I love the line in Juno where Ellen Page says something like “Naaah…I’m already pregnant, what other kind of shenanigans can I get into?”
I’m going to type in a P-day experience of my mission that I think qualifies as “shenanigans,” and the point of this post is to inspire you to share your P-day experiences (read “follies”) with us.
Before I do, a word of explanation. I was a real Mormon goody two-shoes throughout high school. I wouldn’t even say “darn” because it was just a euphemism for “damn,” that sort of thing. Well, every boy goes through a rebellious period, and mine was on my mission. There weren’t many rules I didn’t break at some time or another. Nate has talked about how this can be a safe kind of outlet, because usually such rule breaking involves things that are not a problem in regular society and only rebellious in the context of the heightened missionary experience. That’s exactly how it worked for me. I was the James Dean of my mission, but when I came home the rule breaking was pretty much out of my system and I went back to BYU and being a good Mormon again. So please keep that in my mind and be charitable as you read this account, which records events that occurred on March 13, 1978. I have changed the names to protect the innocent.
3/13 Evening–
Ha! Today was a great P-day! In the morning we did our laundry at Smith’s and watched T.V. (Gong Show, Father Knows Best, Mayberry RFD, and an old Mata Hari movie). It was great! Then in the afternoon we got into some full-on 4 on 4 basketball action at the Stake Center (including Elder Brown and Elder Jones). It felt soooooooo good. Then we messed around at Sandoval’s for awhile.
The evening was a real crack-up. Elders Cheech and Chong had invited us out to go see “Beyond and Back.” We were supposed to try and get an investigator to go see it with us, but we couldn’t. So we go to the movie and sit down, and who shows up? Paris, Britney and Lindsay Diaz. I sat next to Paris (she sat next to me) and the D.L.’s never did show up. We talked almost the whole time–it was almost like a date! After the movie (which was real good, except for re-incarnation and a few minor points), Sis. Diaz gave us a ride in their new Dodge Colt (with me and Paris plastered together in the back seat), and Britney kept pushing Paris against me (and Paris didn’t care-ha ha). What a laugh! I loved it.
It was even more of a coincidence, since Paris had made dinner (meatloaf, I think) for us, but we weren’t home all day so they couldn’t get a hold of us. Oh, well, I still can’t believe it–I thought dancing was bad enough, but my first “date”! How will I ever make the C.K. now? I suppose I’d better stop writing–if the dead are to be judged “out of the books,” then my journal will be “exhibit A” against me! Later…
OK, so let the tales of P-Day follies commence!
March 7, 2008 at 9:35 pm
That’s just scandalous, Kevin. See mine at The Adventures of the Red Light District!
March 7, 2008 at 9:39 pm
wow, not bad.
My P-days were quite tame and innocent. See in Romania, if we would have done what you did, we would have been sent home. Heck, we had one missionary sent home immediately because he left his companion in their apartment and he went walking around town one evening alone. But Romania’s situation was quite tenuous. The church wasn’t officially recognized, and everyone had to walk a very fine line.
March 7, 2008 at 9:48 pm
If you didn’t need your passport, it wasn’t an adventuresome P-day.
March 7, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Hm…
We played football on the beach every monday morning (p-day morning) and watched sunday night football for lunch on mondays in the philippines. Nothing too scandalous to report. I think the rules were already pretty lax on my mission, so crossing the line meant doing something really bad, and not just “shenanigans” When Elder Packer sent out a letter telling us we could only call home for an hour, my mission president said “rules are meant to be broken”. When the MTC sent out a letter saying we needed to part our hair, he said “I believe in leading by example, and since I don’t have hair and barbers over hear don’t listen anyway, don’t worry about this.” When a close friend of mine confessed to the bishop he was attracted to women in his area, he said “There’s a difference between saying ’she’s attractive’ and going home, taking her clothes off and sleeping with her.”
I loved my mission president. I’d do anything for him. He’s also the only man I’ve ever met who’s used the term pisscicle to refer to frozen urine.
March 7, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Hmm. Let’s see. One PDay we took the bus to Old San Juan and I bought a Stephen King novel (can’t remember which one) and a Guinness Book of World Records. That’s about as wild as it got for me.
March 7, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Would love to hear such a story. In my mission our passports were taken upon arrival in country, and locked in the mission office safe, to be returned only upon leaving. I was even told no when I asked to see it on one occasion.
March 7, 2008 at 10:02 pm
I would share, but I know my spouse reads here.
Sorry honey, there’s just some things you don’t need to know.
