A snore of historic proportions: a prank by a MEPhI teacher that is remembered years later

On Pikabu, a user nicknamed BootSect told how in 2007, together with his classmates, he played a prank on a history teacher at MEPhI. He even designed a special mechanism for this. We are publishing his story in full.

On November 24, 2007, a regular lecture on history was to be held at MEPhI for students of the cybernetics department. At that time, no one suspected that it would become one of those mythical tales that would be retold ten years later, adding new details. It so happened that I was a witness and even to some extent a participant in those events - but first things first.

Sergei Mitrofanovich Nikitenko's lectures were popular at MEPhI, so even on Saturday mornings the auditorium was not empty. The only thing that spoiled the picture was a student in the first row who had dozed off from fatigue. Well, what can you expect from him - he was exhausted, the poor guy, who hasn't? And everything would have been fine if he hadn't started snoring quite loudly after a while...

The most impatient can skip to 0:10, because I've already told the backstory. And if someone wants to feel like a teacher, they can stop the video at 1:45 and try to guess what happened.

Well, now you can definitely watch the video to the end. The snoring student turned out to be a doll, from which "guts" poured out as soon as the lecturer lifted his jacket.

After that, he couldn't lecture normally for about ten minutes because he was laughing so hard. We didn't expect the prank to be so successful, and didn't really bother with the issue of filming. It's a good thing one of the guys from the parallel group had a digital camera, and thanks to him we can see how it really was.

The idea for this prank came to us, as usual, by accident. Once during class, my friend Andrey noticed that a down jacket hanging on the back of a chair looked like a sitting student from afar. And then the imagination of first-year techies, multiplied by childhood playing in one place, came into play.

The basis of the doll was Andrey's jacket. We filled its sleeves with scarves, put backpacks and briefcases instead of a body, and made the head out of a balloon. From the side, you can see that our sleepyhead student turned out to be legless, but from the front it was completely unnoticeable (the desks were separated from the lecturer by a plywood wall).

Of course, if you know it's a fake, you can see the unnaturalness of the pose and proportions. However, we managed to successfully deceive the teacher, who spent a good minute trying to wake the doll.

I was responsible for the "ratchet mechanism". A simple amplifier was cobbled together from spare parts, powered by a "Krona" battery. The snoring recording was transmitted from an MP3 player to a large speaker (I think it was a 4GD-35), hidden inside the doll. The snoring is hard to hear on the recording, but it was exactly as it should be - not a caricature, but loud enough for everyone in the audience to hear it.

By the way, we recorded the snoring ourselves: it was masterfully imitated on a dictaphone by our then class monitor Misha, now Mikhail Mikhailovich, a teacher at the 12th department of MEPhI. I am sure that he tells this story to his students. By the way, he was also responsible for the "animatronics" (a technique in film and animation that creates movable artificial body parts.) of our doll - yes, it was not static! It had "lungs" made of a balloon, to which a long rubber tube was attached, so that our student not only snored, but also breathed quite naturally. In the first minute of the video, you can see Misha blowing into the tube.

A fragment of an old version of the same video has been preserved, where a picture in a picture is inserted from a different angle (true, in terrible quality). But it is valuable for the short story of the teacher about how in a similar situation the lecturer abruptly woke up a student sleeping during class, and the student almost had a seizure. This explains his delicacy in handling our doll.