We all have that one friend (or if you’re really unfortunate, handful of friends) or a family member who enjoys nothing better than pulling a good old ‘prank’. Occasionally, it might even seem like their life’s mission is to make your life as stumble and fall-full as possible.
From being super-glued by your brother to a chair to stealing your ex-girlfriend’s hamster, this April 1 the Mirror Magazine takes a look at the unsuspecting victims of the joke and the evil masterminds behind them.
Nishan Liyanage will never try to pull the hero act again. At school sometime around midnight, waiting to take over his shift at the annual school radio broadcast, he was watching a movie with some friends on the sixth floor when another friend asked if someone would come down with him to collect his bag. “I, like the wannabe hero I am, gallantly offered to go with him.
It was pitch-black. Like literally can’t-see-your-hands-in-front-of-you back, and this guy had his phone light and I didn’t. All of a sudden he starts walking faster and I shout at him to hold up, but he just walks ahead whistling. And then, out of nowhere this eerie wailing starts and its coming at me from all sides-I tried feeling my way across the dark corridor and the noise just wouldn’t stop. There was absolutely nothing I could do so I sat down and put my hands over my ears; then doors burst open and out came my friends who had been hiding in classrooms the whole time! I felt like an idiot.”
Sonali Silva was called up one day by a man who alleged to be from the examination department, accusing her of cheating on her papers. “He was so insistent, he had me believing him-even though I knew I hadn’t cheated! Eventually I recognized that it was the voice of a good friend though.”
Anisha Niyas was part of an unintended prank of sorts. “My two best friends, Sam, Samantha and I were backpacking through India. We were staying at a friend’s place in Gurgaon for a couple of days. Sam woke up early one morning convinced that he could smell smoke. He was so convinced of this that he woke us girls up at 7am and then proceeded to walk around the house waking everyone else up too, insisting that he could smell smoke. Samantha and I had a late night so when our plan to sleep in got interrupted, we decided to play along and act as if we could smell smoke too, just to annoy Sam.
He walked from room to room sniffing the air, while Samantha and I would make snide comments, like ‘hey Sam, we can smell smoke in the room 3 floors up. You should go check it out’. The prank was on us in the end, when Sam did eventually find the source of that funny smell – a faulty electrical connection that had burst, resulting in everyone having to evacuate the house and call the fire department! Turns out that Sam had the last laugh in the end!”
Elijah Sinthabay’s experience was a little more painful. “I fell asleep on a desk at school wearing a tie. They stapled the tie to the desk and then slapped me real hard. I jerked awake but of course I fell down and the table fell down with me too!”
Chalukya
Weerakoon was betrayed by her own kin. “My brother put superglue on a chair and called me over to watch cartoons-mind you I was like five years old then. I was stuck pretty bad! My mum had to cut my shorts off…once she was done laughing.”
Charith Kulasiri’s had his share of being pranked too. “My phone was stolen and hidden inside my printer, and people started calling me and I could hear the blasted thing but couldn’t find it. I kept looking at my printer but couldn’t fathom how the sound could be coming from there! Then after hours of searching I found that there was a little compartment at the back that was big enough to hide a small mobile phone.”
Varuna Poonamperuma and his friends had a minor hygiene scare during their university years. “We were in an apartment complex and during the evenings we’d all get together and hang out. The apartment next door was a girls’ one and one evening they invited us over for dinner and a movie. The movie turned out to be made by them and we watched it in horrified silence-they had sneaked into our apartment and filmed themselves using our toothbrushes to clean things.
Most notably to clean the sink, toilet and the bathroom floor! And then they filmed themselves replacing everything. We were so mad and rushed home to throw out those brushes and gargle with Listerine. The pranks continued back and forth and the day we were leaving, they gave us another video that showed them going out to buy new toothbrushes and replacing the old ones that had been used to scrub our bathroom-they hadn’t actually pranked us in that sense after all!”
Burhan
Bartowski had one pulled over his head at university as well. “My friends told me that there was a costume party at the university gym pool and the theme was Sex Change. So I got all dressed up and went, only to find no one there. Oh yeah, except for the dean, lecturers and professors who were there for an inter-faculty meeting. I just ran out and
atleast I had my coat on-and my friends were outside just laughing their heads off.”
Sandali Gurusinghe and her friends pulled one of the oldest tricks in the books on their friend. “We were in school, and told a friend to stand in the corridor with her eyes closed for six minutes, making her believe that it was a cool hypnotic experiment. Then we just left her there and came back to class, so she was standing by herself in the corridor during interval with her eyes closed.”
Naveen Ratnayake had the last laugh. He kidnapped his ex’s pet hamster. “I had just broken up with my girlfriend. So a friend and I went to her place while she was at school and told her Grandma we had to take her pet hamster to the vet, and she actually believed us and gave us the thing! Then she came home and all hell broke loose. We gave it back in the end, but it was pretty funny!” |
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