knowing that we have people like Gromit and Mustang here on TLR...
lol. how do I take that exactly?
ok, I admit, I've been involved in some stupidly large practical jokes...but most of them are really reeeaallly lengthy to explain...so I'll just give you the first and the largest in scale...
When I was 15, I spent the night at a friends house whose parents where away, with a small group of friends. So we did what all 15 year old adolescent boys would do when given the free-reign for the night - we drank heavily and listened to loud guitar-based bands
What was to come, I still find extremely amusing, but I would kill someone nowadays if they were to do this - and we were very lucky we didn't get arrested for it.
I lived in a town called Ashton, which is very close to the M6 motorway.... Haydock (near the racecourse) to be exact. At 3am that morning we got extremely bored with the loud guitar music and had drank everything in sight, so we went for a walk - or rather a stagger. As we got close to the motorway we noticed that some workmen had left a lot of road signs and cones piled up on an embankment - shed loads to be exact
They were obviously getting ready for some serious roadworks.
We sat down and started to chat. It became apparent in the conversation that one of the guys was really upset - a matter to do with a grumpy old sh*t who lived in the road next to his who had, shall we say, caused him some considerable "Physical pain". So after an hour or so of talking to him and trying to calm him down, our minds turned to revenge against this bloke. To put it politely, he wasn't a very nice man.
It wasn't long before we eyed the road signs again and thought of a plan. Our friend, the grumpy old man, lived in a Cul-de-Sac (dead end road)...hmmm...what could we possibly do with cones, road signs and a dead end road?? Well we could block off his road, lift a manhole and make his journey into work a misery.....hmmm....naaaah....thats too wussy....I know, how about we direct the main road into his dead end?.....hmmm...interesting....but not harsh enough.....*lightbulb moment*....I KNOW! There's no traffic usually til about 6am.....lets redirect all of the traffic from the motorway sliproad down his dead end street!?!! YES! Now thats an idea!
So off we went, starting at the end of his road and working our way back to the motorway, we coned off, we redirected with signposts, we made shortcuts down back streets, we did the lot. And then at about 5.45am we made a mad dash for the sliproad and finished the coning route....and then promptly legged it.
We ran back to my friends house, crapping ourselves all of the way and darted upstairs to his parent's bedroom where we could get a good view of the chaos that was about to insue.
And then....nothing happened.
6.15 came, still nothing.
6.20 came, still nothing.
At this point we'd given up hope, we presumed that something had gone wrong and people had worked out that it was a joke. "aaah never mind" we thought "at least we won't get in trouble now" (we'd been crapping ourselves in case anyone had seen us doing it).
How wrong we were.
6.25. An articulated lorry hisses down the street and turn's into grumpy's cul de sac. Immediately realising the problem, he begins to reverse....but is blocked by the other 3 trucks and 20+ cars that had obviously been slowly tailing them through the backstreets for the last 30 or so minutes.
That was when the horns began. It was like a dawn chorus.
I can honestly say, as bad as this "practical joke" was/is, I have never in my life laughed that hard. We were bordering on literally pissing ourselves...especially as grumpy stepped out of his house, jaw wide open, and started to have a go at the first driver - who visibly was not happy with him.
And then there was rush hour. Oooh dear. Our joke was getting scary by that point. But we seemed to get away with it. We made a pact there and then that we would deny all knowledge and tell no-one what we had done that night. The heat was too great. The mess took about 6 hours to sort out...and subsequently made the local papers and tv news that week. The major plus though was that we had that day off school, because the headmaster and majority of the teachers were "stuck in traffic"
lol. You ain't seen me right?!