I Never Learn

I stumbled onto a great website this week.

Fake Magazine Cover Dot Com….or http://www.fakemagazinecover.com/. Had a blast with it. Used photos of me, my kids and even my wife. The premise is simple….just upload a photo to the website and put yourself on the cover of Vogue, Time, Sports Illustrated…..or if you like the live dangerously….do what I did.

Put your wife on the cover of Playboy.

I thought it was funny.

She didn’t.

So I won’t be showing you her cover…but I can tell you it was tasteful…and she was fully clothed.

I like practical jokes but sometimes I go too far. My classic practical joke came when I was a student back at Lewis and Clark Community College in the radio program. I was a first year student, cocky, and I didn’t much like the older second year students. They returned the favor and didn’t care much for me either.

One day we were responsible for building an automation sequence (the days before computers). There were a couple of reel-to-reels and two carrousels of cartridges and a series of programming toggles. My job was to make sure the different elements were designed to keep the station on the air while we were in class. In fact it was an assignment. I thought I had the thing programmed correctly, but it shut down and the station was silent.

Another student told me one of the second years sabotaged my automation. I had a name (let’s call him Fred) and I went on a mission to get even.

I found stationary for the biggest St. Louis radio station and I typed a letter to the head of the radio program saying that the station was monitoring WLCA, the LCCC station, and was so impressed with one student in particular and wanted to offer him a $25,000 scholarship at a senior institution. Of course, the student mentioned in the letter was the guy who had messed up my automation….Fred/

I mailed it from St. Louis and the next day the head of the program walked in joyously and told us that class was cancelled because of the celebration.

“We have always told you that people are listening,” he said. “Now we have proof! One of the major St. Louis stations has offered Fred a free ride scholarship! This is the high point of this program!”

I was stunned. How good was my letter? These idiots were swallowing this little prank hook, line and sinker. I started sweating.

Here’s where the worm turned. I signed the letter with the name of the St. Louis station’s news director. Two days before, the news director died in a tragic lawn accident. He was zapped when his electric trimmer malfunctioned.

Obviously the St. Louis station was not happy when the Lewis and Clark faculty called to claim the scholarship and asked for the dead news director.

The poop hit the fan. An investigation into who perpetrated this horrible prank could not prove who engineered it. But they knew it was me. They knew I was the only one smart enough in my class to concoct and implement such a dastardly act of revenge.

I survived, graduated…and promised myself I would never do something so stupid again.

That is until I saw that Playboy overlay on Fake Magazines Dot Com and put my wife’s face on it.

That one backfired too.