March 7, 2008 at 10:04 pm
I loved your story, BiV!
Dan, I suppose if I were in a place like that I would have toed the line better. But I was in Colorado, which lent itself to a little bit of looseness in rule observance.
March 7, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Matt W., there was a hair part rule? I wouldn’t have been able to comply with such a thing, as my hair is just too curly.
March 7, 2008 at 10:26 pm
When did you serve in Romania, Dan?
Because there were some shenanigans in the early days.
March 7, 2008 at 10:39 pm
We didn’t always save the rebellion for P-Day. But a few memories:
-The entire district watching 5 straight hours of Elder Kaimori’s Jackie Chan fight scenes at the church.
-Our weekly outings to the local video game arcade to play Virtual Fighter
-Spending “the Lord’s funds” over a period of a year on amassing the entire Dragonball comic book series (hey, it was Japanese language study). My dad was absolutely mortified when I shipped them home 3 months before I came home.
-Raiding the dumpster outside “Mr. Donuts” at 3:00 AM Thursday morning for the free trash bags full of perfectly good donuts.
-Letting an attractive single mom take us on a sightseeing drive one P-Day. When I left the area, she gave me a pair of boxers as a gift. Still not sure what to make of that one…
-Marching in a parade as a Samurai escort for a Japanese princess. Companion nowhere to be seen for almost an hour.
-Catching a couple fish down at the pier. Decided to freeze em solid and gut em later while we went to Nagasaki for a zone meeting. Got back and discovered that we’d forgot to put them in the freezer. Had to transport the festering covered bucket by bike about a mile from the apartment and dump them in a river when we thought no one was looking.
-Trying to burn the old branch membership lists in the crowded back alley behind our apartment and catching hell from an old grandma about the stupid foreigner who is lighting things on fire surrounded by wood and paper buildings.
-Renting Indiana Jones from the local video rental store for use in our weekly English classes.
-Going to a local college heavy metal jam.
-Getting a full professional body massage from one of our investigators. She was old enough to be my mom, but still…
-Watching the Superbowl with a family of new members.
-Watching the movie Speed with the same family.
-Watching 45 minutes of Cliffhanger in the TV aisle of the local electronics store. Oddly enough, I’d never seen an R-rated movie until my mission…
And I was a pretty mild and obedient sort actually. A lot of the other missionaries were worse.
March 7, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Gosh, you all had much better P-days than I did! The comp and I would wake up around 5:30 like usual and sweep out a weeks worth of dust, dirt, and bat poop. Then mop, burn the trash, drop off our dirty clothes with the hermana down the street, and fish sticks and debris out of the well. After we showered we’d read our scriptures, the Liahona, letters from home or something until the power went out around 10:00 or so. Without the fans it was usually so hot we’d just go out and start tracting early since it was too miserable to be inside and there was nothing else to do.
I think the most scandalous thing we did was when we borrowed a pair of donkeys from an investigator and tracted por burro for most of the week. Man that sounds lame compared to these other stories!
March 7, 2008 at 10:54 pm
I used to drag my companion to “my” monastery in the mountains above Grenoble — you had to take a train, then a bus, then a long hike to get there, and even then you could only walk around the outside walls of la Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian order. I’m calling it shenanigans because we used to go so often that the nuns living on the grounds to do the cooking and laundry (women’s work is ever the same) thought we were Catholic pilgrims and once invited us to join them for dinner. We both would have loved to do that, but dang it all, we had to go back to town for a baptism. (It turned out not so bad — the “convert” was one of those who sample Mormonism like I sample chocolates, passing through and vanishing overnight. Her most recent church had been rather emotionally demonstrative, and she leaped out of our canvas baptismal bucket without the aid of the ladder, throwing both arms above her head and calling “Merci, Petit Jesus!”)
March 7, 2008 at 11:07 pm
My favorite P-day memory: Picture a small Argentine town at Christmas time, with 3 sets of missionaries serving in the ward. Picture 6 elders behind the chapel playing volleyball and making a real ruckus on their p-day. Picture the man who lived next door to the ward building, irritated by all the noise, demanding through his window that we be quiet. Picture our trying to be respectful of his wishes, but unable to contain our youthful exuberance. Picture our neighbor finally exiting his house, approaching our volleyball “court”, pulling out a handgun, telling us to be quiet or he’d kill all 6 of us and then put a bullet in his own head. You get the picture.
Good times. Admittedly, no real shenanigans on our part, but it’s a fond memory. (No one got shot).
