There are some crazy things we did as kids to get people to like us. A lot of us probably did even crazier things to become popular. In some instances, whatever weird or wacky thing we did wasn't even done for popularity. Sometimes a situation just comes along and how we responded to it ended up making us legends of our schools. The people in the following stories found themselves in such situations. Whether it was a prank they were pulling or just a reaction to a situation, it made them famous with their friends and schoolmates.
The Great Escape
“We were a group of 7 friends in total and by the end of our four years in college, three were thrown out of college, two had to repeat a year, and the remaining two of us (thankfully I was one of the two) barely managed to pass on time.
We were in an extremely strict college. You could call it half military. All of us did. Even if you lived near the college, you had to stay in the college dorms. Morning exercises were at 5:40 AM, different uniforms for breakfast, college and dinner.
This particular event happened on a Monday. Sunday was party night and my friend was sleeping late after missing the morning in his room and suddenly woke up with a jolt to check the time. It was 9 am. Classes start at 8 am. He quickly dressed and the instant he was locking his room door, the warden saw him. The warden was fed up with our group and this guy in particular. Today, he had the perfect chance to ruin his life. He would say that this guy was sleeping in his room and had no intentions of going to college.
Normally this would amount to suspension for a few days, but given my friend’s reputation, this would have amounted to suspension for a whole semester (6 months)!
The warden locked my friend inside the room. He put double locks just to be sure, and went to call the proctor to seal my friend’s fate.
Meanwhile, my friend who is very slim used all his might to widen the bars on his window, squeezed through them, jumped from the first floor, limped his way to the nearest taxi, went to the railway station and was off to Mumbai! Mumbai wasn’t far from my college, around 2 hours by train.
He calls me up, explains the whole situation and says in a very sweet voice, ‘Bro, please handle everything.’
How would I handle the situation? There was pandemonium in college! No one knew where he was!
Using my wits I told him to search the floor of local stations in Mumbai for tickets for the morning of Monday and go to a doctor and make a fake medical bill for the same time as well. All this to prove that he had been in Mumbai on Sunday.
Now for showtime! He came back the next day and went to the warden to sign his name on the roll call. The warden said with a scorned look, ‘How did you get out of the room.’
My friend says, “Room? Which room?’
‘Don’t act smart! Be straight or I will have you thrown out of college!’ The warden answers.
My friend with a confused look says, ‘Sir I don’t understand a single word of what you are saying?’
It was hilarious! The warden was seething and raining off accusations, but my friend was calm and kept denying everything.
The warden called up an official meeting of all the heads of departments. My friend was already armed with proof and his side of the story. He proved that on Sunday he had gone to Mumbai and started feeling sick. So he did not come back to the dorm and instead went to visit a doctor in Mumbai on Monday morning. He showed the medical bill signed by the doctor. He had missed morning exercises so there was no proof of any teacher seeing him there as well.
The heads of departments had a hearty laugh and they knew exactly what was going on. Turning to my friend my head of department said, ‘Either you are lying, or the warden is mad. Anyway, you have shown that you are sick. So I am giving you medical leave. Go get proper treatment and then come back.’
Case closed! As expected, everyone gave my friend a hero’s welcome back to the hostel. But for our group, this incident was just another feather in our cap.”
Take The Big Fish Out And You Become The Big Fish In This Pond
“I graduated high school in 1978 in south Texas, so bear in mind, it was a completely different place and time. This incident would have occurred in about 1974, it was my freshman year. I had recently broken up with a girlfriend because she treated my friends horribly – she was very insecure, but back then I just thought she was a jerk. I really liked her, and I wasn’t happy with my decision.
I went to a party on Saturday night and saw my ex there. She was pretty inebriated but wasn’t doing anything stupid, as far as I could tell. I sort of kept an eye on her, she noticed, and we ended up hanging out together. We didn’t talk about the breakup, we just had fun. At the end of the night, I told her I thought I had made a mistake, and we should talk after we sobered up. She agreed, and we went our separate ways.
Monday at school, she wouldn’t even look at me – she was apparently very mad, and I had no idea why. I spent the day angry, just sort of lost in my cloud.
At lunch, just before we returned to class, I heard from several people that this guy Derek was looking for me, and was also mad. One of Derek’s friends told me that I had slept with Derek’s girlfriend at the party Saturday night and he was going to kill me. Derek was a huge guy – big and dumb, probably 6’3″ and 300 pounds. I had always gotten along with him, but I didn’t know who his girlfriend was and I hadn’t gotten any at the party by anyone, so? I sent this info to him through friends, but apparently, they didn’t believe me. I think the odds were 5:1 at that point, and not in my favor.
I went to class and sat there fuming. I was getting angrier and angrier. I finally jumped up and left the class. I went from room to room, flinging open the door and yelling, ‘Is Derek Schenk in here?’ I never found him. Eventually, the bell rang, I went to my last class. My anger had reached nuclear proportions.
After class I walked out to my truck and put my things in it, then walked back to where people always hang out, some waiting for buses, some just winding down. I found Derek and came up behind him. He was talking about me with a couple of his friends.
A friend of mine, who we called Flip, (because he did, off of everything) had recently broken an ankle and was on aluminum crutches. I grabbed one of them that was leaning beside Flip on the wall. ‘Derek!’ I yelled. He turned and stared at me. I beat him with that crutch. He never even got a punch in.
Turned out Derek was universally hated as a bully. I was a pretty good size, so he had always been nice to me, and I never realized he was such a jerk. Still, no idea who the girl was or why this happened, but when you beat up public enemy #1, in public, in high school. You get a rep.
My girlfriend was mad because she heard I had slept with someone at the party. We straightened it all out. She is still my wife, today, in 2017.”
The Last Straw
“It was in math class early in the morning. Every day the teacher used to come in and sit waiting for us to quiet down without saying a word, and as shameless as we were, we kept talking. He would just go to the principal’s office and tell them to come and then finally the class would start.
This one day I was angry. My brother was annoying me the whole morning and I was getting fed up. The teacher came in and for a change said, ‘What do you think I’m waiting for?’
I got up and said, “Waiting for us to quiet down because of your inability to control and guide the class. All of the other teachers don’t have this problem. All we do in this class is pass the time for the first 20 minutes and the 20 minutes which is left is used up by your ridiculous teaching methods. How do you expect us to even pass?’
He just went quiet and left the class and I got a standing ovation from the whole class. Later on, one of the teachers came to me and said, ‘If you have any problems tell us, don’t just rant in front of the teacher. He really felt offended.’ I just left with a sigh.
He was kicked out two months later.”
No One Calls This Guy Tiny
“We were having one of those less interesting physics classes at school. Though I tried, it was hard to concentrate on the lecture since I was indulged in a life or death conversation about Clash Of Clans with my friend.
Obviously, the teacher saw. She spared no mercy for such a terrible sin and yelled my name at the top of her lungs. Now, it would have been completely fine by me as it was my mistake but what she did next made me really angry. She yelled out, ‘You, the small boy at the back bench, get out of my class.’
Everyone except me and my friend started laughing. You know, one of those ‘100 knives in the back’ laughs. I was pretty angry at her for taking a dig at my physical appearance. I felt like crying. I could see everyone giggle as I walked out of the class slowly with my head down and my eyes full. Luckily for me, the bell rang and the teacher got out of the class. She walked past me, and I called her out, By now, the whole class was peeping out and the teacher slowly tilted her head towards me. I continued, ‘With all due respect ma’am, my name is (my name), not “small boy”!’ The expression on her face was priceless as I slowly walked back to the class. All the other students who were laughing at me moments ago were now in total awe. I felt good standing up for myself. Self-respect trumps fame or popularity any day.
The next day the teacher met with me and apologized for her mistake. She also turned out to be my favorite teacher the following year.”
The Government Is Too Complicated To Try And Fix In This Classroom
“I’ll never forget what this quiet, studious kid did one day in a history class. We can call him Ken.
There was one particular girl in school that no one really liked. She had a superiority complex and would constantly talk about being underprivileged. She was arguing with the teacher about some political nonsense that she didn’t agree with. The argument went on for some time, and everyone was just tired of it and wanted to go back to work.
Suddenly Ken inhales and bursts out with, ‘You’re trying to fix something that’s not broken!’
The entire class just blew up with reactions of amusement or shock. It was legendary.”
The Talk Of The School
“During freshman year, I was enrolled in precalculus. The rest of the class were juniors and seniors. One day our teacher decided we should take a break, so we played a game of Spoons. I made it to the final three, which is one of the most difficult rounds, as it is a speed competition between the two losers. Of the other remaining contestants, one was a smaller fellow around my size, the other was a senior who was 5 years older than me, outweighed me by around 100lbs, and had decided at the beginning of the year I was ‘worthy’ of hanging out with him.
