Flying high: An April Fool's prank

What happens when two ordinary students, bored with a life of eating, sleeping and studying, decide to make everybody's life interesting? Rafil Kroll-Zaidi and Jon Kennedy, both sophomores in Forbes College, recently undertook this task. And according to Kroll-Zaidi, he's done it before, and he will strike again.

Students woke up on Sunday, April 1 to find the familiar facade of Forbes College adorned with color. Four flags — placed in flag holders on the white columns near the main entrance — appeared overnight.

The flags — three representing small countries, the other one a skull and crossbones — fit right in with the Forbes facade.

Shortly before dawn that morning, Kroll-Zaidi and Kennedy emerged from the main entrance to raise the flags.

"The flag pole sockets are about 15 feet off the ground, and Jon's a really good climber, so at first we thought he would just climb up and put them in," Kroll-Zaidi said. "[Then] he got up to the socket and realized he needed three hands to hold on to the post while putting the flag in."

Luckily Kroll-Zaidi had a solution to the problem.

"I remembered that I had seen a ladder in the basement. It was an incredibly old ladder," he explained. "It must have been there since before this place was a residential college." Kennedy climbed onto the ladder, and began putting the flags into the sockets.

But the duo's troubles didn't end there.

"It was four o'clock on Sunday morning, and a lot of people were coming back from the 'Street.' We kept having to duck inside," Kroll-Zaidi said. "We interrupted two lovers in the hallway."

"Every time Public Safety pulled up we had to stop. They came every ten minutes," Kroll-Zaidi added. "I hadn't realized that they watch us so carefully. It makes me feel really safe knowing about it, but it was frustrating at the time."

While Kennedy put the fourth flag into its holder, Public Safety pulled up a final time.

"They came up and they actually stopped the car and got out. Jon got off the ladder and we ran inside." Kroll-Zaidi said. The two returned to their rooms, awaiting students' reactions the next morning.

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This is not Kroll-Zaidi's first attempt at mischief. He has an impressive resume of pranks, ranging from revenge on a roommate to parodying badly translated video games from Japan.

"Last year most of the pranks that I did involved water and elaborate tubing systems," Kroll-Zaidi said.

"There was a personal conflict and we needed to resolve it in a way that was amusing," he explained with a mischievous grin. "So we removed a section of the metal window frames with bolt cutters. We glued a tube to the ceiling and then led it up two stories to the roof. When our target was asleep, we poured several liters of water on him."

Kroll-Zaidi also played a prank last year on his freshman seminar,taught by English professor Michael Cook.

"I had gone in an hour before the class and set up this piping system that went under the seminar table to the other side of the room so that when I put pressure on the system the water exploded onto whoever was sitting on the other side," he said.

When asked how Cook reacted to his work, Kroll-Zaidi shrugged. "I think he agreed it was funny but distracting," he said.

And what pranks does he have in store for us?

"One of them involves a really large order of vinyl banners which will appear around campus soon," Kroll-Zaidi noted.

As for the flags, they were mounted outside Forbes for a week. On the far left was the Republic of Rwanda, chosen because it bears Kroll-Zaidi's first initial, second was the skull and crossbones, then New Zealand and finally the flag of the Kingdom of Bhutan.

"I always thought that Rwanda [had] a really funny flag because it's uncreative to put an 'R' on Rwanda. It's like, 'Hey, get it? 'R' for Rwanda,' " Kroll-Zaidi said. "We picked the dragon flag because the Kingdom of Bhutan's flag is such a contrast. Despite being a small country, it has the coolest flag."

A week after the flags were raised, Forbes College administrator Allison Cook finally acknowledged their presence, writing in an e-mail, "There are some interesting flags flying over the front entrance of Forbes, but none of us appears to know how they got there!"

She requested the flags be removed by their anonymous owners, ending Kroll-Zaidi and Kennedy's April Fool's Day prank.