Oh, wait a minute. This isn't a casino, after all. It is the telling of a few practical jokes that Blimix has pulled over the years:
Back in my freshman year at college, the Loser Room (our quad's user room, famed home of the piss chair) was the place where the biggest 'Net geeks could be found. Three terminals in particular were "reserved" for Airborne and his two cronies. Airborne liked to foster a reputation as a VAX god. He was also viciously rude when he wanted to be (i.e., during his waking hours), but it was somehow not a matter for offense. ("My inner child is a mean little bastard," his .sig said.)
Anyway, one day I was geeking in the Loser Room, when Jeremy, a guy from my hall, sat down at the VT320 two seats over from me. "You might want to sit somewhere else," I advised. "That's Airborne's terminal."
"So what? He's not here," he responded.
"He's kind of protective about his terminal."
"What can he do? It's just a dumb terminal; there's no way to program it, right?"
"Yeah, but you never know, with Airborne," I said mysteriously.
He gave me a doubting look, turned it on, and entered the XYPLEX menu. I turned my screen ever so slightly away from him, and issued a XYPLEX send: "Get off my terminal!" He jumped as the message appeared in the middle of his screen. (He was familiar with VMS sends, which reveal the userid of the sender, but at that point he had never heard of a XYPLEX send, which just pops up with no identifying information, looking as if it had been generated by one's own terminal.)
"Joe! Look at this." He waved me over, and I appeared shocked. "How did he do that?"
"He knows a lot about these things," I offered, with a bit of reverence in my voice. I went back to my seat. He shrugged and logged in. I sent him another XYPLEX message: "I said, get off my fucking terminal!"
He was disturbed, and showed me, but I just gave him a confused shrug. He played with the VT320 configuration for a while, then went back to geeking. "I think I've figured out how to disable those messages," he proudly told me.
I sent him another one: "Don't you ever listen, punk? I told you to get the hell off my terminal!" He logged off and went to a different station.
My work done, I left. Apparently, within minutes, he had returned to Airborne's terminal, because when I ran into him on the stairwell on my way back down a bit later, he informed me that he had gotten the messages to stop. So I asked him to show me. After a repeat performance of our earlier fun, he acknowledged Airborne's mastery, and stayed off of that machine.
(I never owned up, so Jeremy, if you're reading this for the first time: Thwpp!)
Gbob and I had plans to drive out to Ithaca to visit Marty for the weekend. I had just finished doing my laundry, and still had a half-hour left until the time of departure. I was feeling goofy and creative, and not at all in the mood to fold and put away clothes, so I took my time arranging them on the bed in a human shape. I covered it with my blanket, adjusted it a few times to fix the proportions and some unsightly bumps, and then left to meet Gbob, failing to run into anyone else on my way out. I had forgotten all about it by the time we left.
We had a blast at Cornell, and the next day, from a computer lab there, I telneted to my own account. My suitemate Christian found me on-line, and wrote, "Joe! You're alive!" He had a story to tell me:
Shortly after I left, he wandered into my room to play "Tie Fighter" on my computer. Seeing that I (or what he thought was I) was fast asleep, he considerately lowered the volume. A bit later, his girlfriend Lynn walked in and started talking to me. He immediately shushed her, indicating that I was asleep, and she quickly apologized and left. Various of my suitemates and hallmates were socializing in and out of my room for most of the afternoon and evening, keeping their voices low to avoid waking me. Eventually, my roommate walked out and said to them, "Guys, I think Joe's dead. He hasn't moved all day." They then spent several minutes debating whether they should pull back the blanket and check. They didn't want to violate my privacy or disturb my sleep, but they finally decided that if something were seriously wrong, they had better know. So they checked. And they flipped. (I would love to have witnessed it.)
Being typical frosh geeks, my suitemates and I set up our suite computer as an FTP server. The program was primitive, and gave a connected user full access to our filesystem, so we only gave out the password to people we knew. (Marty took advantage of this to stick his name into our Minesweeper high score table. We were very amused.) And being typical frosh geeks, we loaded this server with an abundance of pornographic images. I included, in the porn directory, a huge file called "emily.gif" that would take forever to download. (We had an Ethernet connection, so we weren't worried about our own bandwidth.) I knew that any of the people who would be checking out those pictures would feel compelled to see what this great picture was, and sure enough, they all were suckered into retrieving a detailed satellite photo of hurricane Emily.
Having arrived well before the coaches at the room for the Nassau County All-Star Math Team practice, I wrote "Do Not Erase!" in huge letters across the chalkboard filled with useless mathematical scribbles from the class earlier in the day.
At work, after closing time, the phone rang on line one. I punched the "line 2" button and shouted, "Fuck off!" at the dial tone. My co-workers' jaws dropped in utter shock (made even better by the fact that they had never once heard me swear). I then answered line one normally.
My parents bought a new lawnmower. So they left the old one by the roadside, as an invitation for anyone to take it. It was night, and I was across the street, when a car finally pulled over, and someone got out and started dragging the lawnmower to the car. I knew why it was there, but the impulse that struck me was too funny (to my eight-year-old mind) to pass up: I shouted "Stop, thief!" My friends and I watched this guy drop the lawnmower, jump in the car, and take off. (My parents were not pleased.)
For Halloween of my junior year at college, we turned our lounge into an elaborate haunted house, in which each room contained a corpse, dead of a unique cause. The one who had been poisoned by his eyeball soup was not terribly obvious, so I assumed a killing pose over that corpse, dressed in my ninja outfit (which covered me completely). Ron ran to get a couple of the girls from the other lounge, telling them, "You gotta see the new thing we just added." They squealed with delight when they arrived. I held perfectly still while Sue walked right up to me, examining me from many angles and exclaiming, "This is so great! How did you guys do this?" When she was back in front of me, I jerked forward and greeted her with a loud "Hi, Sue!" She screamed and jumped, then spent the next few minutes twitching.
In the fourth grade, while riding the schoolbus, I bragged to the other kids about the strength of my fingernails. To demonstrate, I lined up the nail of my index finger with a small tear (unnoticed to them) in the back of the seat ahead of me. I suddenly shoved forward, pretending to puncture the leather where my nail slid in. Most of them were terribly impressed, though a few aired suspicious (correct) guesses about my method, and challenged me to do it again. They were baffled when I quickly spotted another, wider slit, and repeated the performance with my thumbnail. (Another time I pulled this stunt, some kids told the bus driver, and I had to work hard to convince her that I had not been damaging the seats.)
During the summer of '95, I was just finishing the vaccuuming in a restaurant equipped with a central pump, when a customer complained about the noise. I told him, "Okay, to turn it off all you have to do is stare right at it for twenty seconds. You do that, and I'll be right back." I then walked unhurriedly back to the maintenance room and shut off the pump. When I returned, he looked at me, wide-eyed, and asked, "How did it do that?"
I have a four-track recording of myself and Greg performing various
songs. When placed in a normal tape player, side A plays two tracks, and
side B plays the other two tracks backward. So I played our vocal harmonies
backward for a friend. "This is me and Greg singing in Hebrew," I
explained.
"Really?!? I didn't know you guys spoke Hebrew!"
About to give a ride to a friend, I approached the driver's side door of a
random car. "How do you like my new car?" I asked.
"Wow! That's really nice! I didn't know you got a new car!"
I wrote a random prompt program for the mainframe. One of my random prompts was "#root: ". Jaime walked by, did a double-take, and exclaimed, "Whoa, you're logged in as root?!?"
1. Mr. Clothes' first name is Don.
