You’ve probably seen it happen before. It may come in many forms. There may be a hand stealthily creeping towards the lanyard, and there could even be a distraction–either through overcasual talk or a third person. Around half the time, the band comes off easily and the lanyard is yanked away. However, some students at our school specifically tie their lanyards to prevent this. Instead of the lanyard coming off smoothly, it catches on the victim’s throat and usually some violent altercation follows, involving cursing, swearing and occasionally, physical gestures that look like a fight to the passersby. In reality, the victim and assailant are just having a brutal conversation that goes something like this:
“You little piece of [bleep].”
“I didn’t know you tied it though.”
“Why the [bleep] would that matter?!”
“I mean…”
“[bleep] you you [bleep] [bleep] hole.”
“Bro you’re overreacting.”
Of course. Both parties are probably males. Thus, women tend to live longer than men. The process of the Lanyard Heist takes less than two minutes, which is eerily similar to the time it takes for the gym teacher to finish discussing the untoward private practices of freshmen football athletes–or so I’ve heard. In a research conducted by yours truly on the student body finds, on average a total of forty-seven lanyards are yanked off on a full day. Through careful observation of who does it and when, it has been found that gym and lunch were times when the assailants, specifically males, strike with more boredom in mind than content. In fact, though intelligence has not been found to correlate to the amount of attacks, the amount of time these assailants have to think about being bored closely corresponds to how likely they are to carry out their devious plan.
But is boredom all? No, actually. I have come to the conclusion that what is even more important than boredom is who’s around. Besides the victim and assailant, there are usually three groups of people. One–mutual friends. Mutual friends almost always ignore the proceedings except their under-the-breath snickering. Rarely, close friends try to intervene, spouting the usual.
“Yo chill out, you’re gonna get the gym teacher’s attention.”
Two–upperclassmen. Since freshmen are most likely to be both the assailant and victim, the two actors in this play may always have hidden reservations concerning their reputation. A positive correlation was found between the amount of upperclassmen around and the violence the victim exhibits. However, since when upperclassmen are around, fewer attackers decided to act, this has not been found to be certain. Three–romantic interests. This is probably the most surprising element of the assailant’s mentality. If there is someone of romantic interest to the victim nearby, he will absolutely crash out and beat the living daylights out of his attacker. If there is someone of romantic interest to the assailant around, he will play around and pretend this was normal. This is indeed not normal. But this is the conclusion of my–our–research. Other participants in my analysis decided to remain anonymous. But when I asked them whether they thought yanking lanyards was fun, they all had around the same response.
“Nah, but [someone or other] did it to me so I gotta do it back to him.”
Thus, yanking lanyards will forever be a tradition of freshmen in high school—at least until the end of this school year. It is not uncommon these days to find people greatly lacking brain cells. The End.