Isn't it illegal to put cameras in bathrooms in most schools?
You'd have thought so, but our school didn't get the memo.
In 1996 was the Dunblane massacre in Scotland. Basically some paedophile took his (legally held) collection of rifles into a school and shot a load of kids and a teacher. One of the kids not shot was none other than Andy Murray. Yes, that Andy Murray. Who went on to be quite good at tennis and win Wimbledon in 2013 and 2016.
Anyhow, the next week a load of burglar alarms and CCTV sprouted throughout the school I was at at that time including in the changing rooms. Fox, meet henhouse.
We also had keypad locks appear on the doors. I can still remember the code to the rear door, *1615. We were told that anyone attempting to go through the front door or elicit its code would be immediately given massive and horrible punishments. It was *1654 by the way.
Anyhow. The stories I had planned to put here.
1. William the Bastard and his secret test of character.
(Repost from some other thread)
So, this was about 1998 and I was in year 8 (13 years old) at a state grammar school here in Britain. It was double History, and our usual teacher was away for some reason which sucked because we could derail him for hours about random shit because he was into historical re-enactments and historic European martial arts and would happily regale us forever about the difference between a sabre, estoc, zweihander, and similar and how full plate was more hindrance than help because while you were trying to get to your feet with a busted leg some archer type would stab you through the heart under the arm, and all that.
His replacement was the formidable Head of History, a man with the face of Jim Davidson and the voice of Del Boy, but the heart of Herr Flick of the Gestapo. He was an evil, evil, man and his nickname was William the Bastard (because William the Conqueror, and he taught history, was called William, and was a bastard, like his Norman namesake). Anyhow. Having set us a load of stuff to do, he said he had to go over to some other room the other end of the school for some reason, and that he'd left confidential things under his desks which we weren't to look at, and if anyone tried, they'd get a Saturday Detention no argument.
Anyhow. Needless to say, one of our number thought, right, how's he gonna know, and went and looked under the desk. Within five minutes William the Bastard barged back into the room and with an outstretched finger, like Emile Zola's
J'accuse, he rounded on the kid responsible and told him that he'd looked under the desk and was subject to immediate Saturday Detention.
"No I didn't, honest sir," said the kid responsible.
"Yes you did. I saw you," said WTB.
"How could you have from that other room?" said the kid.
"Aha!" said William the Bastard. "Because I didn't go to that room, did I. I went round the side into the outside cloister and stood on a bench and peered in through those high up windows in the exterior wall and watched you all from there! Now be quiet unless you want another Saturday Detention."
And it was true; he had done just that. He basically set us a secret test of character for no other reason than he wanted to fuck with us.
2. How the Porn Fairy cursed us in Geography.
Before widespread high speed internet access, so about 1999, pr0n was not something that was all that easy to come by. You could sit on dialup for minutes waiting for your chosen bobs and vagene to appear line by line and not get anywhere. This was risky because if someone picked up the phone or your parents walked in you would have to hit alt-F4 or disconnect and it was all gone. And we were 14 years old so obviously were gigantic coomers.
Now, this will be lost on most non Britbongs, but a very popular purveyor of televisual filth was a gentleman called Phil Sutcliffe who ran a company called Fiona Cooper Audio Visual. His business model was something that didn't so much skirt around laws on sale of explicit content at the time so much as leap backwards and forth over them, cock in hand, singing "I'm a Wanker" by Ivor Biggun. He also turned out to be a serial sex pest but back in 1999 that was still in the future. Basically, you would send off to a PO box in West Yorkshire which was advertised in the Sunday Sport and in (oddly enough) PC Format at the time, and he'd send you back a catalogue of the filth on offer. The conceit was that Fiona Cooper was a MILFy half-French model who persuaded young lasses to pose for art house videos of them disrobing and/or frigging at themselves and/or lezzing out, and this was all a big lie. It was Phil, a fat, sweaty old sex offender. It was always filmed in a big ol' farmhouse with a very distinctive fireplace, and for some reason always, without fail, had in the soundtrack New Age music often involving pan pipes. At the time it was illegal to sell adult videos by mail order, but Phil also had a cover business doing wedding videos and a very generic company name. You'd pick the girl or girls you liked out of this catalogue and by return if you sent cash or cheque for ten quid a VHS tape sans label would be sent to you by return.
Needless to say, when Jim Gilmour found a discarded Fiona Cooper catalogue in the bushes behind his house, he was immediately the most popular kid in the entire school. No, the entire TOWN. Everyone wanted to get their hands on it so they could grab access to hours of actual real commercial pornography without having to keep on dialup for days on end. But he kept it to himself because he thought that if he lent it out he'd never get it back and he'd never be able to wank himself blind.
See, because of the illegality at the time of mail order adult videos, they would be sent with generic covering letters saying something like, "Dear Sir, thank you for your custom. Your video under order number V2077/1 has been recorded and edited and is enclosed herewith." from a generic looking company name.
Now after a few weeks of this and the "can I have a lend of it Jim" turning to "I double dog dare you to actually order those tapes to prove you're not a big gay," our friend Jim Gilmour decided he had enough of just looking at the catalogue and trying not to jizz on it and ordered a video of two girls lezzing out, which he successfully recovered without alerting his parents.
Wouldn't you know it, the next Friday, by a stroke of extreme fortune it was double Geography and both our class and his (which were in adjacent rooms) had no teacher and the teacher covering had to teach some other class due to extreme staff absences. The TV on wheels was brought in to the room and we all piled in. Because we were going to see some bird named Helen and some other bird named Kathryn making with the Sapphic delights. Oh yes.
So the tape goes in the recorder and he hits play and basks in possibly being the most popular lad in the town forever. And... static. Then a picture forms, and it's not a Fiona Cooper tape. In fact, it's a recording of Gladiators from two years ago. Jim Gilmour goes utterly pale and spends the rest of the day hiding in the toilets because we were going to beat the shit out of him. You know how I said that the tapes from Fiona Cooper were unlabelled? Well, so was this one. And he mixed them up because most likely in a post masturbatory rush with his parents coming down the drive he just shoved whichever tape was into whichever box was closest. I mean, let's be honest, it could have been so much worse, and regarding Gladiators most of us had probably fapped over the idea of being up on the rings with Jet's thighs clamped around us (this is not an admission), but all the same, it was a serious disappointment and in my entire school life I'd never seen anyone go from hero to smelly spacker so fast.
The next year, broadband internet became affordable for the mass market in our area so we could have all the bobs and vagene we wanted and were no longer reliant on finding discarded jazz mags in bushes.