It was my last day of high school, which as anyone can tell you is the day of senior pranks. I had heard plans of senior pranks from friends and acquaintances, but most of them were either impossible, had been done countless times, or were ethically unsound. Being the joker I was, I wanted to remember some sort of joke on such a momentous day. That morning, people arranged plastic cups in front of the main office to spell "2015," but I knew I could do better.
I was walking to school when the brainstorming began. I did not have the time, money, or supplies to do anything too intricate. I eventually came up with an idea: a school-wide game of tag. Now, this idea seemed a little silly and not very prank-like at first, so I thought I would flesh out the concept a bit. The idea evolved into starting the game in multiple places, in the hopes that two people would tag each other and chaos would somehow ensue.
I started by tagging a friend in the hallway en route to my first-period class, telling him that a school-wide game of tag will be played today. Walking to second period, I tagged two different people, then tagged one more person on my way to third period. When somebody in my third-period class tagged me and explained why she did, I could tell my little scheme was going to become something special.
The afternoon rolls in. I tagged a few more people at lunch but occurrences of people tagging each other in the hallway are declining as the day wears on. Feeling discouraged, I stopped tagging people, figuring I had at least injected a little fun into the morning. Then, the unfathomable happened.
I was walking to my last period class when I heard two people about thirty feet back simultaneously yell, "TAG!" One tagged person said, "Hey, I was it!" The two argued about who was it when they were tagged, and whatnot when the bickering turned to shouting. The shouting turned to fighting. These two people were brawling because they could not determine who was "it." The fight was escalating quickly, so I nimbly snuck off to class to avoid trouble.
I could not believe what I had witnessed. In a deus ex machina style, what started as a shoddy attempt as a senior prank resulted in a hallway fistfight. I never saw how much the fight grew, but rumor had it that several smaller fights started within the swarm of people watching the "it" men fight. In a borderline sociopathic manner, I was delighted by the turmoil I had created out of such a half-assed concept.
And that is the story of how I started a riot with a seemingly benign prank.
