Were you mischievous growing up?

[NotYou]

So I was just chatting with someone about what I was like as a kid growing up and how me and friends would spend our time.
I have always lived in the same small town, and quite frankly it was always boring with nothing to do here (it's MUCH better now) so we would have to entertain ourselves in any way we possibly could.
Some of these ways were mischievous and downright bad and shameful - at the time when you're 11, 12, 13, 14, it's not what you're thinking about though, I am sure plenty here were no angels - I hope.

My town is mostly Cul De Sacs and houses. The houses have front and back gardens, and the front gardens would have fences or hedges bordering one house from the other and from the streets - I am sure you all know what I mean and have similar.

We would do a few things to kill time, and I am wondering if you used to do things like this or anything as bad/naughty or similar when you were younger?

- "Hedge Jumping" - Quite obvious from the name, we would go and jump over as many hedges in people's gardens as we could, the bigger or thicker/wider the hedge the better and more challenging it was. We would usually get screamed at and chased by some people, which only made it more fun for us.

- "Egging" - this one is probably the worst, to be honest. We would simply buy eggs and throw them at houses. usually "the longer the garden" the better, so it's more challenging.

- "Knock Knock Run" - I think we definitely all know this one, right? Literally, knock on a door and run like crazy. We would do this deliberately to people who we know would chase after us.


I am by no way saying all of this is good or fun now, and as an adult, I would hate any of this happening to my own house or friends and family etc. The damage we did from these was ridiculous but unfortunately, as bored kids, you don't consider any of this stuff.
My whole point is just the fact of wondering, what did you guys do as kids? Did you also do things like this that you now would kill your kids for if they did it?


We did many other things too (such as the whole neighbourhood would play football (soccer for you Americans), and there would be 20 or 30 of us doing this, and we'd do other things "1, 2, 3 in" which is basically a big game of hide and seek (again with the whole neighbourhood) but you had to race the person who counts back to a specific point (usually a big lamp post) and say "1, 2, 3 in".. if you were the first one caught and not saying that, you were the next one that has to find people and catch them out.. we did lots of other "good/innocent" things too.

So, what did all of you do?

 

[LaceyRoyce]

Most of the time I was a good kid but I got blamed for a lot. I also didn't have a lot of friends so I was left out of most of the worst of these types of activities.

My older brother did teach me to stand on a bridge and throw rocks down at cars passing below. His went under the car, mine went in the open window of the car... which happened to be driven by the school principal.. i was in so much trouble.

beyond that moment of pure havoc, I think the main thing I did was shoplifting and prank calls. We'd call random numbers from the phone book.. and say stupid things.

I don't have kids now and this thread seems like a good deterrent..


side note - in america it's less common to have front gardens with hedges/fences. It's more common to have flat lawns or landscaping that comes to the street, often with no fencing or only fencing in the back half. It does depend on where you go in the country, but yeah. My mum was always remarking on the lack of privacy in back yards there is here when she visited from NZ which has a penchant for high fences.

 

[Lilly_____]

I was a very well behaved kid which honestly only led to problems later own, but that's another story... I was a true nerd, who learned programming and japanese for fun and spend my whole afternoons on the computer.

The only thing I remember though is me and some friends used the public phone in school to call people and prank them... My favorite one was "Excuse me mam, I'd like to confirm whether you work with clothing" _ they'd most likely say "no"… to which we'd reply "Oh so you work naked!?". And then burst off laughing - which I realize it's quite ironic now.

(Just to be clear, "with clothing" and "with clothes on" is the same sentence in Portuguese, thus the joke.)

 

[rockin_rod]

More trouble than mischief, sorry to say.
I grew up in a smallish town where there was a large military base on the edge of town. Lots of rotation of service personnel and their families in and out of continental Europe meant a lot of instability and constantly-changing class composition at the local high school. Always trouble between us local kids and the military family kids, lots of fights.
Now that I look back on it, I realise how hard it must have been on those families frequently uprooting their entire lives, and especially on the kids of serving personnel.
In my early teens, I fell into the rabbit hole of alcohol abuse and by 16 I had a very serious problem.
I don't really know how I turned that around, nobody helped me but I remember telling myself that I was self-destructing and probably going to end up dead, so I dried out, got a few part-time jobs and managed to complete high school.
Going to say perhaps boredom, lack of any infrastructure to encourage positive behaviors, and teenage hormone surges encouraged my stupidity.

 

[AmberCutie]

I was an only child and a total angel . Even when I was old enough to go out, date, etc I was pretty mild. Worst I ever did was take my mom's car out when I only had a permit (no actual license yet) and drive my best friend and I to Jack in the Box at like 1am. My parents were out of town and I thought she'd never know. She noted the car mileage before they left town. OOPS!

 

[rockin_rod]

I was an only child and a total angel . Even when I was old enough to go out, date, etc I was pretty mild. Worst I ever did was take my mom's car out when I only had a permit (no actual license yet) and drive my best friend and I to Jack in the Box at like 1am. My parents were out of town and I thought she'd never know. She noted the car mileage before they left town. OOPS!

Wow that reminded me of an occasion where we 'borrowed' a car without permission too. Probably around the early 90's, a kid I knew came from a wealthy family and his dad had just bought himself a brand-new BMW M5. The parents went on vacation so of course we took the car out for a drive! I clearly remember the BMW marketing hype said that the car was electronically limited to 155mph, and so inevitably we set out on a remote country road to prove or disprove that......
I have a vague recollection of sitting in the passenger seat watching trees and hedgerows flashing past us in a blur of green, right up until the car ran out of gas and slowly coasted to a halt
Had to get a tow truck back to town and of course the kid's dad found out everything.

 

[NotYou]

Most of the time I was a good kid but I got blamed for a lot. I also didn't have a lot of friends so I was left out of most of the worst of these types of activities.

My older brother did teach me to stand on a bridge and throw rocks down at cars passing below. His went under the car, mine went in the open window of the car... which happened to be driven by the school principal.. i was in so much trouble.

beyond that moment of pure havoc, I think the main thing I did was shoplifting and prank calls. We'd call random numbers from the phone book.. and say stupid things.

I don't have kids now and this thread seems like a good deterrent..


side note - in america it's less common to have front gardens with hedges/fences. It's more common to have flat lawns or landscaping that comes to the street, often with no fencing or only fencing in the back half. It does depend on where you go in the country, but yeah. My mum was always remarking on the lack of privacy in back yards there is here when she visited from NZ which has a penchant for high fences.

I see all of these types of gardens in movies and shows obviously, I figured it was just "some" areas that were like it, but it does seem to be open front gardens with no fencing, from what i see in them. It's one of those weird things here people just like to be territorial i guess especially for if the neighbour doesn't make an effort with their own garden, you want to kind of separate from them and be "well this is my amazing garden" and it stands out a bit more that way (hope i make sense).

We had a lot of train tracks here in my town going through it, so we would walk a lot on them to get to places - even though obviously we're not supposed to and would get in trouble.

Prank calls were always fun to do, we would just do stupid and dumb ones where you order food from a few places and have them delivered to DIFFERENT houses on your street, and you watch them all get delivered.

More trouble than mischief, sorry to say.
I grew up in a smallish town where there was a large military base on the edge of town. Lots of rotation of service personnel and their families in and out of continental Europe meant a lot of instability and constantly-changing class composition at the local high school. Always trouble between us local kids and the military family kids, lots of fights.
Now that I look back on it, I realise how hard it must have been on those families frequently uprooting their entire lives, and especially on the kids of serving personnel.
In my early teens, I fell into the rabbit hole of alcohol abuse and by 16 I had a very serious problem.
I don't really know how I turned that around, nobody helped me but I remember telling myself that I was self-destructing and probably going to end up dead, so I dried out, got a few part-time jobs and managed to complete high school.
Going to say perhaps boredom, lack of any infrastructure to encourage positive behaviors, and teenage hormone surges encouraged my stupidity.

This reminds me of what we used to do, it was similar.
We have 3 secondary schools in my town (secondary = ages 12 - 16 but can also have a few extra years for sixth form students).

There was an All Boys' school which you could only go to if you passed a test called the "Eleven Plus" - you need a specific score or higher, and it's for the smart kids.
There was a similar one, for All Girls. The same way to get into it.
As you can guess they are more prestigious.

Then.... there was the other school which had about 1000 kids of mixed boys/girls and as you may guess many trouble makers and not so smart people.
Not sure how it would happen but there would always be big groups of fights between the 2 schools (males from the "dumber" school, and the all-boys smart school).

