Inspired by Go Easy On The Soy Sauce, Bro, It Could Kill You : Shots - Health News : NPR article
I was out to a team dinner for work once at a nice Sushi restaurant. There were 6 of us there, two women Ali and Angela and two men Mark and Shaun and my boss and me. Mark and Shaun were always goofing off and challenging one another but I tended to stay out of it, so did Ali and Angela.
For some reason, at dinner I decided to put a $20 bill on the table and say, "whoever eats this entire ball of wasabi can have this." The ball of wasabi was about the size of a golf ball.
If anyone, I fully expected Mark or Shaun to be the ones to do it, but instead Ali (a petite, mother of two from Minnesota-heart of an angel, super, super nice lady) grabbed the $20, put it in her purse and then grabbed the wasabi and downed it. She did this all so fast that none of us had time to talk her out of it. Within minutes she turned red, her eyes were extremely blood-shot and she couldn't talk. She was a mess. It took at least an hour before she returned to normal. The hardest earned $20 in history.
I felt horrible.
What about you? Any dares or pranks to speak of?
I absolutely love telling this story! I have a very close core group of guy friends. We have all known each other and been friends since we were about 9 years old (we are all 23 now). One summer ( we may have been 16 or 17 at the time), we were out at the lake for fireworks for the 4th of July. There is a main road that runs by the lake that gets really jammed with traffic after the fireworks are done. So, four of my friends and I were walking on the shoulder of this road going back to another buddy's place. It is probably 11:30 at night and we were just messing around. Picture a group of friends doing general dickery. That was us. My friend Adam turns to us and exclaims, "Guys, I have a great idea! Lets fake mug John right beside the street so everyone sees it!" Now, what you must realize is that Adam always comes up with pretty outlandish ideas. All these ideas revolve around John being the center piece becuase he was a smaller than a lot of people our age. Kyle and Pete usually go along with Adam as long as John agrees. Just kidding, they'll go along with it even if John isn't down. Back to the main story. They all agree to do this 'fake mugging' while I decline. I have always been the most reserved out of the group. I'm the one person in the group of friends that parents usually points to as the more responsible one out of the bunch. The guys don't care because they are caught up in how awesome they think this will look to everyone who is sitting in their cars while in traffic. I walk down an alley to wait for them and call up my, then, girlfriend. They hash out the details and I go stand by a light pole. The plan is this: John will run out from the alley and go around the corner of this building into their front parking lot. Adam, Pete, and Kyle will be chasing him and they'll knock him down in the parking lot, throw some fake, but convincing, punches and then stea John's wallet. The 'fake mugging' starts. While they were at the front of the building, I am still on the phone with my girlfriend telling her how I think the idea is pretty dumb. I assume the fake mugging is completed because Adam, Pete, and Kyle come around the building and start walkig down the alley. With their backs turned towards the main street, they didn't see what I did. Two cars of people speed across the alley and into that parking lot. It crosses my mind as odd but I just tell my girlfriend that I will call her later since my buddies were done screwing around. Kyle, at the same time I am saying my goodbyes to my girl, starts walking back towards the parking lot but just before he can get up there, a solid twelve guys come around the corner and, I assume, their ringleader yells, "You think it is funny to beat up little kids?!" It is important to note here that I did not hang up the phone yet so as soon as I see these guys I say, "Oh shit, there are a group of guys coming towards us." To which my girlfriend replies, "Wait, what?" I am in a state of awe as I see the ringleader guy shove Kyle and then land two punches, one right after the other, to each side of Kyle's head. Either Adam or Pete yell run and then they both bolt, each running by me. You have to realize, I am completely stunned and am just at a loss as to what to do. Think of it as daydreaming or zoning out. I literally do not believe any kind of thought was going through my head. So, this guy starts taking off his shirt, getting ready for a brawl, while walking towards me. All he says is, "Are you in on this?!" Let me tell you what, I have no clue how I put those next two words together but I sure has hell spoke. "Uh, no?" At this time, if you forgot about John, I wouldn't blame you. I am sure everyone, at that time, forgot about him. But, lo and behold, motherfucking John comes around that corner of the building, apprises the situation, and yells at the top of his lungs, "Stop! Stop! They are my friends! It was all a joke! I am ok! Stop!" Everyone freezes and their ringleader just stares and then says, "That ain't funny. You shouldn't joke around like that." And him and his buddies all walk away. It all ended like it all started: quickly.
Dude. Sucks to be Kyle. Glad you didn't get your ass kicked too. Sometimes, the person not even involved can get beat up too. I remember when I was in high school my buddy Ian was driving a full car of us fellas through the University of Michigan campus. A student on a bike cut us off at a right turn. I yelled out the car window, "fuck you asshole, that's right ride off!" I felt comfortable that the 5 of us could take that one dude, even though he was bigger than any one of us. About 5 minutes passed and we were at a stop light. The one nice, calm guy in the car was named Ryan and he was sitting shotgun. Before we knew what was happening a fist came flying through the open passenger window and Ryan was punched about 3 times in the face before Ian took off. His nose was broken and it bled all over the place. I got the evil eye from Ryan for weeks. We tried to find the bike guy for retribution, but never did. I probably, no definitely, deserved to get punched. Not Ryan though.
Yeah. Luckily Kyle didn't sustain any seriours injury. We later found out that our friend, John, was still playng the part of the victim when all those guys came out of those cars. Apparently they asked him if he was alright and asked where the people were that mugged him and he just acted groggy and pointed to the alley. Lessons learned, I suppose.
Oh, wait, I wasn't there but.... Back in the day (1983?) at Nortel I went to a bachelor party for a guy in our group the night before the wedding. At about 11pm I was done and took a cab home - they were headed out to an all night club. 11am ceremony, ya'll. The next day, we show up at 10:40 or so and are met by a groomsman saying that the ceremony had to be moved but the reception is going to be on time and to just go there and hang out until the bride shows. Note: not the couple, the bride. Hmmmm. So I go hang out with my date, all is confusion, they let us in around noon, the bar is open, we're having a few adult beverages and waiting and waiting and waiting. Around 2pm they bring out the food, we fall on it like zombies in a schoolbus. (Sorry) Around 4pm the father of the bride comes out and tells us the ceremony is complete but the groom is "unable to make it." I figured he was passing out drunk and they just did the necessary offline and that was that. Nope, later I find out that his buddies took him to the airport and put him on an 6am flight to DFW. At around 8:30 am the nice flight attendants in DFW put him on a flight to ... Alaska. So he got married "over the radio" from the cockpit. But wait. At some point his "friends" took all his clothes off and painted his entire body from wrist/neck in ... blue with fountain pen ink. So on their honeymoon to the Cayman islands, well, I'm sure the pix were interesting. He actually changed jobs within a few weeks after basically not talking to anyone in the team after getting back. I was so glad not to be part of that. _XC
Good ole' Minnesotans. I love my people. Poor girl. To contribute, and in the same vein as "chili eating" and things of that nature, me and some friends put in 10$ each, 6 of us, for a total pot of $60. The challenge was the milk challenge. For those unfamiliar, it's drinking a gallon of milk in an hour, and you can't put it back in the fridge. It spawned form an argument after hearing about it that "we could all easily drink a gallon of milk, because it's delicious and we love it!" So all 6 of us were arguing who and who couldn't do it, so we slapped the money in the pot, went to the grocery store, and returned with 6 gallons of milk, one for each of us... No one finished, 4 of us puked, myself being one of them. Me and another guy got the farthest, and honestly had less than a glass left in our jugs, but we just couldn't do it. Stared at it for like 30 minutes trying to man up the nerve to finish it but we were both so nauseated. Ended up running to the bathroom and throwing up. The two guys that didn't throw up only drank like half, and like smart people, just admitted defeat and saved themselves a trip to the bathroom. We each just took our $10 back and that was that.petite, mother of two from Minnesota-heart of an angel, super, super nice lady
I have a hard time drinking a pint of milk, let alone a gallon. I don't see the appeal of milk. Cheese and other dairy products are a different story, but milk I am ambivalent towards. Next time make the bet for who ever can consume the most... You would have won!
