YW Moderator-29
I don’t recall the title of the thread. What I do remember is some key words from a post by “mbachur”. Unfortunately the Google searches that I tried haven’t worked. Given that Google searches I tried on key words from other threads and posts around the same time frame yielded successful results I’m resigned to the reality that I’m remembering something incorrectly or the entire thread has been deleted.
Mistykins-
I wouldn’t say that I was a character over there. For the most part I was ambiguous when asked about anything- I would simply state that I’m neither confirming nor denying my involvement in whatever incident I was being questioned about.
In the Fire Alarm incident some people claimed responsibility but couldn’t explain how it was done. (When questioned by the hanhalla they denied responsibility.) They never bothered to ask me about is as they considered me too dumb based on my grades. (One Rebbe whose father knew my grandfather was overheard saying that I’m the only dumb grandkid my grandfather has. I actually found it amusing.) When other students asked me if it was me I just answered that I’m not commenting.
The Soda Machine incident (to give you an idea of my style) is something I did do (but again I was ambiguous when questioned).
The school tried changing out one popular flavor for Crystal Pepsi or something like that. After everyone tasted it they had enough and wanted Dr Pepper back. The Yeshiva said that once the Crystal Pepsi is sold out they’ll bring back the old flavor but barely anyone wanted to buy a can.
There was a little known design flaw in tubular locks (thank to YouTube it’s a little better known nowadays) and they can be easily opened with a Bic pen. While I had no success with a Bic pen I was able to exploit the flaw and easily open the machine.
The way the machine dispensed cans was by rotating a small shaft under the chamber until a can was dropped and then stopping. Each half rotation would release a can and a full rotation would release two cans. There’s a ring at the end of the shaft that has a cutout in it that a sensor looks for. By cover one notch with a strip of magnesium the shaft made a full rotation releasing two cans for the price of one. (If anyone has ever seen the inside of a soda machine, these shafts are covered by a metal plate that is easily removed. If a vendor has more cans than will fit in a chamber they will usually stack them on this plate.)
Pretty soon people (or possibly the one person) noticed that they were getting two cans of Crystal Pepsi for the price of one and someone told the school about it. After testing this repeatedly and verifying it they emptied the chamber and called the repair guy.
Before the repair guy came I removed the piece of magnesium.
When the repair guy got there he was scratching his head as it seemed to work just fine (and he never heard of such a thing before).
We were all cracking up as the administrator responsible for the soda machine was trying to convince him that it wasn’t a bad dream but he didn’t have too much luck.
Later on he finally replaced the sought after flavor to everyone’s delight.
There were 20 cans originally and four left when the repair guy came so I calculated that eight cans were given out for free. At $.50 a can I owed them $4.
For the fun of it I opened the machine one final time to leave a $5 bill in the bill chamber and take a $1 bill.
I would have loved to see the look on the administrators face when he found the $5 in the chamber or hear the phone call between him and the repair guy where he insists that there was a $5 bill in there. (This was before vending machines accepted $5 bills.)
As one can imagine there were others who tried taking credit for this but no one had a valid explanation.