Pranks Part 2: Not Retarded. Not

Senior year of college, my friend Jon (my co-conspirator in the other prank) and I had, well, few friends. Probably because we did stuff like this to them.

Our friend Julie had two girls come and visit her. They hung out with us and we got to know them a little bit. Shortly after they left, Julie sent out an email to all four of us. When I saw this email with her friends' addresses, it got part of me thinking. The part of me that should never be thinking. The part that just comes up with awful things to do to people, but only sees the possible positive outcomes. Like how great it would be to be trapped in an elevator with Megan Fox. Such a scenario sounds great, but the problem is, it'll end with me in prison for life.

I devised a plan. (I should mention that this was the year 2000. Email had not yet taken over the world. I was new at completely understanding the internet and its power of pornography.)

Anyhow, the plan was simple:

1. Create an email address at hotmail with Julie's full name.
2. Send an email to Julie's friends claiming to be Julie and explaining that the school's email system was having problems receiving emails and that they should only write to this address for now.


Brilliant.


But you see, I didn't really think this through. And neither did Jon. Because thinking things through is not our strong suit. In fact, we're both 30 now we still don't know exactly what our strong suits are. We know what they aren't, but that list would take up a whole other blog and would include things like talking, eating, getting dressed, checking the weather and logic.

We sent out the first email. I included a detail which I thought genius at the time. It was an expression that Julie used to describe herself whenever she did something stupid. Needless to say, we'd all heard this expression quite a bit. She used to say she was "not retarded. Not." Amazingly, it was this detail specifically that led to my first hearing the phrase "malice aforethought."

We signed the note with what we considered to be an obvious indication that the email was a forgery. Under the name Julie, we added a photo of hardcore lesbian sex. It was a small picture, from one girl's POV, of another girl licking her pussy.

I'll tell you right now that had I then, or if I do now, ever get an email from a friend of mine that includes email re-routing instructions and is signed off with a photo of a dude sucking cock, I'm not responding to it. I'd probably pick up the phone and call that person. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe it's because 9 years have gone by and we've all gotten a little smarter. Well, most of us.

In two days, we got our first response. It was nothing. Just small talk.

It was then, that I got another idea. We sent a second email that detailed - very graphically - a hook up with a guy named Steve. Very graphic. My initial thought was that spring break was a few weeks away and Julie was going to see her friends. Wouldn't it be funny if they both started asking her about this guy Steve? She'd have no idea what they were talking about. Ha ha ha ha! We also signed the email with the same photo of lesbian sex. Ha ha ha ha!

Morons.

I like to think of myself as someone who is able to see all sides of issues. I may disagree with people, but I like to try and understand other points of view and figure out where things are coming from and could be going. But that one part of my mind that I mentioned before does none of that. And I can still remember to this day, that it did not occur to me for even a single second that this entire thing could be anything less than hilarious.

We got another email.


It was from the same friend. The first thing we noticed was the size of the email. It was a long one. It was taking up a lot of space in our inbox. Julie's inbox. Our version of Julie's inbox.

Now, I don't know what crying looks like in word form, but I assume it looks a lot like this email. We sat in silence reading the first paragraph. It was about her boyfriend, things were bad, something sexual had --

I closed the window. We just stared blankly ahead. At least two minutes went by before Jon said "we're fucked." As is very rarely the case, Jon was correct.


That email was very personal, very long and very much not something we should be reading. Instead of sending out graphic details about Julie's fake relationship, our little email scheme was pulling in the details. Details we didn't want to know. And knew we shouldn't know. And then that feeling. The one most people would describe as guilt, but is really more like nausea.


I had only one thought in my head: "How did this happen?" How did this girl get 2 emails signed with lesbian sex, one of which included sexual acts that would make Jenna Jameson blush and respond with details of her personal problems. Amusingly, Jon - as he so often does - also had only one thought in his head. But his thought was: "How are we this stupid?" So at least he had enough sense to recognize that this was completely our fault and wasn't still trying to blame the poor girl for being too trusting - like me.

We pondered our next move.

Our first thoughts were about Julie's other friend. Why had she not responded? Was she too smart and or did she know that we were this stupid? Probably a little of both.

We knew that we had to get this email to Julie, because her friend would be expecting some kind of response. We also knew that we didn't want to read any more of that email. And we began to wonder if we'd broken the law. It started to seem like something that should be illegal. The part of my brain that concocted the scheme was now the equivalent of the kid who shot a spit ball and then looked out the window and whistled, thinking it made him look innocent.

We did what we had to do. We wrote Julie an email telling her what we had done. We explained our hilarious intentions - though only briefly - as we knew she wouldn't care anyway. We included her "new" email address and password. I scrolled the mouse over the word "send."

When you click on something, your index finger or thumb lightly depresses part of the mouse. Less than a second later, that part of the mouse is back up. I know it happens that quickly, I've done it thousands, probably millions of times. But I swear to this day, that before that part of the mouse had come back up, my phone rang.

It was Julie. She was pissed. She was yelling. She was coming over. We were dead.


Our only defense was to focus on the lesbian porn that we'd sent and how obviously, we weren't expecting anybody to take it seriously. "Why would anybody respond to that?" I asked. "Who would think that was really you?" Julie looked at me the way a teacher looks at a bad student or a man looks his red-headed stepson or the way the whole world should look at Jessica Simpson's family: with contempt. When she spoke, she over emphasized the words, pronouncing them as though she were performing a play at a retirement home. But angrier. And louder. And with spitting. She looked me in the eyes with burning rage and said "Not retarded. Not."

I lowered my head and accepted the 90 minute scolding that followed.

We promised to make it up to her. And we meant it. Then, a month later, I jokingly tripped her in a parking lot, but her hands were stuck in her jacket pockets and when she fell, she bruised her shoulder, cut her chin and hurt her knee.

Sometimes I think I'm just not a good person.