I handed a friend a green pepper (think pencil shaped/sized) on a stick in a nice middle class Indian cafe and said "eat this." We were the only two white guys in there and before any of the more sensible people with pepper reference could stop him - chomp, chomp, swallow. Four of five mano lassies later he could talk. He said bad words. Two years later at my going away party in a different place, with 100 of our team there, he handed me a similar pepper and everyone chorused "eat this." It was horrible. _XC
Do you know what "whippersnappers" are? The little white calls of paper filled with a bit of gun-powder, shaped like a mini-tadpole that explode when you throw them at the ground. Some people call them "bang snaps". Here's a photo: Anyways, I was telling jonaswildman that I had bought some to show to my daughter and he mentioned that when he was a kid he and his brother used to put them under the toilet seat as a prank to his mom and dad. The things are pretty loud and if you sat on a toilet seat and one went off, you would definitely be freaked out. I put one under our toilet seat in our bathroom the other day and chickened out before my wife ever sat on it. It just seemed too mean.
Oh, yeah, and from wikidedia: Bang snaps consist of a small amount of gravel or coarse sand impregnated with a minute quantity (~.08 milligrams) of silver fulminate high explosive and twisted in a cigarette paper to produce a shape resembling a teardrop with a tail. When stepped on, ignited, or thrown on a hard surface, the friction-sensitive silver fulminate detonates, producing a sharp salute similar to that of a cap gun.
Despite producing a legitimate (albeit tiny) high-explosive detonation, the extremely high mass ratio of gravel to explosive acts as a buffer to ensure that the devices produce only the audible "crack" of the supersonic shockwave; they are incapable of producing physical damage, even if discharged directly against skin, and the detonation frequently fails to even break the thin paper holding the ingredients.[2] The explosion is also too weak to propel the gravel any distance, which usually falls to the ground. This makes them safe for use as a children's toy, for which purpose they have been widely sold across the world since the 1950s. They are also a common part of Chinese New Year celebrations."
I can't say I was involved in this prank directly but a co-worker of mine was. Some years ago he worked in a company that had hired 2 contractors to finish some programming work. The 3 of them worked pretty closely together as a team for 6 months. On the last week before the contract was due to finish one of the contractors, lets call him Dave, left his computer logged in when he went to get some lunch. The other contractor, Fred we will call him, was away in a meeting at the time. My friend spotted an opportunity and pounced. He wrote an email on Dave's laptop to Fred that went roughly like this. "I love you, I cant face not seeing you again after this week. Reply if you feel the same, if you don't I will understand, Love Dave." My friend said there was no visible reaction at the time from Fred. They both left at the end of the week. He met Dave a few years later and asked how Fred was. "No idea, he left our company soon after your contract ended without saying a word to me"
That's a big one. Did he tell Dave about what he'd done? What if Fred went on to work on cool projects that he otherwise might have included Dave on etc? That's the kind of prank that a week later you fess up to, you don't wait a few years.
I was 16 and we were sitting in Business Studies class. Ms O'Brien was explaining stock markets and how share prices rise and fall. Ms O'Brien was a replacement teacher filling in for maternity leave, she was young, pretty and by all evidence a decent person, something quite different to our other teachers. An interesting discussion started around how markets could be manipulated by rumours started by accident or sometimes on purpose. Someone mentioned that chinese whispers could cause a lot of problems. "Whats a chinese whisper?" asked Ms O'Brien. "Its when a story gets passed from person to person but gets changed and miscommunicated and comes out as something totally different on the other end". "Oh" said Ms O'Brien with a twinkle in her eye "lets try it". I think she wanted to make a connection with her students, to break through the cold curriculum and have fun while being educational at the same time. So someone at the rear left corner started it off, speaking their message to the person in front of them, up and down the rows of students the message passed in furtive whispers. Ms O'Brien looked on in pride. I realized I would be the second to last person to get the message, the last person (sitting behind me) was Ger. Ger was one of those big friendly kids who lacked any form of common sense. Ger was a born follower. My teenage mind reeled with the possibilities open to me, there was a golden opportunity for a prank here. I would come up with something so good it would blow everyone away. I don't even remember what the actual message was, I was so excited that it didn't register, all I could think of was how good the prank would be. I turned to Ger and delivered MY message. As Ger was the last person in the chain the entire class shouted at him to say what the message was. "Yes Ger, what was the message" asked Ms O'Brien beeming with pride at the students engagement in our market experiment. Ger didn't bat an eyelid as he shouted "Ms O'Brien is a bitch".
