Practical Joke

From time to time I read about neighbors pranking one another while remaining good friends.

It always brings back a fond memory from my early childhood. We lived on a fairly short street, there were only 8 or so houses, and we all knew one another. One of the families had a VW Beetle (this was in the early '60s) and the owner was a fuel consumption fanatic. He was always measuring fuel consumption and telling everybody what excellent mileage he was getting.

One of the neighbors started sneaking over once a week to put an extra gallon of gas in the guy's tank. Of course, this completely threw off his fuel consumption stats, giving him phenomenal mileage. He couldn't stop bragging about what great fuel consumption he was getting.

Then one day, he boasted that he found this little hole-in-the wall German auto mechanic shop and that he had scheduled his next service with the "experts." He was expecting a significant improvement in fuel consumption after a tune-up done by these highly skilled experts (that mostly specialized in servicing Porsche, BMW and Audi vehicles).

After the service, the neighbor that was adding gas to his tank stopped adding gas with the result that the poor guy's fuel consumption plummeted (of course, in reality it simply reverted to normal for that type of automobile).

The poor German auto mechanics were driven nearly nuts by the neighbor insisting that they revert whatever changes they wreaked upon his car.

The entire street were enjoying this prank for years afterwards.