I think it was always the dumber school (I can say this because it's the one I attended lol) kids that wanted and started the fights. Not sure why, I think they were jealous of the smarter kids, who were usually richer kids too, so it was one of those things. Now we can look back at how ridiculous it all was,


Everyone would finish school at the SAME time, all 3 schools, and everyone would have to congregate in the same areas to wait for buses, cars to pick up etc so it was a huge disaster. I think they fixed this by making the schools fii=nish at different times. Very simple solution and it worked

 

[Smoothie]

I was more adventurous than mischievous, but the two did intersect pretty frequently.

I’d get bored and travel long distances on foot or bicycle into not-so-safe places. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. I went deep into the woods a few times, just to see what I’d find there, or to play G.I. Joe in a more interesting environment.

Once when I was pretty young, I went for a long walk and found an abandoned gravel pit. I stayed there a while just playing… it was like the world’s coolest sandbox, to a boy my age. Since those were the days before cell phones, my parents had zero clue where I went and no idea how to contact me. I got punished for that one.

When I became a teen, then came the parties and pranks and other nonsense. We didn’t do anything too criminal (underage drinking was the most common thing). My friends and I would go driving around and occasionally take aim at pedestrians with our Super Soakers.

Once I had my drivers license, I continued to get the urge to travel on a whim. But now, I could go much farther and was more inclined to cause mischief. Me and some friends actually left the country during one such trip. And again, we did not give a heads-up to any of our parents that we were doing so. I won’t tell the whole story, but we ended up detained by international border police and questioned while they searched our car.

 

[rockin_rod]

Since those were the days before cell phones, my parents had zero clue where I went and no idea how to contact me.

I used to roam far and wide from the age of maybe 8+. Those long summer vacations, I would just follow my nose and head off somewhere new every day.
I grew up in a rural area where there were many dense pine forests, lakes, rivers and fire trails. All so much fun to explore, on foot or by bike - with just some sandwiches and water in a backpack.
I used to head off early in the day and nobody ever knew where I was - the only rule was be home by dusk, break that rule and you were in huge trouble.
Different times, I'd never be comfortable with my own kids having done anything like that.

 

[Smoothie]

I used to roam far and wide from the age of maybe 8+. Those long summer vacations, I would just follow my nose and head off somewhere new every day.
I grew up in a rural area where there were many dense pine forests, lakes, rivers and fire trails. All so much fun to explore, on foot or by bike - with just some sandwiches and water in a backpack.
I used to head off early in the day and nobody ever knew where I was - the only rule was be home by dusk, break that rule and you were in huge trouble.
Different times, I'd never be comfortable with my own kids having done anything like that.

Same here. lots of wooded areas, trails, hills and ponds. I’ve spent most of my adult life living in an urban area, but I kind of miss that quieter environment.

Parents used to send us outside without any real oversight. We’d be gone all day in some cases. In my case, it was a nice way to grow up, but I understand it just can’t be that way anymore. And of course, even in those days, that parenting philosophy sometimes ended badly.

 

[bud9752]

I was an only child and a total angel . Even when I was old enough to go out, date, etc I was pretty mild. Worst I ever did was take my mom's car out when I only had a permit (no actual license yet) and drive my best friend and I to Jack in the Box at like 1am. My parents were out of town and I thought she'd never know. She noted the car mileage before they left town. OOPS!

you Ferris Beuller'd the Ferrari

 

[maskedsissyslutforyou]

forking someones lawn (basically put many bags of plastic fork's into someones lawn-it is best to have a number of people run up to the lawn and started shoving the forks into the lawn).
kick the can (hid and seek and/or seeker protects the can, the game ends when someone kicks the can without getting tagged or the seeker tags everyone, protecting the can limits the seeker searching too far).

 

[MarieElise]

I was completely out of control. Me and my friends used to like to go to neighborhoods and switch the political signs around in the middle of the night. So one neighbor would have all the pro conservative signs and candidate stuff in their yard, and we would take them all and put them in the other neighbor that had all the liberal stuffs yard and vice versa.

We used to type up fake eviction notices for our friends and steal traffic cones and cordon off their driveways and post weird eviction notices that were total bullshit.

If there were guys who were rude to us at parties , we’d mail them fake letters supposedly from their other best friends telling them they were secretly in love with them. And then we had this ongoing farm character we made up called “Stacy” who was obsessed with her llamas and used to leave strange notes repeatedly on all the guys cars who we liked. Lol. Fun times. There’s too much more to list and honestly some of it gets even worse… late teens early twenties

 

[NotYou]

forking someones lawn (basically put many bags of plastic fork's into someones lawn-it is best to have a number of people run up to the lawn and started shoving the forks into the lawn).
kick the can (hid and seek and/or seeker protects the can, the game ends when someone kicks the can without getting tagged or the seeker tags everyone, protecting the can limits the seeker searching too far).

Hahaha we did something with Garden Gnomes
One night just me and one other friend were doing an "all-nighter", for no reason. There was meant to be a group of us but they all slowly peeled away and went home to sleep.
We were bored so we just walked around our town (it's a small town, you can walk from one end to the other within 1 hour). And we got to one part where there were gardens full of gnomes, so we decided hey, this will be fun - let's mix up the gnomes and pose them in other people's gardens. haha

The funny thing, the police actually drove by us about 20 minutes later on the same long road, stopped and started to talk to say "why are we out this early, blah blah". I think at this point it was about 5 am so it wasn't too bad, so the police had a little chat, a little joke, and then they went.

Also, another time when one of our supermarkets was first being built, they fenced the construction site off with a stupid wooden fence. We were bored one evening and decided to climb in there and mess around.
They had left the master key for ALL the vehicles in there, so my friends started to drive around in them - I didn't. Eventually, they crashed them and they tipped over, so we decided maybe it was finally time to go (we had been there an hour). We climbed back over the fence and got grabbed by lots of police officers who had just been waiting for us to climb out hahahaha



Ahhh the fun times hey ladies and gents haha

 

[Maxi]

Oh gawd, we used to ‘play’ knock n’ run and chuck eggs at houses. From a small Liverpool suburb in the 90s that’s all we had! I remember one friend told me about jumping hedges and I was terrified - I got about two metres into my next door neighbour’s garden and froze because I saw a window and assumed they had seen me. I must have been about 9.

Now it’s a buzz if I get something on Uber Eats for free..

 

[rockin_rod]

There was a 'prank' that kids used to play in my neighborhood; always seemed weird to me, like who would even think up such an idea??
Kids would get a paper bag, put some excrement in it (usually some dog shit they found nearby, but occasionally they'd use their own), put it at the front door of a house, set fire to the paper bag, and then knock on the door and run to hide nearby where they could watch.
When someone opened the door and found the burning paper bag, their instinct was usually to stamp on it to put the flames out.
And so they'd end up with the crap everywhere, all over their shoe and on the porch.

The worst aspect was that they would often target elderly people who they knew couldn't chase them.

 

[NotYou]

Oh gawd, we used to ‘play’ knock n’ run and chuck eggs at houses. From a small Liverpool suburb in the 90s that’s all we had! I remember one friend told me about jumping hedges and I was terrified - I got about two metres into my next door neighbour’s garden and froze because I saw a window and assumed they had seen me. I must have been about 9.

Now it’s a buzz if I get something on Uber Eats for free..

Uber Eats + Free = do they both exist in the same sentence?
I usually have items MISSING, not getting free stuff haha
That's a buzz for me, but a whole different and "angry" type of buzz - meal is ruined, all of my meal is ruined because they didn't give me a straw haha

There was a 'prank' that kids used to play in my neighborhood; always seemed weird to me, like who would even think up such an idea??
Kids would get a paper bag, put some excrement in it (usually some dog shit they found nearby, but occasionally they'd use their own), put it at the front door of a house, set fire to the paper bag, and then knock on the door and run to hide nearby where they could watch.
When someone opened the door and found the burning paper bag, their instinct was usually to stamp on it to put the flames out.
And so they'd end up with the crap everywhere, all over their shoe and on the porch.

The worst aspect was that they would often target elderly people who they knew couldn't chase them.

This is another thing I have seen in movies/shows from US, I thought it was something just made up, but people really did that?
Putting one's own excrement... how do they choose who? rock, Papers and Scissors? haha

 

[rockin_rod]

This is another thing I have seen in movies/shows from US, I thought it was something just made up, but people really did that?

well maybe they got the idea from watching those shows, I have no idea.... but yes, it was a common (and very gross) thing for a while in my area.
It seemed to be slightly older kids than my group that were involved, maybe 14-15 yr-olds. But I do remember them bragging about it at school, and who had been their targets.
Another related one was using a gloved hand to push dog crap through a letterbox - with this taking place in the UK, the letter boxes were all set into the front door of every house, so the crap ended up on the floor inside the hallway - often carpeted. Yuck.
Something I appreciate about having separate mailboxes out on the street here in Aus.

