The Joke's On You

At first, I started to laugh when I read a headline about a man getting glued to a toilet seat, but after reading the article, I felt pretty bad for the guy. Yikes! The poor man had to be helped by paramedics when he sat on a toilet seat at a shopping mall after someone put super glue on it. Can you imagine having a whole ambulance and (probably) lots of other people having to help pull you off of a public restroom toilet?! It's like one of those bad dreams I have where I'm naked in public or have to use a restroom without a door in a crowded place. Makes me shudder just to think about it, not laugh like I do every time I watch Flick get stuck to the flag pole in A Christmas Story.

As kids, we participated in - as well as were on the receiving end of - a lot of pranks. We toilet papered just about everyone in the youth group, plus a few assistant pastors and ministers of music. We put one another's underwear in the freezer, put shaving cream in the youth guy's socks at a lock-in, I even duct-taped Amy Beth to the fort in our back yard once. In college, Amy Beth's friends had a great prank war. Someone dumped something like 20 lbs of kitty litter on her bed in the dorm (how did the boys get into the girls' dorm without an escort, anyway?), and they filled a boy's bathroom with sticky marshmallows and balloons. Matt's parents also filled two friends' bathroom with balloons when the couple went on their honeymoon.

At work, we went through a great phase of practical jokes like flipping all of someone's shelved books upside down, putting sticky sugar water on someone's chair arms, and changing out people's office door name plates or adding silly slogans to them.

Some pranks were not quite as funny. I somehow thought it would be hilarious (what was I thinking) to put hair gel in my teacher's chair in the 6th grade - yeah, got paddled for that one. One family of the youth group got their house rolled two days in a row (although I can plead partial innocence on that one). It was pretty obvious after the fact in both instances that the jokes probably weren't the best ideas ever.

I was also the butt of a few pranks. One girl thought it would be funny (actually, she was probably being mean on purpose, but I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt) to matte my hair with chocolate cake when I fell asleep at a slumber party. Another two girls (you know, the "cool girls" in 6th grade) put salsa in my coke and laughed at me, making me feel paranoid when I kept saying it tasted funny. 6th grade was a rough year.

So, where's the line between a funny prank and one that goes too far? It's been a while since I've been party to a really good prank. I'm up for it when it's fun and not mean-spirited. You have to know the person you're pranking, too, to ensure that they won't take it personally. However, it's also really easy for a harmless prank to just go too far.