The Prank Gone Wrong in Dorm Lobby
Anonymous Sneaky Prowler #388 · General
So here's the thing. Me and my roommate Ben are always cracking jokes and pranks on each other, harmless stuff like hiding his toothbrush or swapping out our snacks for weird flavors he hates. Last night, I decided to go a little bigger with something that had been bugging me for weeks: Ben loves sleeping in but is an early riser because he needs to get to class on time every morning. So yesterday afternoon, while he was napping and everyone else was out of the dorm room, I set up a pretty convincing alarm clock, or at least, I thought it was convincing. I put the alarm on snooze for 15 minutes after his usual wake-up time (6:40 am) to really screw with him. Of course, it’s a digital alarm clock so I couldn’t just set it for “snooze”, nope, that would have been too easy and predictable. Instead, I programmed in every hour of the day leading up to 7:15 am (when his class starts) as snoozes. I was going to let him know what happened later with a big ol’ grin on my face. But this morning, Ben stumbled out into the dorm lobby right at the start of our mandatory morning study session, still in pajamas, looking like he could fall asleep standing up and mumbling something about how his alarm is broken. Everyone looked over and some people laughed (not very kind, I might add). It was pretty awkward. He tried to stay quiet but everyone knew that 15 alarms had gone off in a row in our room earlier. Now he's acting like nothing happened and trying not to be too annoyed, I think part of him is worried about how this looks with the RA (resident assistant) or maybe just because it was an immature thing for me to do. But I feel terrible about what I did, even though my original prank plan didn't have a lot of forethought. Am I being too hard on myself here? Should I just try to laugh it off as a funny story and tell everyone the real reason behind those alarms (and maybe set up a better, less annoying alarm clock for him)? Or is this one of those things that will stick with us for a while?