 

[piercedcock78]

Oh Hell yeah!

My specialty was pranking business on the phone. Infomercials were great for this in the middle of the night.

One of my favorites was calling Kum and Go gas station and asking how much that they paid for a deposit. Without fail, at first the clerk who answered would be confused...like what do you mean?

Then I would be like, "Well, this is a sperm bank isn't it?"

Sometimes they would laugh and sometimes (the funniest) was when they would get seriously pissed.

Ironically I just saw this meme before I logged on here and saw this. It fits me to a T:

 

[Deleted member 57737]

damn, found this thread too late.
I was completely crazy as a kid.
- one winter I remember the neighbour didn't find his cat. I didn't know it up to that point so when I was out playing I found a frozen cat under the snow without knowing it was his. After playing with the corpse for a while I thought it might be funny to take the cat by the tail and bang it against a road sign, I loved the sound of that. Well it was obvious that right in that moment the neighbor came along and saw what I did. I never ran that fast I guess. Mom had to protect me against the guy who was understandably furious. But after some explanations he understood and later that day we buried the cat together.
- some years later my brother stole the eyeball of a cow out of the biology lab of the school and gave it to me (he was having that in his class as a practical education). I was in that age where every girl is stupid (especially the beautiful ones) so I took the eye and thought about how I can terrify those girls. We had a kind of huge community room in the middle of the school which was 2-3 stories high. So from the higher places we had this kinds of balkonies where you could stand and watch down to other people sitting on a table 3-4 meter below. Well those girls where sitting there during the break doing their girl things and I was throwing the eye which was really a ball of glibber onto the middle of their table. They screamed and ran away lol and I was the hero of the day

 

[NotYou]

damn, found this thread too late.
I was completely crazy as a kid.
- one winter I remember the neighbour didn't find his cat. I didn't know it up to that point so when I was out playing I found a frozen cat under the snow without knowing it was his. After playing with the corpse for a while I thought it might be funny to take the cat by the tail and bang it against a road sign, I loved the sound of that. Well it was obvious that right in that moment the neighbor came along and saw what I did. I never ran that fast I guess. Mom had to protect me against the guy who was understandably furious. But after some explanations he understood and later that day we buried the cat together.
- some years later my brother stole the eyeball of a cow out of the biology lab of the school and gave it to me (he was having that in his class as a practical education). I was in that age where every girl is stupid (especially the beautiful ones) so I took the eye and thought about how I can terrify those girls. We had a kind of huge community room in the middle of the school which was 2-3 stories high. So from the higher places we had this kinds of balkonies where you could stand and watch down to other people sitting on a table 3-4 meter below. Well those girls where sitting there during the break doing their girl things and I was throwing the eye which was really a ball of glibber onto the middle of their table. They screamed and ran away lol and I was the hero of the day

And now as an adult, you and your brother have killed how many humans? Will I be seeing you on Criminal Minds soon?

 

[MarieElise]

Imagining Gruner in this clip, but instead of a 2 by 4, a dead cat ...

 

[Dan Epstein]

I wasn’t exactly mischievous in comparison to the neighborhood I grew up in. I was a late bloomer and only been arrested once at 15 True story!

 

[NotYou]

I wasn’t exactly mischievous in comparison to the neighborhood I grew up in. I was a late bloomer and only been arrested once at 15 True story!

You can't say you were arrested at 15 and give 0 details

 

[Dan Epstein]

You can't say you were arrested at 15 and give 0 details

We made graffiti, and the arresting officers traded deleting the listings for us fixing the wall. The good ole 90’s, no body cams, when people could fix shit under the radar

 

[IsabelaHarlow]

When I was in high school me and my best friend were always blamed for all the bad stuff that happened in our classroom. Other than that I was a pretty good girl and didn't have any problems with cops or stuff like that

 

[AriaAvalon]

I was a trouble maker. Like you I was just bored. And I found it entertaining to break rules but in creative ways so adults would struggle with punishing me. I would ditch school, but maintained a 4.0 so they couldn’t say it was effecting my grades. I broke the dress code every day because I felt it was bullshit. I cut one shirt straight up the front and then used a bunch of safety pins to put it back together. Safety pins were not allowed but if I took them off my shirt came apart. I got pulled out of class just to have the principal say I looked just fine. He said they were clearly holding my shirt together. Lol. Shop lifting, tp someone’s house, prank phone calls, hanging out with older kids.