Our faces of exhaustion after studying for days on end

With less than 24 hours until our final exam you can note the stress in the air. Students are sighing out of desperation, there’s some major stress eatin’ going on, powerpoint is working on overdrive to deal with the 400+ slides, study spaces have been claimed and reserved (the cigar room has become the equivalent of a Bass study room–without the soul sucking atmosphere of Bass of course), and the study breaks get weirder and weirder. I have resorted to doing laundry as a study break (thank you Kashoba for covering my clothes in a solid layer of dirt that has now transferred to my bathtub), some take a stroll to the supermarket, and some have even decided to sun tan and go for a quick dip into the freezing hotel pool.

But none of these can compare to the study break that we had last night. In what can only be described as a masterfully and intricately crafted prank toward Jared, we managed to get the hotel staff and several students to make him believe that we had spilled tea on his computer. While Jared was initially skeptic that we had spilled tea, he was fully convinced when we got the hotel staff to deliver a bowl of rice so that he could “dry” his computer. Jessica told Jared that you could easily solve the problem by holding your computer open and spinning around in circles (yes, she has done this in the past. Yes it looks ridiculous). While Jared did not spin around in circles with his laptop open, he did prop open the computer over a towel (so as to soak up all of the tea that would come dripping out obviously), and then placed the bowl of rice nearby (probably to soak up the evaporated tea water).

This is not the first time our group has done some hilarious pranks however. Our insatiable need for pranks all began in Kruger, when we got Brittany to believe that a monkey had entered her room and turned on her bathroom shower. Why the monkey would want to turn on the shower is beyond my comprehension… you’ll have to ask Brittany as to her thought process. It all began with some harmless window scratching. Our prank quickly escalated when Adrianna and I hoisted Jessica up the wall to the outside shower, got her to turn on the shower, and then made some of the most bone chilling screams I’ve ever heard in my life. The next thing we know, the door to Brittany’s room is wide open (this is a big deal considering she has a gigantic fear of moths entering her room late at night) and she is nowhere to be found. Before we know it, she is running back with the professors, talking quickly and anxiously about how there’s a monkey in the room (note: we never intended her to believe it was a monkey. All of this time we were pretending it was some kind of human intruder).
We hide in her bathroom awaiting our fate, the professors enter the room (at this point Jonathan has figured out it’s a prank somehow and helps us complete it to a masterful conclusion), and just as Jonathan enters the bathroom where Jess and I are hiding we all emit a loud monkey like scream and voila! The prank has been completed, Tara and Alan are in complete shock, Jonathan can’t contain his laughter, and we are deemed some of the most skillful pranksters of the trip.

Stories like this and the prospect of more future pranks have kept me going throughout these days of studying.