(For those reading on LiveJournal: "Story Hour" is an occasional series of the more entertaining anecdotes from the part of my life before I started keeping an online diary. I write them down in here whenever I remember a good one. Unfortunately, it's been running for nearly three years in my Monochrome diary, so I'm afraid you've missed all the best ones already... Anyway, on with the show.)

When I was in the third form at secondary school, two of my classmates had a thunderous shouting match one afternoon in our dormitory. Eventually one of them lost his temper completely, picked up a metal waste-bin, and hurled it very hard at the other one's head. Not being completely stupid, the other guy ducked, and the bin smashed a window behind him.

The usual sorts of things happened: the housemaster came in and lectured the whole class on responsibility, and then told us that each of us would have the full cost of the window put on our school bill unless the culprit owned up (though I don't think the parents stood for that in the end). And a little while later, a glazier showed up and put in a new pane of glass.

Unfortunately, neither he nor the housemaster bothered to let us know that putty takes a day or two to dry. So an hour or so after he'd gone, one of my other classmates climbed up on the cupboard in front of the window (those cupboards were popular places to sit) and leaned back against the window pane - which promptly fell straight out of its frame, and shattered on the ground below. The classmate was as startled as everyone - he very nearly fell straight through after it, and only just managed to grab hold of the window frame and stop himself.

The housemaster spluttered and fumed and desperately tried to charge us all for the replacement window pane again, but eventually had to admit that thirteen-year-old boys couldn't reasonably have been expected to know everything about the process of glazing, and that it was his own fault for not warning us the putty wouldn't be dry for a while, so he had to pay for that one himself. After his attempt to get paid thirteen times the cost of the first windowpane by charging everybody the full cost, we thought this was absolute poetic justice. :-)