I would likely have done the same thing, though I like to think I'd have been more creative than "bitch," but I probably wouldn't have been. Maybe, "Mrs. O'brien has dick breath." Did the person that was before you ever rat on you?
I left out the aftermath that followed as I thought it would be funnier that way. I only had 5 seconds to come up with something to say to Ger and my teenage mind went to the classics, the tried and true. The fallout involved Ms O'Brien leaving the class room in tears, seeing that was the only punishment I received.
used to work with a guy who was really OCD. I don't mean that he was particular, I mean he was diagnosed with OCD. He didn't really count things, but he did arrange things just so. He was a teacher with me in Vietnam and the company we worked for had a room where we'd go to prep our materials and plan lessons. Each of us had our own seats staked out at these two long tables since management got rid of our desks, claiming that they wanted us "to be more collaborative." I'm pretty sure they just wanted more seating space since our staff doubled in a year. Anyway, D (OCD guy) had really started to get under my skin, just by being himself. He's one of those people who are absolutely convinced that they can do anything under the sun. Not too long ago, he decided he was going to be a novelist and his goal was to get his first novel published within a year. I also watched him straining as hard as he could to do a pull-up and his face falling into bewilderment as he realized he couldn't do it. He thought he'd be able to do at least ten because the rest of us were able to. Never mind that the rest of us had made an agreement to push each other to work out for the six months prior. Due to his OCD, D is an extremely fidgety person. He's always fiddling with this, straightening that, making sure that everything is in order. To be fair, it is that same quality that allowed him to maintain and use a 1997 Dell laptop until 2011. I don't know what he did, but it ran almost as well as my (then) new computer. In the office, I am a very focused person and even though I was at the other end of the table from D, his fidgeting would drive me nuts. So I began to mess with his things. Very subtly, I moved each and every one of his things, just enough for him to recognize that something had happened. At first, he thought it was something he'd done as he'd got up. Then, as time went on, he began to check the table, to see if there were loose screws that were making it wobble. He observed the way people moved around the room to see if anyone regularly knocked into the table, thus moving his things. Eventually others occasionally began doing the same things I had started doing and it was pretty apparent that it was really bugging the shit out of him. He had no one to point a finger at and at this point it had been weeks and no one fessed up to seeing anything. Fortunately, (probably more so for us) all of us in on "the joke" stopped. Months later, D had again gotten on my nerves and on the nerves of a good friend. That night, D insisted on arm wrestling each of us and marveling at his own strength whenever he beat someone. He was even going around to other customers, who for the most part were pretty good natured about it, but as some of those guys had been on oil rigs for the past three or more weeks, it seemed like only a matter of time before he got knocked out. The plan for our "prank" on him was to get him blackout drunk and put him in a taxi, after taking his shoes, money and phone and paying the driver the equivalent of $60 to drop D off in a random corner of HCMC. Luckily for D, another friend talked us out of it 3/4 of the way into the process. I can't help but feel like that was the prank that got away. Of course, D could have ended up having his organs farmed or some other horror, but man does that guy get my goat.
From reading this D sounds like an almost sympathetic character that is excessively picked on for character flaws that are likely the result of some uncontrollable imbalance. That said, I guarantee that if he's as annoying as you say, is have been the guy pushing him in to the cab. We've all had a guy like that in our lives. If you haven't... then you're that guy for someone else.
I don't really know if you can say it's the OCD that causes the flaws, at the root of it it just depends on the person's character. In my freshman year of high school I was diagnosed with severe OCD by one of the better doctors in Seattle, and it was even said that the next step up would be so extreme that it would've been recommended I pull out of school. However, as severe as my symptoms were, part of my mindset was to not inconvenience others or ever be unkind, and as a result most people couldn't even tell that I had the disorder. Granted, it did end up making me more shy and withheld than I wanted to be, but even as people got to know be better I'd still try to be that nice guy who's there to help and listen, even if I wasn't in a position too. I'd never dream of boastingly beating people in arm wrestling, I don't think that stems from OCD but instead I think that stems from a narcisstic character. Likewise, I also have (what I assume to be) a realistic sense expectations, and wouldn't say I could publish a book in a year unless I reasonablly could. I don't think that stems from OCD but instead from a unrealistic character. I'm sure he could've been a better person, OCD or not, and just didn't try to.