>>Mario Mendes Jr. wrote:
>> Virtually the same story from me, but instead of an electromagnet, I
>> used a small dc motor I had ripped out of a toy =)
>
>I tried it with a neon bulb, although I had a pretty good idea what
would
>happen and stood away by the fuse box.
>
>In college we sacrificed a telephone mouthpiece in the same way.  We
knew it
>would go poof, but it was more spectacular than I had expected.  A
really
>nice orange flame shot out about 3 feet.
>
>olin

Hehehehehehe. This reminds me of another story. Mean thing to do, but it
worked.

During my sophomore year in high school I had electronics shop classes
on 4th, 5th and 6th periods.  On Fridays only, this overlapped with the
senior year students who had 5th, 6th and 7th periods.

We started to notice that when we came in to class on Mondays, some of
our projects and experiments had been sabotaged.  We simply assumed that
it were the seniors that were doing it during the 7th period on Fridays
after we were gone.  Eventually we go sick of it and decided to teach
them a lesson.  Now we knew that it could only be Keith or Joe, because
they were the only two idiots constantly making trouble and getting
detention or being suspended.  We also always overheard them discussing
the "neat" things they had done or would be doing to other people in
other classes.

The benches were divided by the students' year in school.  They had
partitions so that you could not see those sitting across the bench
unless those on each side stood up, and on top of that partition there
was shelf where we placed our instruments.  They also had these very
long power strips under the top shelf facing down with an on/off switch.
One Friday, we turned off all of the power strips on Keith and Joe's
bench and placed shorts in the sockets made with cut pieces of solder
from the roll (we were all required to wear protective goggles as soon
as we stepped in class and wear them until we left, at least we did
think about blinding someone ;).

When they came in, they sat down as usual and started to make noise.
The teacher eventually yelled at them and told them to get to work.  A
couple minutes go by and we hear a click (the on/off switch) followed by
a bunch of pops and non-stop scared yells of the sort of "Wow! ***k" and
the like.  Hahahahahaha.  Keith and Joe turned white.  There was flux
smoke everywhere and their bench got a ton of burned marks where the
molten solder landed, splashed and ran like liquid mercury beads.

Needless to say, our projects never got sabotaged or booby trapped
again.  I eventually had to turn myself in to keep the entire sophomore
class from getting suspended and got suspension myself for 1 week.

During my last school day in my senior year, the teacher approached me
with a big, huge smile and said, "By all means, I do not agree with what
you did to Joe and Keith that time you got suspended!  But thanks, it
was about time someone taught those two jerks a good lesson."

In retrospect, I do realized what I did was very wrong, someone could've
gotten seriously hurt, but at the time, it just seemed so well worth it.

Anybody care a story about teaching someone a lesson like that? =)


-Mario

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