Aaron B
March 8, 2008 at 12:04 am
Pday bads:
I had one comp that helped bring out the bad in me:
a couple times I went four wheeling at a member’s home who lived on a farm. Such fun. I did tell the mission pres when I left. I am grateful I wasn’t hurt, now that I know more about the dangers of 4 wheelers.
also I had heard some missionaries got tattoos on their mission, shame on me I joined that club.I don’t blame the comp who came up w/this idea. To this day, I don’t regret the tattoo as much as I regret is the misrepresentation to the mission pres in that we were given permission to go to town for another purpose.
Other than that,I was a pretty good missionary in terms of compliance. I did “hope” to be able to go on a certain P-day trip w/my comp and 2 elders but that plan never worked, secretly I had thought it would be like a date. But luckily it never fanned out.
March 8, 2008 at 12:07 am
Oh thought of one more though this wasn’t unique to Pday: we were allowed to get up and exercise at 6AM. I am not a morning person and the early AM wake up time was a huge struggle for me.
one of my comps liked to get up at 6AM to either go jog/walk or play basketball (pday activity) or other exercise.
Sometimes I’d lie in my bed and pray my comp wouldn’t wake up on time, so that we didn’t have to go to exercise at that dreadful hour.
March 8, 2008 at 12:09 am
We went to the movies almost every P-day.
When I’d been out about 6 weeks, we got a
letter from the Mission Prez saying “starting
NEXT week, no more x-rated movies. That
meant that that week, everybody in the mission
went to an x-rated movie!
That was SW British Mission, 1968-1970. See,
that was before there was a Church-wide rule
book for missions. Jut think, every one of
those rules is because of some “less-than-
spiritual” experience of us previous mssrys.
Now remember, all the Elders had tape recorders
to play regular music on for our P-days. That
was where I was introduced, by my comps, to
new rock groups and country & western music.
And, in some of our digs we had a TV. (Tho’ we
watched it fairly infrequently.)
Oh yeah, about those “X-rated” movies. That
was also BEFORE there even was a rating system
for movies in the US. So x-rated meant ANY
bad language, any violence, and yes, any sex.
But you never knew until you went to the flick.
Heck, some of the mild movies were x-rated
because they had a shooting or a cuss word.
Made ya think, tho’, cuz we did stumble into a
real x-rated movie once. Boy did we make a
quick exit!
Mission–GREAT experience! –Ron Titus
March 8, 2008 at 12:10 am
Word.
Renting little mopeds didn’t suck, either.
March 8, 2008 at 12:36 am
I was once in a four-man apartment in Portland. Apart from the nightly games of Hearts and Cribbage, one P-Day one of the Elders in the other companionship bought a pack of “Little Dynamites” – little firecrackers that had a fuse that would burn underwater. As the sun went down we were lighting them and throwing them into the ditch behind our apartment. Soon, however, the little flashes weren’t enough and it led to open Gatorade bottles of water splashing the roof of the shower (I’m still amazed that the Gatorade bottles never broke even when the lid was on–one of us actually held a bottle while the firecracker exploded inside). Eventually one of us (I really hope it wasn’t me) threw one in the toilet where it fell down the S-trap and blew the sides out of the tube, flooding the bathroom floor. It still didn’t stop us from going back to the ditch the next couple weeks, though.
March 8, 2008 at 1:06 am
Companion who had lived an interesting life and could pick just about any standard lock; breaking into the church, then the gym, then the piano to spend time playing rock music; hearing the door open and seeing the Bishop (young, native Japanese man who looked like yakuza – nice man but SCARY looking) coming toward us; being waved away from the piano; scared spitless; watching Bishop sit down and start to play . . . Pink Floyd.
Not as “bad” as most, but a memory I will never forget.
March 8, 2008 at 1:14 am
P-day shenanigans in Austria invariably involved mountains. The rule was “no climbing” which was generally obeyed but sometimes P-days started at 4am and finished very late in order to incorporate monster-but-otherwise-kosher Alpine hikes.
On one such hike we had a disagreement as to how far to go and one of our district walked home on his own (not to be seen until that evening). It was high summer and we all got sunburn and sunstroke and spent the next two days in bed. Worse still, the two young ladies who lived downstairs invited us over to apply lotion to our sunburn.
At this point, I shall end the story,
(Peter LLC: Knittelfeld, July 1995…)
March 8, 2008 at 1:17 am
1. Daytona Beach Spring Break 1987. Missionary apartment was right up the street from the beach next to the Volusia Mall. It was great. Driving on the beach in a mission car and getting flashed by the college babes was alot of fun too.
