Tag Archives: pranks

Duct taping prank

My friend is a student at Cal Poly Pomona.  But when he was in high school he was in the marching band.  His high school’s marching band had a particularly strict sense of hierarchy, and so freshmen who were just joining the band were expected to “stay in their place.”  This is an account my friend told me, of a freshman who was particularly unruly and how upperclassmen retaliated during band camp, a week in which the band members train and get to know each other:

“There was this one kid, who, um… who was a freshman, and he was pretty much just a general asshole.  Um, he didn’t show up to practice, he’d cut in line past seniors to get to food and stuff like that, and… he was even worse to people who were, like, of his year.  And… yeah, so basically he’d go around stealing people’s stuff.  And so, one of the seniors were like… “So um,yeah, this is too far so we need to get back at him.”  So we took duct tape and we duct taped his sleeping bag… until there was more duct tape than actual sleeping bag.  And… yeah, basically it was like… justice.  But kind of like, vigilante justice or something like that.”

[“Do you feel that pranks like this kind of enforce the hierarchy you guys have? Like, if people fall out of line…”]

“Yeah, for sure, ‘cause generally if you are being really… arrogant, and, you know, just a general douchebag… we try to put you back in your place.”

My friend definitely thinks that this disproportionate retribution was effective in perpetuating the cultural hierarchy of his high school band.  The duct taping tradition in that particular community far predates my friend’s account.  He remembers it as one of the more common gestures used in disciplining freshmen.

There’s a certain discontinuity betweem the nature of the prank and the values it’s supposed to reinforce.  Band requires a lot of self-disicipline and respect of bandmates/directors, yet this prank is demeaning to the target.  I think this irony can be explained by the way band’s hierarchy works.  As my friend said, the targets of these pranks are usually unruly or arrogant freshmen.  So, as a form of reciporcity, the upperclassmen return acts of disrespect with more disrespect.  On the other hand, it seems likely that duct taping is something that amuses high schoolers because it demeans the target.  There’s a constant struggle of being “better,” and strict hierarchies like band help to reinforce that way of thinking.

World of Warcraft Legends – SuperAIDS

My informant used to play World of Warcraft for a period of about 5 years, and during his time with the game, he has come across several stories.  The two stories he told me about were the SuperAIDS story and the Leeroy Jenkins story.  This story is about SuperAIDS.

According to my informant, SuperAIDS was the player given nickname of a debuff [essentially a curse] that a particular boss character would inflict upon the players.  This debuff would deal damage to the inflicted player and would spread to any nearby allied units.  The debuff could be cleansed by a particular class and be stopped.  However, this debuff would sometimes get on a player’s pet, and one of the ways to deal with this was simply dismiss the pet rather than wait for someone to cleanse it off, because it’s really hard to see if it’s on someone’s pet and just as hard to target the pet.  So players with pets would simply dismiss them and be done with it.  Unfortunately, the debuff didn’t go away, so when they went back to major cities, and summoned their pet, the debuff would still be there.  Once players figured out this was happening, they got their pets infected and brought them into the major cities and started spreading the disease intentionally.  The disease would spread rapidly between players and would kill almost anyone who wasn’t highest level.  Normally this would just be considered a prank but the disease would also spread to NPC’s [non-player characters].  The major problem with this was that NPC’s regenerate their health when out of combat and this regeneration outpaced the rate of damage from the disease.  So the disease would kill almost any player who came into contact with it, but it would never get off the NPC’s.  This is perhaps how the name SuperAIDS came about, because it didn’t go away.  Anyway, this meant that, as the disease was spread, more and more areas of the game became essentially uninhabitable because your character would just get infected and die over and over.  This persisted for about a week until the devs were able to patch the game, eliminating the disease from the NPC’s and preventing the disease from leaving the raid encounter.  And even though the game of WoW is played in several different servers, because the players all communicate online, nearly every server experienced this in some way.