Are you scared? Well, you shouldn't be.

[constance]

Today one of my coworkers introduced me to the delights of Scare Tactics, a punk'd-style reality show where everyone is conspiring to scare the bejeezus out of you. She thought it was can't-catch-your-breath hi-larious, and I thought it was funny in places, but mostly I was thinking two things:

(1) Man, the acting in this show is lame. But I guess all horror is bad melodrama, right, until you're in the middle of it, and then you're freaked out enough that you don't notice that the blood doesn't look quite real or the crazy guy is acting crazy in a really weird and stilted way.

(2) There are almost no girls on the show. It seems to be mostly a guy thing, to set your bestest friends up to pee in their pants because they're thinking they're about to be shot by mobsters or dismembered by an angry gorilla.

I've played pranks on people, but they involved things like live crickets in lockers, or names spelled out in squished Oreos on the front walk. Things like that, not oh-my-god-am-I-about-to-die scenarios. And I can't help thinking, as I did when I watched David Fincher's The Game, that if someone I loved were ever to set me up in a life-or-death situation that was never really life-or-death at all, I would not only not love that person any more, I would also probably spend my days planning to kill them in the most elaborate and ghastly ways possible.

But that's just me, and I have arrived at my question du jour: do you play pranks on people? And if you do, how elaborate or infuriating were they?

Comments

[wishwords.livejournal.com]

Every once in a while I will play a prank. The latest one was with a coworker who is constantly playing pranks on everyone else. He has been wanting to be promoted to foreman for about a year now. While he was on R&R he would call every day to see how the shop was doing. I had one of the guys tell him that two foreman positions came open and we knew how badly he wanted one of them so we filled out the paperwork and forged his name to it since the position would close before he got back. Then we told him that the other guy who applied got the maintenance foreman position and he'd been given the cleaning crew foreman position. He hates the cleaning crew. It only took him a minute to figure out he was being pranked.

I don't do scarey pranks or things that make people angry.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

It's a good point that you kind of have to consider the victim, too. I mean, I think you have more leeway with someone who's always playing pranks himself, don't you?

It's all so complicated!