In April of 2000 my friends and I did something totally stupid, potentially illegal and questionably awesome.  In true amazingben.com fashion, I fully intend to divulge the gory and intimate details of my borderline-felonious actions for all the world to see and potentially arrest me for.

It was nearing the end of the Fall Semester of my Freshman year of college when Sexx discovered the magical Shangri-La of supplies.usps.gov.  One morning when I stopped by to visit him, he told me fascinating and unbelievable tales of a mythical site where you could order TONS of Priority Mail supplies totally free.  He had already placed an order for some labels and envelopes to send legitimate boring mail, but neither of us could deny that the potential for disaster was painfully obvious.  If only we had a plan, we could put this seemingly never-ending font of Priority Mail supplies to effective use.

I transferred out of the University of Florida at the end of Fall Semester, assumedly leaving behind any chance of getting in on the Priority Mail-related hijinks.  The reasoning behind my transfer are best left unmentioned (let's just say that I went there for a girl who ended up not being worth the trouble), but the fact remained that while Sexx and Evan plotted devious wrongdoings at the expense of the United States Postal Service, I was now over 100 miles away at Florida State University.

They did eventually order several hundred boxes of Priority Mail, and to prevent anybody tracing the gross misuse of government funds back to them they stored their illicit contraband in both their dorm's freight elevator and a bathroom stall on their floor.  Their crowning achievement involved pulling a pretty radical prank on Shitface Massey.  While Massey was out getting busy with his psychotic girlfriend, Sexx, Evan, George Sucks and Munjal picked the lock to his dorm room and stole his mattress.  They then strung several boxes of Priority Mail together with Priority Mail-brand packing tape, put Shitface's sheets on the assembled boxes and put that back in place of the mattress.  When Massey and Psycho returned, they laid down on a mattress of Priority Mail boxes.  Their combined weight broke through the boxes and had them both crashing downwards into the crappy and unnecessarily pointy dorm bed boxsprings.

They pulled various other pranks of this nature, and I would be lying to you if I didn't say that I was jealous of all the hi-jinks, because you guys KNOW how I feel about zany hi-jinks.  I support them.

Well in my first full semester at FSU, I made friends with the enigmatic and unpredictable J. Catfood.  I had told him about the unlimited boxes and showed him some of the pictures of what was happening at UF, and together we devised an even more devious and large-scale project.  It was going to require more boxes than any of us had ever seen before and be even more illegal than anything we had done yet to date.

In an alcohol-induced haze I sat down in my crappy dorm room one night frantically ordering impossible numbers of boxes and Priority Mail-related supplies.  It was free, and I was young and stupid, so I just kept clicking on stuff until my fingers bled and my mouse buttons broke off into tiny splinters.  The next morning I had a vague recollection of what I had done, but as the days passed I paid the impending gargantuan mail delivery less and less attention.

Until one fateful day in the second week of April 2000.

I went down to the FSU Post Office to check and see if my mom had sent my my monthly delivery of chocolate chip cookies when I found a strange-looking yellow slip in my Post Office Box.  On it, in chicken-scratch blue ink, someone had scrawled, "come up to the counter".  Perplexed, I went to the counter of the mail room.

"You Ben Thompson?"

"Yeah."

"All this stuff came for you today."

He gestured to a veritable mountain of giant brown cardboard boxes.  I think all I could manage to get out was a "holy shit" as I realized the gravity of what I had done in my alcohol-induced stupor.  THIS was the physical manifestation of the abstract numbers I had been so enthusiastically clicking on that night.  THIS was the path I had chosen, and there was no turning back now.

The mail guys let me take one of their carts to bring all this shit back to my dorm room.  Unfortunately, the post office on campus resided almost a mile from my dorm room, and it was situated in the middle of what at one time was probably some sort of sinkhole.  Bringing this overloaded cart up the steep incline the extreme distance to my dorm room was a momentous task.  At several points during my fateful journey I had to put my back up against the cart to prevent it from rolling back down the hill and dumping its contents on some unsuspecting old people or oblivious college students.  I spend a good portion of the trip leaning against this tiny cart walking backwards and sweating in the oppressive Florida heat.

Finally the supplies arrived in my room and I summoned J. Catfood to discuss what the fuck we were going to do with all this shit.  We knew that our good friend The Admiral had an upcoming birthday, so we eventually decided to give him an unexpected b-day surprise.  We would build a wall the likes of which no one had ever seen, and completely seal Chris into his dorm room.

We enlisted our pal Sam Bazinet to hang out with The Admiral and keep him occupied in his room while J. Catfood and I began construction on the wall.

Close to two hours went into this epic venture.  We labored tirelessly, putting together hundreds of boxes and using roll upon roll of packing tape.  The scale of this thing really can't be conveyed properly with these pictures, but I will present them anyways to give you some sort of idea what we were dealing with here.

Once all the boxes were assembled, we took them out into the hallway and began taping them together into a giant wall.  Half an hour and several dozen awkward stares from hallmates later, we had constructed a wall large enough to completely cover the door to The Admiral's dorm room.  We carried the assembled monstrosity up two flights of stairs and brought it to rest infront of the Admiral's door.  Once it was in position, we began taping it to the wall to secure it in place.

The final product was a glorious thing to behold.  These pictures don't really do it justice, but it was fucking enormous.  We knocked on the wall outside Chris' room, and when he opened the door he was greeted by a solid wall of Priority Mail boxes stretching from the floor to the ceiling the entire width of his doorway.

The Admiral eventually surprised us by getting a running start and plowing through the wall like Janet Reno, sending boxes and stuff flying in every direction.  After we had seen our work thoroughly crushed, we decided it best not to just leave it laying on the floor, so The Admiral, Sammy Baz, me, J. Catfood, BLT and a couple of other guys carried this giant hunk or warped cardboard through the streets of Tallahassee at 11 o'clock at night, drawing applause from some random drunk co-eds and horrified stares from most everybody else.  We eventually brought it to a giant ten foot-tall crappy new-age metal sculpture that vaguely resembled a human being in the middle of the FSU student union and threw this thing on top of it.  There it stayed, and we left so that people the following morning would be able to admire our handiwork and further appreciate the sculpture we thereafter dubbed "The Postman".

Looking back, it was probably pretty stupid to totally abuse the Post Offices' goodwill and probably even stupider to post my exploits on my website.  They eventually stopped offering unlimited packing supplies via their website, and it's probably for the best.

I tried to take a couple pictures of the statue, but it was too dark and nothing really came out.  I did, however, manage to get a great shot of The Admiral flying through the wall: