I Love A Grenade
I love comedy grenades. A comedy grenade is a joke they “get” or a prank that goes off after you’re long gone. A grenade I left in Missoula last month just went off.
Todd, the network administrator out there, and I spent my two weeks there one-upping each other with stupid pranks: taking the wheels off chairs, unplugging keyboards, removing mouse balls; that sort of thing. I left two grenades for him on my way out the door. For the short-fuse one, I rubbed a Chapstick all over the lens of his sunglasses, which gave me much pleasure two days later when he emailed me “You owe me a new pair of Oakleys, you bastard.” The long-fuse one I forgot about … until now.
I also smeared Chapstick all over the earpiece of his telephone handset. He normally uses a headset, so I knew it would be awhile before that grenade went off. Well, I guess today was the day he picked up the phone, because I just received a flood of cursing from him through IM.
Aaaaahhhhh….. I love a good grenade.
Ok, this one forces me to come out of the closet. I’ve been reading you for a while and you can blame Gavin at LiveJournal (and, no, I don’t know him either) anyway…
The best grenade story I ever knew started in 1969. I was in college and my best friend and I went home to my folks house for a weekend. My Mom had a decorative screen in the front hall. About a week after we got home, my Mom called me a school spouting off expressions I had no idea she even knew. It seems that my friend, Heather, had left a beautifully wrapped box housing a lovely vase behind the front hall screen with a note that said “if you cleaned behind here more often you would have found this sooner. had a lovely weekend, heather”
Nothing was said for more than 10 years. My parents moved. Heather got married and divorced. None of us lived anywhere near each other. We all did, however, gather at Mom’s new house for my wedding in 1979. The first evening, Heather had just gotten out of the shower and yelled out to me “where are the towels”?
I yelled down to Mom in the kitchen “Heather’s dripping wet, she needs a towel. Where are they, I’ll get her one”
Mom’s voice had a grin you could hear… “dripping wet… you say? towels? Hmmmm let me think about it….” It was a really long weekend for Heather.
Revenge is a dish best served cold … and dripping wet.
See…now you forced me to drag out the old Star Trek movie link again: http://www.khaaan.com/