The smaller fellow drew the set, and I was the first to see him reach for a spoon. I went to grab the other… and missed. The spoon went sliding across the table, directly towards my friend. His hand landed on the spoon, and I saw only one opportunity to remain in the game.
I dove headfirst across the table, knocking books and binders everywhere, tackled him and his chair to the ground, pinned his wrist with my knee, and wrestled the spoon out of his grip. It was unanimously decided I deserved the spoon, despite the fact that he had won fair and square. Even our teacher was laughing at how quickly the situation escalated. Shouldn’t he have been busy suspending me?
I can’t tell you how many times I heard the story repeated across the school. Apparently, people were impressed by the 13-year-old who tackled a varsity lineman in the middle of class just to win a card game.
In Sophomore year, one of the seniors on my football team thought it would be funny to put me in a headlock. Halfway through his attempt, I threw my entire weight into a single motion, driving the top of my head into his face. I’ve never seen someone with a broken and bloody nose laugh so hard. This definitely earned me some credit with the older guys.
Later that year, I received a detention from a teacher with a personal vendetta against me. I informed the teacher that the detention was ridiculous, and proceeded to bounce the slip off his forehead. I don’t like saying this, but he deserved it. A fact that was backed up by me not being punished, and him being fired at a later date for repeated misconduct in the classroom. This one earned me a reputation for not taking anything from teachers and stuck with me for the rest of high school.
In junior year, someone on my swim team thought it would be funny to throw my backpack in the pool. Apparently, he thought the hundreds of dollars worth of textbooks and my $200 calculator wouldn’t be damaged, and that I wouldn’t do anything about it.
I responded by tackling him through the leg of the canopy, ripping the metal in half. The entire canopy proceeded to collapse on him. Word got out after people started asking why we no longer had a canopy at the pool.
Oddly enough, I ended up being good friends with all of these people, other than the teacher of course.”
Stupid Cupid
“I broke into a national exam, dressed all in red with wings on my back, and terrorized the room by screaming, ‘HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!’ This goes way back.
France has a system where, in 9th grade, you pass a national exam that determines whether you make it to the next year. Now I was in 10th grade at the time and was delighted to discover that this year, they had set the date of the mock exam to the 14th of February: St Valentine’s Day.
This exam was a serious affair. The administration had locked down part of the building and set staff to patrolling the halls to ensure no one made any noise or tried to interfere.
I was intimately familiar with my school, however, and I knew that the amphitheaters the exam was being held in had a door at the back that gave out on the nearby forest. They were locked from the inside though, but I knew a few people in the 9th grade and convinced them to join in on my plan and unlock the doors.
With a buddy, we then set out to Pimkie and bought the tightest pair of bright red pants we could, as well as a bright red shirt. Back at home, I built cardboard wings that I then painted (I’ve always had an artsy touch), with safety pins to attach to our back.
We’d planned it perfectly. We changed from our clothes into our costumes in the forest, put them in a bag and tasked a friend of ours, let’s call him Jack, to bring them to a bathroom on the other side of the classroom.
I have never seen a look of fear as intense as those poor 9th graders, when, at the height of their concentration, two complete maniacs BURST into the room with a slam of the doors, yelling at the top of their lungs, ‘HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!’
We then tore through the campus, yelling at the top of our lungs. Teachers saw us pass but were so shocked and/or confused that they didn’t even try to catch up. We were assigned to the bathroom and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Turns out, we had gotten away clean. The guy with our clothes, however, got caught. We were now stuck in a bathroom stall, dressed all in red with cardboard wings on our back, and nothing else. We didn’t even have our wallets – they were in our clothes, WITH OUR IDs.
We ended up giving ourselves in and got a week’s suspension. They also held onto our clothes for a week as evidence.
That night, as I got onto the bus, still completely dressed in red, I gave the bus driver what, to this day, is one of the weirdest excuses I have ever uttered, ‘Monsieur, I’m sorry, I don’t have my bus pass. The administration confiscated my clothes.’
Worth it though.”
Immortalized In Video
“Do you know that one person who is a mixture of ignorant and arrogant? Well, in my Boy Scout troop, there was this one kid all of my friends knew who was difficult to work with. He was argumentative to no end, and we dealt with him quite a bit. It’s one thing to debate politics where the answer is not firmly set in stone, however with him, he would debate things when the general consensus was already known.
