Comments on: Student Pranks

By: Michael (The Right Wing One)

Michael (The Right Wing One) — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 21:51:30 +0000

One I heard about was a letter sent on Ministry of Works letterhead to Terrace residents that a new automatic drilling machine was being used to build the Terrace tunnel, and that it’s sensors made it pull away from metallic objects. So to ensure it didn’t go haywire all residents had to put pots and pans on their lawns.

Any Vic students circa 1975 able to confirm?

By: sagenz

sagenz — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 11:27:41 +0000

aaaah student memories. The dry ice one was real. cops were very pissed off with that one.
As was the leaflet given to students embarking on a pub crawl that McDonalds in Queen St would give everyone who said they were on the pubcrawl a free cheeseburger. They had to close it for a few hours cos of the number of blotto aggro students.

We almost failed to get a second tree made of balloons and bamboo up on One Tree Hill when the police nicked our rope but managed to rescue some spare rope from a nearby playing field.

My personal favourite was getting a 7 foot Mickey Mouse face onto the Auckland Town Hall Clock. I still think I am the only person to learn how to abseil on that clock face. Then Mayor Cath Tizard wanted us to do a days gardening in Albert Park as penance.

By: mikeybill

mikeybill — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 10:36:42 +0000

I seem to remember one at Auckland where a group of engineering students walked into the middle os someone’s lecture carrying a long piece of 2×4, and a power saw. Got to the bottom of the lecture theatre, mimed trying to get it out of the narrow doors, then pulled out the saw and cut in pieces untilo they could get it through the doors at the bottom.

By: dfr

dfr — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 03:16:57 +0000

Massey students have pulled off some good ones. Back in about 1994 / 1995 – sometime around then – the avenue of trees in Fitzherbert Ave was chopped down, to widen the road to four lanes, so that there wouldn’t be an hour-long traffic jam mornings and evenings as half the city’s workforce tried to get down the road to and from Massey and the various science centres across the river. One of the leader of the ‘Save the Trees’ campaign (there’s always a bloody save the trees campaign, no matter what the other needs) lived on Fitzherbert Ave. Early one morning, to his horror, he heard chainsaws going, and he raced outside to find tree limbs and sawdust falling from the tree right outside his gate. He started shrieking imprecations, threatening to call the press, only to find that it was some students up the tree, with bags of sawdust, spare bits of (other) trees and a chainsaw, running but not being used.

Then there was the fake speed camera on the university ring road, which caught half the staff and had senior professors ringing up the university registrar to complain, loudly.

By: Hoolian

Hoolian — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 02:51:50 +0000

Im sure the cop/workmen one happened at Auckland Uni too.

One year, some students put a car on top of a building. Cant remember which one (think it was Kate Edger).

Also Craccum reported a stunt where students altered the sizes of the carparks all along Princes St€, so that they were just a bit smaller.

Its a shame that the capping stunts have become all but extinct.

By: Doug

Doug — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 02:32:17 +0000

One of the best pranks ever was the Knox College UFO hoax, circa 1954. It took weeks of planning and preparation. When the gentlemen at Knox went home for the summer, they contacted their local news agencies at a coordinated time, describing two UFOs in great detail, travelling southwards down the country. Of course the national and international media ate it up.

The actual aim of the hoax was to punish the ODT for publishing a series of breathless, ridiculous reports about UFOs. And it worked!

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 01:28:02 +0000

I was going to say user-pays.

By: Andrew Bannister

Andrew Bannister — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 01:17:56 +0000

Yes, the Albert park one was great, especially watching buses trying to navigate their way through.

By: Murray

Murray — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 01:05:04 +0000

OSH.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 01:00:08 +0000

The Vic one is true – it’s in the Rachel Borrowman’s official history I think.

Polemic: I think a similar stunt occured at Vic when rush hour traffic was diverted through the Hunter carpark, although Albert Park would be so much better. Having attended both Vic and Auckland, I might have my wires crossed.

What ever happened to the capping stunts? The last I remember of them was the absailing tea party under Grafton Bridge in the late 1990′s.

By: Polemic

Polemic — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:21:22 +0000

Auckland Uni engineers once diverted traffic through albert park. That was pretty funny.

By: Murray

Murray — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 23:57:50 +0000

Students are why police have minto bars.

Shooting to quick.

By: burt

burt — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 22:51:38 +0000

One of the best pranks I have seen in a long time was the fake reports that Parliament has voted for retrospective legislation gaing back 17 years. As if that would really happen in a democracy, but people seem to think it’s real.

Do people really believe that Labour are so corrupt? Come on, no democratically elected Govt with any integrity or principals would sweep 17 years of misuse of tax payer money under the rug.

Still it had me going for a while, that was until the lefty bloggers supported it, then I knew it was all a piss take as irrespective of which party did this sort of thing, any reasonable person would think it was wrong.