Indoor Slingshot

I don't know if anybody actually reads these anymore, but I have fun writing these anyway.  So, I'm posting this new one that I wrote a while ago, but just never put it up on the site.  Enjoy, folks.

"It’s always Bo."

That is what Ferg and I always used to say about the phenomenon that always seemed to put Paul "Bo" Hill in the middle of any problem on the 12th floor even when he wasn’t directly involved. In an injury shortened school year, Bo got tied up by Chris Wright (even though it was Bo attempting to tie up Wright), was sent into a coma in the aftermath of a water fight and had a small run in with a water balloon slingshot. This is that story.

It started simple enough. Ferg, Swan, Wright and I were playing Sega (the original Genesis, not Dreamcast) and for some reason we had the idea to tee-pee Jason Shaffer’s room. While that would have been funny enough, we decided that it would be much funnier to just do his side of the room. Since Wright had the tool, getting toilet paper out of the maid closet was easy enough, and we proceeded to turn half of the Shaffer/Schulte room completely white. It is amazing what three rolls of TP can do to a dorm room.

Once Shaffer found his room, needless to say, he was not a happy camper. Meanwhile, we were back in our room playing a little more Sega when we heard wood scraping on our door outside. I looked under the door and saw the bottom part of a number of mops and brooms (again, out of the maid closet). Apparently, the big joke was that we would eventually come out of the room, and about 10 mops and brooms would fall in on us. Everyone would be out in the hall to watch the big joke and laugh because we had been taught a lesson.

Unfortunately for the peanut gallery outside, we had 4 of the most devious minds at Southeast in one room along with one of our tools of the trade: the water balloon launcher. We devised a plan that involved wetting an enormous ball of toilet paper and shooting it out of the launcher out of our room and into the door of the room across the hall. Great plan. There was only one small problem with the implementation.

We made sure that we had a big crowd out in the hall to witness what they thought was a mass of mops and brooms falling into our room. What they didn’t know was that what they were actually going to see was a 6 inch ball of wet toilet paper fly out of our room at about 200 miles per hour and explode on the door across the hall.

We heard the crowd gathering and we set up. I was to fling the door open and get out of the way of the mops and brooms. Swan and Wright held either side of the slingshot and Ferg was the trigger man. I got down in the floor and got ready to open the door while Ferg pulled the slingshot back, way back. I threw the door open, and all I remember was that there was a little longer pause than I thought that there might be and there was no explosion sound on the facing door.

What I would soon find out was that everyone had stood out in the hall, but they were hiding behind corners and along the close outside wall. Everyone, that is, except for Bo. Bo was right in the middle of the hall just giggling that all the mops fell into our room. The toilet paper ball hit Bo in the wrist and spun him around like a top and dropped him to the floor. I thought, "Oh my God, we just broke his wrist," but he got right up still laughing. He stood back up and had an enormous welt on his wrist. He seemed fine, so we all just started laughing right along with him.

Ferg later said that he thought for a split second about not letting go of the slingshot when he saw Bo in the middle of the hall. Of course, if he had, there wouldn’t have been a story. Another story with Bo right in the middle.

"It’s always Bo."