Mail mischief

Ok so recently my friend Hope posted a note on the Antioch92 alumni MSN board that she found some livejournals of current Antioch College students. Ok, I’m game, I’m curious what they have to say.

So I read Jenna’s Livejournal. Kinda interesting to read her online diary, and I wish people had been doing this when I was a student, but here’s one entry that really caught my eye;

“anyway, i want to get stuff in the mail. so.. i’m giving you all my school address, and you better all send me stuff. i don’t care what – letters, postcards, food, whatever.. just send me stuff!

Jenna Fields
Student Mailroom, Antioch College
Yellow Springs, OH 45387”

Did she REALLY just ask strangers to send her “Whatever” ? Oh dear.

I don’t think many people who know me from Antioch know that I really enjoy mostly harmless pranks & mischief.

A bit of background here before I continue, Probably most Antioch students from when I was a student there and worked there think of me as that guy on ComCil, a C-Shop Manager, Community Manager, Asst. to the Dean of Students or Asst. Director of Technology Resources. Being in CG and the Dean of Students office got me a reputation as, what i call it in card/board games, a ‘Rules Lawyer”. I got put in positions where I had to enfore college rules and policies that, while I undersood them logically, didn’t really care about that much and pretty much hated enforcing. One example comes to mind where I had to ‘babysit’ the dances (which was rather ironic since I never went to them as a student!), checking CG cards and stopping people from bringing glass bottles in to the dance. NOTE the destinction there, not preventing them from bringing alcohol into the dance space (or even bringing up the subject that I knew they were 18 so what were they doing with a big bottle of beer anyways), but just the simple act of courtesy of not bringing glass in there.

For some students this was the social equivalent of laying down the guantlet for a duel, and they decided to try to volley drunken, slurred poorly formed arguments at me in hopes their warped logic would convince me to let them past the table into the dance with their bottle in hand. What I would have loved to say is “Look you stupid prick, if it’s really so much to ask to have you put your 40 oz beer in a plastic cup (that we are providing no less, oh and i’ll personally babysite said bottle until you return, we aim to please) so you wont break glass in the dance space where other students are, albeit stupidly, dancing barefoot, then fine, what do I care?, go cause an accident.”

What I really loved was the idiots that smuggled them by me and then did break them, and had to sheepishly come ask me for a broom “Dude, I don’t know how it happened, can you help me? Now I realize what you meant.”

So anyways, since I got to be there as the representative of ‘the man’; the evil college administration that took all their money and plotted new ways to make their lives more miserable, most folks who know me only through that probably think I’m a real prick with a copy of the college leg code, civil liberties and honor codes shoved up my ass.

What all those people, and probably most of the people who knew me as a student didn’t know is I am actually a rather mischevious person. I’ll post some other time here about my high school pranks and Antioch escapades, but suffice to say, when presented an opportunity for a prank, i’ll take it.

So here’s poor first year Jenna, whom I don’t know AT ALL, whose livejournal happened to have been found by a friend of mine, and I happened to read on a day where she posted that her mailbox was too empty. Little did she know that her mailbox would soon be pandoras box.

Do you REALIZE how many free samples you can request on the internet just for asking? And free magazine subscriptions? Hope joined in this quest and together I suspect we’ve requested hundreds of items for Jenna. Her address will also no doubt be sold to dozens of other mail order spammers and they’ll tell two friends and they’ll tell two friends.

Also, as it turns out, Jenna’a friends Dayna Ingram and Brittany Yoak thought it was neat Jenna was getting stuff in her mailbox and posted in their journals they wanted the anonymous mailers to adopt them too. 3 is doable, why not?

I even called in the terrible triumvarate(sp?) of 3 of my weirdest friends, Xydexx, Drumsong and Countryham, from high school, who aren’t associated with Antioch remotely, to help with this project. I don’t know if any of them will take up the challnege, but it was worth asking cause if they put their (warped) minds to it, they could get some WEIRD stuff heading towards Yellow Springs.

I also felt generous, and bought some cheap weird stuff on ebay for them including weird decals (‘Beware of Dumpster Diver’), Coffee grinder table lamps (which turned out to be owned by Khaos who sent lots of other weird stuff with the lamps), books, a magnetic bumper sticker that reads ‘I am a bitch’, and more.

So now I’m tuning into their journals awaiting their comments when this stuff arrives. If anyone of them get smart enoug to search for links to their journal on the web they’ll find this note and I’ll be ‘outed’ but i doubt this will get googled anytime super soon, We’ll see. For now I’m reading what Jenna, Dayna and Brittany encounter as Antioch digests, er educates, them.

For the record, in case you, the reader, feels so moved to send them stuff, both Dayna & Brittany’s mailing address is the same as the one I quoted from Jenna in the first post, though you might want to include 795 Livermore Street in there too, as well as the main switchboard #, 937 767 7331 cause some places require that.

Enough for now. -Matt