About ten years ago, a group of us played a prank on a mutual friend. He'd been trying to work on his motorcycle, doing maintenance that required knowing when one piston was at top-dead-centre. After trying several ways to discover it, he decided to put a pencil in the spark plug hole and turn the engine over by hand until the pencil was sticking out as far as possible.

So far, so good.

He put the pencil in and started turning the engine by hand. The pencil got shorter, and shorter, and shorter...and then dropped inside the cylinder. Then he spent several hours trying to avoid having to take the head off to get the pencil out, to no avail. Once everything was back together he made the mistake of telling it as a "Stupid Me" story.

Fast forward to a club meeting several months later. We all chipped in to send one guy to the nearest Wal-Mart and buy up every pack of pencils they had in stock. While he was visiting the beer trailer a whole gang of us descended on his bike and put pencils everywhere. Nothing was damaged and he got a lifetime supply of pencils out of it (I think he donated them to a program that gives school supplies to needy kids...).

At least it didn't go too far. We had a good laugh, and although he was embarrassed he also knew that we weren't going to push it any further, so he could relax about it.

I'd give anything to share that laugh with him again today. He was killed in a car accident last week in Oklahoma, rear-ended by an elderly driver who couldn't see that all the traffic in front of him on the freeway was stopped. To paraphrase the old saying: "Keep your friends close and don't make enemies."

:ootd: