In fifth grade while vacationing in Arizona, Kaleb Barajas threw a Snickers bar into the pool, causing everyone to evacuate, fearing the snack was floating waste.
“I’m just a goofy guy,” the sophomore business and management sales major said.
The prankster began tricking people in the second grade. Barajas said his best amateur pranks of all time were in elementary and middle school. One creative deception involved Barajas and a friend pouring red Kool-Aid onto the snow and placing a chainsaw near the legs that they had taken off store manikins, making a mock crime scene.
Once college began, Barajas put his pranking skills to work on campus. During his freshman year at Ball State, Barajas said he became known as the prankster on his floor in LaFollette Complex.
“Go all out, do it big so everybody knows the prank,” Barajas said.
Barajas’ pranks have had their fair share of casualties. In one instance, he placed a package of Gatorade on the top ledge of a door. Once Barajas’ friends opened it, a bottle fell down hitting him directly in the groin.
Others have pranked Barajas too, such as a girlfriend in high school who “broke up” with him through a text message. He fell for it and wondered why she did it over the phone.
“I’ve always wanted a girl that I could prank and she would prank me back,” Barajas said.
Here are some accounts of Barajas’ most genius antics:
Prank No. 1
Barajas took others’ mattresses and hid them. A football player who had just come back from practice was tired, but came back to his room to find only his blankets and pillow stacked up on the floor where his bed usually sat. That was the only prank he said had gone too far. His hallmate was pretty upset.
Prank No. 2
Barajas and his friends duct taped the door frame to his resident assistant’s room while he was inside. It took them 20 minutes, and the RA had to end up cutting himself out of his room with scissors.
Prank No. 3
A brother in his fraternity had a broken laptop, and a group of them decided to prank a new guy by throwing the laptop at him without saying “catch this” until the last second. The computer shattered and so did the confidence of the new guy.
Pranksters Anonymous
Barajas is not the only prankster on the block, he and others from his freshman hall shared with us in anonymity.
One April Fools’ day, a resident took a couple of white sheets of paper and a permanent marker from her room to make signs. She wrote: “Water contamination, do not use restroom until further notice.” – Maintenance. Many of her fellow floor members were tardy to class that day.
Another prank pulled on a male floor was just a routine happenstance, no holiday needed. Guys from a floor in Clevenger Hall accumulated all of the styrofoam beans from a beanbag they could find and emptied them into a plastic tub. Someone distracted the student whose room was about to be invaded while the others dumped the beans all over the room. Every square inch of the room was occupied by a blizzard of the little white spheres.
