I actually did this to my family on YTK when I was 12. My parents and grandparents were up partying with a few friends from the neighborhood. I remember everyone was talking about YTK and the end of the world for weeks prior and how it was just a hoax but you could still tell a few people were genuinely concerned. Especially my grandma.

One of the older kids at the party joked that we should prank our parents and turn the power off. I was a 12 year old girl not known for being a prankster or doing anything crazy at the time but immediately blurted out that I knew where the power breaker was. This kids face lit up with glee and then we began formulating a plan on how pull this off without getting caught.

I pretended to go to sleep but then snuck out of my second story bedroom by climbing/jumping off a second story deck that had no stairs and then crawling to our detached garage a couple hundred feet away where the breaker box was. I used a walkie talkie with the neighbor kid who was doing the count down from inside the house so I could turn it off right when it hit midnight.

We lived out in the middle of nowhere so our neighbors were a couple acres away so from inside the house you couldn’t automatically see lights from anywhere else. Pretty sure there’s a family video somewhere taken on a camcorder from my grandmother standing and recording the countdown on the tv and then the power going off and everything going black and her cursing in disbelief. ‘No way. No Fucking Way!’

I hid under my dads truck and waited for everyone to come outside and listened to their conversation go from panic to confusion as they saw lights from the city and other neighbors houses and then I finally rolled out from under the truck laughing hysterically. Most of the adults were laughing with us as me and the other kid proudly revealed everything but my grandma was PISSED and wouldn’t even look at me. Pretty sure she gave me the side eye for weeks.

Good times. Sorry Grandma.