Operation TP and Other Teenage Pranks Involving Houses

So you have a friend that you want to pull a prank on, but you just aren’t sure how to pull off something that will be epic (okay, at least not too lame). Well, there have been a lot of pranks over the course of my life that I have either participated in as the prankster, victim, or witness. In order to keep it somewhat interesting the pranks in this article have to involve the outside of the home (yards, garages, sidewalks, trees, and more are all fair game). I have broken down 10 common teenage pranks (not that there is an age requirement for pranksters).


1. Operation TP

Okay, this one is easily the most common prank involving homes. In order for this to work best, your victim must have plenty of trees in their front yard. If the land is barren, no worries I’ll make that work here in a sentence or two. You unravel a portion of the toilet paper and hold onto it as you throw the TP up into the tree repeatedly (don’t use really weak TP or your strands will be pretty short). If they are tree-less then you are forced to rip a sheet at a time and cover their front yard with small squares of toilet paper. For bonus points you take a window, a car, or even the ground and write a message to the victim in toilet paper. If the operation confuses you, well you are in big trouble.

10 Common Teenage Pranks Involving Houses


There are 9 other "pranks" listed, including the messy sounding "Operation Let Go My Eggo’s", which involves wet waffles and syrup. I'd hate that one. I remember how pissed off I was a few years ago when some neighborhood loser kept throwing raw eggs at cars, hitting mine several times a week.

In one of the books I'm currently reading, there is the following episode:

One of the girl's made a command decision to "wrap" a neighbor's home in toilet paper. The technical name for this is "TP-ing".

...

When the girls returned home to go forward with the actual raid, they got busted.

So the mom learned of the plans, but then suggested they could TP some trees instead of houses. The mom even goes with them on the outing, then finds a motorhome in a drive she can't resist TP-ing herself. She almost gets caught by the owner, but he's distracted by his TPed tree.

Adults don't usually go along with the teenagers to assist in the mischief. They're usually the one who react (or overreact) after the fact. One time when I was a teenager, I was staying over at my grandmother's house. She had two neighbors that she didn't really get along with on either side of her, Mr. and Mrs. T and a chubby old lady named Pat. They had formed a kind of alliance against Grandma.

So, one morning we wake up and look out the front window, and Pat's two old jalopies that are parked on the street in front of her house are both covered in toilet paper. Pat treated it as if a major felony had taken place, calling Mr. T over to take photos of the damage and calling the police. I think that was one time that I really felt someone deserved to be a target of TP-ing (though I'm not saying I had anything to do with it).


Another time, in my early adulthood and born again Christian years, I was with the son of a friend of my Dad's from church. It was getting kind of late and the son (oddly enough named Pat) and a couple of his other friends were getting bored. So we all took off in his friend's mom's car (a station wagon) to go "do something". Since these were church kids and I was pretty fundamentalist at the time, I though it would be something "wholesome", so I was shocked when they suggested we newspaper some lawns. I'd never done that before, and besides being a "sin", I thought it was rather lame and boring, but they insisted. Trouble was, we had no newspapers. That was when phase one of the plan kicked in and we went to a newspaper recycling bin on a street corner and raided it, loading up the back of the wagon with stacks of old papers.

When we got back to Pat's house, his mom and dad were waiting in the living room. They asked us what we'd been doing. I didn't mention anything to them and just let the others do the talking, and they came up with a story to explain why they were all dirty with newsprint and out of breath. It was something about a broken recycling bin that had opened and let newspapers fly out everywhere across a parking lot and we'd stopped to gather them up and put them in a nearby dumpster. The parents didn't buy the story, and Pat got punished. At the time I thought maybe that would help set him straight and keep him out of Hell.

Later, he blamed me, as if I'd confessed or something. But I never said a word. The parents were curious as to why I was the only one of the group with clean hands, though. I think when we played Trivial Pursuit later that evening with the whole family there, I made the remark that newspapering lawns wasn't my thing, but how did I know anyone would make the connection!