Getting Revenge with The Clapper! Clap on, Clap off. . . . When I was in college, my roommate John got the bright idea to get The Clapper. He was tickled by the idea of turning on the lights by making noise, because he was a noisy bastard and enjoyed drawing attention to himself any way he could. Before The Clapper, my roommate had to bang through the front door and scream, "Honeys, I'm home!" in order for us all to know that His Highness had arrived, but once The Clapper entered the home, we would all be informed of his arrival by two loud bangs on the counter. (Clapping wasn't enough; it had to be open-handed SMASHING on the counter for maximum annoyance.) Now, I'll be the first to say he was a really fun roommate to have around most of the time. But the noise that ALWAYS accompanied his presence was the down side. My other roommate and I had a discussion about his behavior and decided it was unacceptable. Who cared that The Fag* was home? One day when he'd been particularly obnoxious, we decided to take our revenge. We unplugged The Clapper. Then we observed. It worked just how we'd thought it would. Mr. I-Need-Attention walked in the door and smashed his hand down on the table twice, and nothing happened. What you have to know if you have no personal experience with The Clapper is that spacing your claps (or bangs, whatever) inaccurately will render the device useless. It will not register your claps as a signal if they come too close together or too far apart. After some trial and error, it wasn't difficult to have success nearly every time, but once in a while a second trial was needed. He thought this was one of those times. So, he proceeded to bang on the counter a second time. And then a third time. By this time we were exploding with laughter; it was hilarious to watch him stand there smacking the counter when we knew nothing would happen. Finally he investigated and found it unplugged. We admitted our mischief to him, and he found it reasonably funny. So it was even funnier when the same scenario repeated itself the next night. After that, it became a regular thing; he would never know if it would be unplugged or not, and we left it plugged in often enough that he could never be sure. Eventually he just gave up and we went back to good old-fashioned switch-flipping. Nobody complained. Not even him. * Yes, I called him "The Fag." He called himself "The Fag." In fact, to this day, when he calls me he mentions faggotry on my voicemail. If you think everyone who uses this word for friends or for themselves is doing so in a derogatory way, you're wrong. (Besides, you should hear the "affectionate" terms he used for me, but I'm afraid of writing them here.) back