When I was in college, some farking idiot thought it was funny to urinate on the carpet at the end of the hall. Did that every night for a week until I got tired of it. Keep in mind this was REALLY thin carpet - the kind that you can pull up and wash off with a hose because water goes through it.
I got a sheet of thin steel stock from the local hardware store and hooked it up to an old electrical cord. Put a step-down transformer on the line to bring the voltage down - no need to kill the little jerk. Pulled up one side of the carpet and slid the sheet underneath. 3am the next morning I'm awakened by a LOUD scream and i hear him running away. Never had that problem again.
For years people have been pulling pranks on their RA's. I know of one hall that set their RA's door on fire. I never got that extreme - an entire can of glade potpurri spray into the keyhole and combination lock of his door was enough. That stuff lingers and gets on your hands every time you touch the knob. Dude smelled like a flower for weeks.
I personally like one that the physicist Dick Feynman pulled when he was in college. I did a similar trick, though not as elaborate. He came downstairs one day to find someone had stolen one of the double doors to one of his frat brother's rooms. So he took the other door and hid it in the cellar. The guys were pissed and found out who took the first door, got that reinstalled, then spent a long time beating the hell out of the poor guy to get him to tell them where the second door was. Brilliant!
There's always the trick of gluing a quarter to the sidewalk. You'd be surprised how many people spend a LONG time trying to get the damn thing up.
I read of one guy who bought a park bench, took it to a park, waited for a cop to walk by, then grabbed the bench and started running out of the park with it. Cop arrested him, he produced the receipt for the bench. Cop arrested him anyway for disorderly conduct