2. Had a part member family where the dad was a gun nut. He took us to the range to pop off some rounds. .44/.40 lever action rifle. It was great.
3. Movies: Top Gun, Ruthless People, Beverly Hills Cop II, Platoon to name a few.
4. The best of all: I hurt my back real bad. There was a member in the ward who was a licenced massage therapist. We went to the Chiroparactor office she worked out of and I was alone in a room with a female wearing nothing but a sheet.
March 8, 2008 at 5:33 am
Wm Morris,
#10,
I served from March 95 – February 97. When did you serve?
March 8, 2008 at 8:06 am
Feb. ‘92 – Jan. ‘94.
We actually never did anything super wild (except for the time we took the mission van to Snagov for the day — but even that was to celebrate that our district had met our goal to teach a bunch of discussions that month).
But there were less than 30 of us for awhile so we all used to meet up somewhere and play Ultimate frisbee or basketball and then go eat at “Baptist” burger.
March 8, 2008 at 8:30 am
I am appalled, etc. at the shenanigans of all you bad, bad missionaries. But reading these comments brings back a few memories.
1. I grew up in Utah where fireworks were outlawed. It is a measure of my lameness to admit that driving up to Evanston, WY to buy Black Cat firecrackers was a big deal. So you can imagine my delight when I got to Germany where 5 year olds can buy WMD grade fireworks. We used to go to a pond behind our apartment and toss explosives into the water, just to watch them go BOOM!. Very gratifying.
2. With Elder X, every day was P-day. He was lazy, and had figured out the trick of sending fake referral cards in to the office. So two or three times a week we would get a referral from the office to an address at 14 Rathaus Strasse or 23 Marktplatz in some little dorf in our area, usually about 35 kilometers away. Since Elder X always wrote something like “I have read the Book of Mormon and know it is true. Please send missionaries.” on the card, we always got it back from the APs with at note saying: “This one looks golden!!! Good luck, brethren!!!” So, we spent several days a week on wild goose chases that were actually planned by my companion. Again, it is a measure of my lameness that it took 3 or 4 weeks for me to figure out what was going on, and why the person never lived at the address on the card.
3. My MP alllowed us to see one movie a month. Germans like Clint Eastwood, so I saw spaghetti Westerns and Dirty Harry movies.
4. In my mission, you rode the subway if your city had one, otherwise you were on a bike. The mission president was concerned that the subway riders weren’t getting enough cardio-vascular workouts, so he instituted a program of daily calisthenics for the non-bike riders. Four of us lived in an apartment on the second floor. We were to exercise upon rising in the morning at 6:30, and on the first day of the program, at about 6:33, our landlady was at our door, demanding that we cease and desist, immediately if not sooner. She lived on the first floor, and was awakened by what she thought was a herd of buffalos in her bedroom, but turned out to be 4 19 y.o.s running place and doing squat thrusts.
March 8, 2008 at 8:58 am
“Watching 45 minutes of Cliffhanger in the TV aisle of the local electronics store. Oddly enough, I’d never seen an R-rated movie until my mission”
I, too can testify of the temptations in digitally-advanced Japan. I had a companion obsessed with Harry Potter who wanted to go to the electronics store to watch it when it came out on DVD. The store even had a nice couch right in front of the TVs, which was nice. Other than that, I always made a point of getting a library card in all of my areas and reading books other than A Marvelous Work (Japanese language study, of course).
March 8, 2008 at 9:10 am
Hold on a minute here. Frozen urine?
March 8, 2008 at 10:29 am
How about convincing the mission president that the “hogueras” in our Mediterranean Spanish town was a wholesome cultural holiday?
The festival begins a few weeks in advance, when local neighborhoods commission artists to build 10-30 ft plaster sculptures, usually of strange or lewd subjects. On the appointed evening, hundreds of drunken Spaniards gather together in the town square at midnight. “Go” is the explosion of thousands of firecrackers a few feet over your heads. At this point, everyone runs to the nearest sculpture and gathers around in a frenzy. The local firemen show up and light the sculpture on fire. (“Hogueras” means bonfires.) The firefighters hose down the buildings and street lining palm trees to prevent spread of the fire. (Picture a European town with narrow streets.) At this point the crowd starts cursing at the firefighters (by tradition). Hoses are then re-directed to the crowd. Everyone laughs and then races off a few streets over where the cycle begins again.
A few months earlier, we went to a small town that hosted something like Running of the Bulls. Except it was at night and the bull plus crowd were confined to three square blocks in the city center. Torchlight, drunken crowd, and angry bull = bad combination. Will NEVER do that again.
