Random acts of destruction

[jgorham]

In high school, I was pretty much a douche. This manifested itself in many ways, the most relevant one being a desire to create panic in people simply because I felt that they were foolish to panic in the first place.

My friends and I used to regularly get drunk and go down to the street corner in front of a friend's house with duct tape. We both sorta lived in the middle of nowhere, and at 2am there were seldom any cars.

The game involved laying several long strips of duct tape on the ground sticky side up near the stop sign. Cars would roll over the tape at a relatively low speed and the tape would stick to their wheels and the bottom of their cars. When they would accelerate, the tape would then be ripped from where it was sticking, only to then stick to a different portion of the car, rip off again etc.

This process produced a very loud noise, similar to the noise one might expect an exploded tire to make. Victimized motorists would then panic, get out of their cars, see that it was far better than they expected in that it was only tape, and then proceed to get even more pissed off than they would have been at a flat tire at the nerve of punk kids for making them feel panicky. I think this is the part from which I derived pleasure.

We had good hiding spots, assuming there was enough time to rush to cover. But if a car approached while we were laying the tape, we had makeshift hiding spots which we hoped were enough. Sometimes they were, as in the case where Clint and I laid face down in the dirt for 20 minutes as police officers sent their searchlights directly over our heads.

Sometimes though our hiding spots were insufficient. One night as we were laying tape, we heard a car coming and rushed to the crappy hiding spot. A jeep pulled up to the stop sign - on top of our tape - and I was able to see 3 men and 1 woman. 3 of them were drinking, the car was loud, and I really wished I had a better hiding spot.

When they hit the tape, they didn't have to pull over to see what had happened, they just looked out the open top of their jeep. Seeing tape and concluding that some punk kids had done this, they stopped their car close enough to Clint and I that we couldn't move safely from our crouched position behind some bushes.

In what is still one of the scariest moments of my life, a man from the jeep saw us and threw a beer bottle directly at where we were hiding. Leaving one of my sandals behind, Clint and I ran desperately into an orange orchard, knowing only that we were running from the constant profanity of angry, drunk men knowing they had a chance to both beat someone up and impress the girl who was with them.

After hiding in the branches of a tree for about a half hour, Clint and I finally saw them leaving and returned to the safety of his house. At one point a man had run directly under our tree. I am glad he didn't stop to think that he had seen us a moment before, and yet we were nowhere to be found as he scanned the terrain in front of him.

Anyway we turned 18 shortly after that, and stopped the practice. But talking to Clint tonight made me think of it again. So any of you all have similar stories of random destruction?

[Zeldark]

Different kind of destruction...

Everest poker. Small site, excellent for beginner's or people who like microlevel tournaments. They have these 10 cent freerolls (1st place gets a whopping 5 cents), 5 cent buy in tourneys, and it goes up from there. I don't play there anymore, but once....

I'm minding my own business (trying to put Sklanksy theory to use in places where most of them probably haven't even heard of Sklansky) when this girl at the table starts talking to me, and before we're done she is asking for my AIM SN. Now I'm not in the habbit of distributing that to random people in cardrooms, but I was feeling nonchalant and decided there's always the "block buddy" button.

So we're about 20 minutes into our wonderful first aim conversation when it becomes clear she wants to cyber, and I realize this relationship has already reached its full potential. So I act like a dork pretending like I don't know what she wants as a sort of twisted experiment to see how long I can keep this random horny person interested while also not giving her what she wants. And it goes on for quite some time. We're talking weeks.

What about the random act of destruction you ask? During this time, I was playing at Pokerstars for tables and Everest for Tourneys, but it became apparent that she played soley at Everest. She had built up her bankroll from the 10 cent prize pool freerolls and 5 cent buy-in tourneys so she eventually got whole $1.04. What does she do with the dollar? I suggest and encourage her to enter a Chip and Chair. A multi-table tournament with a buyin of...one dollar. I had seen her play often enough to know that her chances of getting a return on her investment were, slim. And enter she did. Lose she did as well. And while the flat dollar amount is not a big deal even for micro-limit ring tables, to her it was 96% of her entire bankroll. Although if you want to look at it a different way, the monetary damages were higher than that of the tape ;-). Hard to tell whose emotions got rattled more, but she was fairly upset too. (Although ironically, I was in "damage done" mode and wasn't going to push her anymore but right after her loss she starts going into "Next time..." mode, and tells me she's saving up her winnings for another Chip and Chair.)

I'm not really in the habbit of intentionaly inflicting stress, damage, or poor poker advice upon others, so in retrospect, I almost feel bad about it.

One person's bet is another person's bankroll.

[Michael Davis]

One time my friend TP'd my house, and though he was interrupted shortly after beginning by the alertness of my family, I still dumped a whole bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's in his book bag.

Also, when I was six or seven I picked up some ants and threw them in a very small amount of water that they could almost get out of just to watch them suffer and drown.

-Michael

[DonkBluffer]

[ QUOTE ]


Also, when I was six or seven I picked up some ants and threw them in a very small amount of water that they could almost get out of just to watch them suffer and drown.


[/ QUOTE ]
I've heard people like you often become psychopaths later in life.

[Gunny Highway]

jg,

Actually what makes that gag kind of cool is that it's not destructive. It's a pretty harmless prank compared to the ones we'll probably hear when this thread gets going. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[yvesaint]

i threw a rock the size of a grapefruit and split my cousins head open