Those Pesky Teenagers

7:15am... sunny day and no forecast for snow or anything that would be cause for concern and I hear on the radio that our school district is on a 2 hour delay. What? Can this be? So, I call my good friend KO who is on top of these things and sure enough, she heard the same thing but didn't have any details except that it had something to do with the buses running behind schedule. It turns out the teenagers in our school district have a problem reading the calendar and they were one week late on their April Fool's prank. Every bus in the school bus depot (all 120 of them) had flat tires when the first driver reported to work in the morning. My initial thoughts were... "dang I recently posted about how great it is to live here"... and these teens just slashed the tires of all the buses. But after reading the story, it seems that the tires were just deflated, so it wasn't as malicious as I suspected. Nevertheless, I hope I never hear of my kids involved in a prank like this when they are older. Geez, the things we have to look forward to as they grow up.

This made me think of all the rebellion in my teen years. Most of it, I won't write about here, but there is one thing that I think is safe. Safe because when the kids read this years from now... it's something that they won't be able to do because the technology has changed. Back in the old days advertisement billboards for shopping centers and gas stations used the backlit board with slide-in alphabet letters instead of the all-digital ones we see today. Remember those? Occasionally something would be missing or out of place and it would read "KIDS MELAS RE HER" instead of "KIDS MEALS ARE HERE". The letters might also be in varying colors and always all caps. Anyway... I was on a mission to collect all the letters in my name, so I went around grabbing what I needed from these boards. Then, in college, I proudly displayed them in my dorm room. (Note: I went with the E-E spelling of my name because E's were a lot easier to come by than a Y)



I wish this was the most absurd and senseless thing I'd done as a teenager, but I can't make that claim.