2:00 in the morning and his roomate was still asleep in bed.”

Suddenly it became clear to me, why there had been no revenge plotted.  He didn’t even realize that I had done anything.  Oh, my gosh!  I couldn’t believe it!  Well, I eventually caught up with Don, as I now felt bad and wanted him to hear the truth from me, rather than hearing it from someone else making it look like I had been bragging about it all over campus, although I had.  I couldn’t believe it when I told him what I had done, he actually started laughing himself.  He thought it was hillarious and couldn’t believe I had thought of that.  He said he wasn’t upset at all… or was he?

 

** I must give Wendy Friedrich credit for jogging my memory of this great prank.  She started a great discussion thread on BlogCatalog about “Practical Jokes”.  Thanks Wendy!