mhacdebhandia
Explorer
I'm racking my brains to think of one of my own, so in the meantime I'll relate my favourite high school stories.
Background: there's a tradition in Australia that the graduating class has a "Muck-Up Day" where they're allowed to basically go nuts as long as no-one gets seriously hurt. At my high school, we went several years without a Muck-Up Day being allowed because of the following story.
The other big tradition is that the graduating class gets to put on a revue sometime during the last few weeks of school (and this is usually on the same day as Muck-Up Day). You have comedy sketches making fun of teachers, music from student bands, and so on. This particular year I was in Year Nine, so I would have been turning 15 shortly after this story takes place.
During the revue, which all the other kids in school attended, three or four of the Year Twelves climbed up into the attic of the school hall, which was the space in which all of the props and equipment for school plays and dances was stored. Now, this attic didn't actually have a proper floor per se - everything was either balanced across the ceiling beams or sitting on certain sections which had planks nailed down over the plaster between the beams.
Kids are sometimes clumsy, naturally, so there was actually a hole in the ceiling plaster where someone had dropped a heavy prop the year before, which the school had never got around to fixing. This was where the Year Twelves gathered, with water balloons and bags of flour and juice to hurl at the Year Sevens below the hole (we were made to sit in sections according to our year) during the show.
The problem was that the hole was pretty small, and the beams were thick enough that standing or sitting on the beams didn't get you close enough to accurately hurl your missiles through. Accordingly, one of the kids up in the roof knelt down on another section of plaster and leaned over the intervening beam to throw his ammunition.
Leaning over that beam was the only thing that saved his life - when the plaster inevitably gave way and fell thirty feet to the seats below, he was able to grab onto the beam until his friends pulled him up. The Year Sevens below (directly in front of where I was sitting with the rest of Year Nine, only a few rows away) were only safe from the huge section of falling ceiling because they'd been trying to duck down under their seats to avoid the assault from above anyway.
After this, Muck-Up Day was banned at my school for two years. When I was in Year Eleven, though, the Year Twelves decided to test the ban with a fairly tame Muck-Up Day, mostly consisting of water balloons hurled over buildings into the courtyards during lunch. They managed to get Muck-Up Day banned again, however - when a pack of Year Twelves from a nearby school came by to attack our school, throwing eggs and flour at our Year Twelves, they responded in kind - and unfortunately, one of the moronic girls who'd come around from the other school with eggs herself was severely allergic to them . . . so when she copped an egg in the forehead and it dripped in her mouth she became violently ill.
Good times.
Background: there's a tradition in Australia that the graduating class has a "Muck-Up Day" where they're allowed to basically go nuts as long as no-one gets seriously hurt. At my high school, we went several years without a Muck-Up Day being allowed because of the following story.
The other big tradition is that the graduating class gets to put on a revue sometime during the last few weeks of school (and this is usually on the same day as Muck-Up Day). You have comedy sketches making fun of teachers, music from student bands, and so on. This particular year I was in Year Nine, so I would have been turning 15 shortly after this story takes place.
During the revue, which all the other kids in school attended, three or four of the Year Twelves climbed up into the attic of the school hall, which was the space in which all of the props and equipment for school plays and dances was stored. Now, this attic didn't actually have a proper floor per se - everything was either balanced across the ceiling beams or sitting on certain sections which had planks nailed down over the plaster between the beams.
Kids are sometimes clumsy, naturally, so there was actually a hole in the ceiling plaster where someone had dropped a heavy prop the year before, which the school had never got around to fixing. This was where the Year Twelves gathered, with water balloons and bags of flour and juice to hurl at the Year Sevens below the hole (we were made to sit in sections according to our year) during the show.
The problem was that the hole was pretty small, and the beams were thick enough that standing or sitting on the beams didn't get you close enough to accurately hurl your missiles through. Accordingly, one of the kids up in the roof knelt down on another section of plaster and leaned over the intervening beam to throw his ammunition.
Leaning over that beam was the only thing that saved his life - when the plaster inevitably gave way and fell thirty feet to the seats below, he was able to grab onto the beam until his friends pulled him up. The Year Sevens below (directly in front of where I was sitting with the rest of Year Nine, only a few rows away) were only safe from the huge section of falling ceiling because they'd been trying to duck down under their seats to avoid the assault from above anyway.
After this, Muck-Up Day was banned at my school for two years. When I was in Year Eleven, though, the Year Twelves decided to test the ban with a fairly tame Muck-Up Day, mostly consisting of water balloons hurled over buildings into the courtyards during lunch. They managed to get Muck-Up Day banned again, however - when a pack of Year Twelves from a nearby school came by to attack our school, throwing eggs and flour at our Year Twelves, they responded in kind - and unfortunately, one of the moronic girls who'd come around from the other school with eggs herself was severely allergic to them . . . so when she copped an egg in the forehead and it dripped in her mouth she became violently ill.
Good times.