I never dealt with his shenanigans directly, but my friends did quite a lot. He would argue things and refuse to take responsibility for his actions, and we were all tired of it. Nothing would get through to him, and he would just fan the flames with his remarks.
One day, the troop returned from a campout saying that he got dehydrated. The adults verified their story, saying that he wasn’t taking care of himself. Upon questioning it, he responded adamantly that he was fine and it was everybody else’s fault that he wasn’t fully hydrated. He then sent us a short video arguing his case.
Now, this is where I entered the picture. I wasn’t really involved in his shenanigans, but then he sent me this video and called me out multiple times online. Once I saw the video, I heard the lyrics to Eazy E’s ‘It’s On’ start churning in my mind. I got my friends together and we made a video as a counter-argument and blasted it all over the internet. We made more fun of ourselves than we did of him, but it worked! He was embarrassed, recanted his earlier words, then admitted that he thought it was funny.
I haven’t done many savage things in high school, but this made waves all over my school group. The icing on the cake was when this guy went to a banquet and multiple people whom we didn’t know recognized him from the video throughout the whole night.
Legendary.”
The Heavy Weight Champion… Of The School
“I fractured one of my classmate’s hands. It happened when I was studying in eighth grade. I was a good student and equally good at sports. I was a small built boy. The actor Darasingh was very popular for his action films. Every adventurous student used to follow his wrestling tricks. During a sports class, some senior students were wrestling in a long jump sand pit (there was no separate wrestling ring). All of us juniors were sitting around the sand pit and were cheering them.
All of the sudden, one of my classmates who was sitting next to me started forcing me to join the wrestling ring. I wasn’t interested as I was enjoying the other students playing. He started provoking me to fight with him, started egging me on, saying things like, ‘If you have guts, fight with me.’ Everyone’s attention was diverted towards me and they started encouraging me to take the challenge. With all the support, I was feeling the hot blood flowing through my body.
All the students started cheering us, he was taller than me and well built. The fight started, he held my neck from behind, in a typical Darasingh style. I was struggling but the cheering of the crowd excited me, with all my vigor I did one cross leg and threw him on the ground (I had learned this trick from my grandfather, who was a wrestler). His whole body rested on his left hand, he was crying with pain, he was taken to a nearby hospital and the doctor informed him that he had fractured his hand.
The next day he came to school with his father. A sort of court-martial was done. All students supported me, even the kid admitted that it was his mistake. Topic closed. Suddenly I was the hero and popular one.”
Don’t Use Facebook As Your Therapist
“This happened after I graduated from high school, but I became popular with my high school teachers because of this. I had a teacher (let’s call him Rob) who, throughout my 2nd and 3rd year of high school, had a relationship with one of my classmates (he was pretty young).
I didn’t really care about it and didn’t like the gossip anyway, so it was just something that was. They never were together at school and didn’t even post pictures on Facebook. After we graduated, they made it public and whatnot.
As luck would have it, about 10 months later they broke up. Rob was so sad about it. He posted about it (or something indirect about it) on Facebook almost every day, multiple times a day.
The first week I could understand. When it got to three months, I was tired. So one day I visited my old high school and happened to bump into him at the teacher’s room. So I just said hello and straight up asked, ‘Rob, I know you’re sad, but for the love of God can you stop posting about it every three seconds? No offense, but I’m seriously considering unfriending you on Facebook.’ I got an ovation from every single teacher that was present.
To this day, they constantly remind me of this by asking Rob how many Facebook posts he has written in the last hour while I’m present.”
A Guy With A Future At TMZ
“This happened circa fall of 2008, in the early morning. I said to this guy, ‘Hey Jake, did you know Lil’ Wayne died?’
Jake answered, ‘No way, I don’t believe it!’
‘Seriously, apparently, he had an undetectable hemorrhage in his large intestine. Caused his insides to explode,’ I said (I had no idea what I was talking about).
Jake said, ‘Oh, man. That’s crazy.’
I said, ‘Yeah, well, see you at track practice later.’
Late that morning my close friends were talking about it. Before noon, the hallway chatter gained steam about the untimely news. At lunchtime, everybody and their dog was talking about it. Then by early afternoon, a teacher actually made an announcement dispelling the rumor over the school intercom. At track practice, I was given Legend status.”
(Points edited for clarity)