March 8, 2008 at 10:46 am
The short clip at the bottom of the page is Hogueras de San Juan in Alicante.
http://www.veralicante.com/veralicante/?q=en/node/34
March 8, 2008 at 10:54 am
For adherence to rules, my life has been the opposite of Kevin’s. Two years of strict obedience was my exception, so I can’t tell any biographical stories here. However, my wife told me of a missionary who was charged with arson for burning a tie in the alley behind the Elder’s apartment. I’d love to be the mission pres. that got that call. I’d say, “Why did you waste your call on me, sounds like you need a lawyer.” I think the missionary later plead guilty to a lesser charge like juvenile mischief.
March 8, 2008 at 11:04 am
I have two stories: “Hyper-mileage” and “eBay.” The events take place in Indiana in the year 2002. I got sent home because I drove my companions nutters, but not because of the events listed below.
HYPER-MILEAGE
I served in a United States mission in the Midwest, and we shared a vehicle every two weeks with another companionship. Our vehicle also had monthly mileage restrictions, and if one companionship exceeded their share of the miles for the month, we had to find a way to make up the difference.
The midwestern United States are covered with a lot of long, straight roads with no traffic on them. Our vehicle, a 2000 Ford Focus, used a digital odometer to track mileage. When the car was off, nothing was counted. Our plan was to accelerate to a ridiculously high speed and then shut off the car to coast off the miles.
It worked. We saved an average of 3 miles on a 20 mile trip. Although the gains we made were probably outweighed by the sheer stupidity of driving without power brakes or power steering.
EBAY
In the year 2002, the church had finally granted permission for our mission to use E-Mail to write home. That meant we could go to the public library and access the Internet. Oh Internet, how I longed for thee on my mission. I had only been away from my computer for a month at this point and I was jonesing for information. We weren’t allowed to buy newspapers so I called 1-800-555-TELL for my news fix while my companion was in the shower every morning.
Our area had some really cool scenery and there were lots of events that I wished to capture. At this time, I was hell-bent on getting an SLR camera. I had my eyes on a Canon Rebel G, but the local Wal-Mart didn’t carry a camera like this, and the camera shops wanted too much money.
One day at the library, ostensibly checking my email, I was surfing the Internet for news, and the idea struck me to go check eBay.
I found the camera I wanted and bid on it. This is well before the days of Buy-It-Now, and since I couldn’t watch the auction throughout the week, I just prayed that I would be the high bidder. Imagine my surprise the next week when I found out I’d won! I used Paypal to furnish the transactions, and had everything shipped to our local address. I didn’t do any shopping around transfers time because there was a good chance I might miss the package.
I continued buying lenses and filters for months and by the time I came home I had amassed over $1,000 in equipment and shot 20 rolls of film.
March 8, 2008 at 12:00 pm
I served in the Central America mission (Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama) from 1972-74, so we had to keep our passports with us at all times. Most of our visas were only good for three months, so if we stayed longer than that in a given country, we usually had to make a trip (via an old, uncomfortable bus over bad roads) to the nearest border to leave the country, then get a new visa and come back in.
My most heart-pounding p-day was a zone excursion to a volcano in Nicaragua. You could get to the summit of the volcano and then look down into the caldera, which was pretty much a straight shaft, down to the crater floor a thousand feet or so below. The volcano itself was only slightly active, spewing up small pumice rocks that would occasionally land up on the summit.
We hadn’t been there long when I happened to look to one side just in time to see Elder Garfield (a former companion) jump onto this slightly sloping ledge covered with the small pumice rocks. What I could see — and what Elder Garfield couldn’t — was that the ledge sloped down for about 15-20 feet and then abruptly dropped into the crater, with no lip or anything else to grab. As one of the zone leaders, all I could think was, “How am I going to explain to the President about Elder Garfield falling into a volcano?”
I yelled very loudly (and a bit frantically) for Elder Garfield — who was sliding a bit on the rocks — to get off that ledge immediately. He did so, but I spent the rest of the paseo [CA Spanish term meaning roughly 'outing', 'activity'] in something of a cold sweat over how close I had come to watching a fellow missionary (and friend) fall 1000 feet to his death and being responsible for dealing with the aftermath (including answering questions as to why we picked that particular activity in the first place).
Note, by the way, that the mission office was in an entirely different country (Costa Rica), and we had no stakes in Nicaragua — just a single district and a half-dozen or so branches. We saw the mission president about once every six weeks; other than that, we (the zone leaders) pretty much ran the missionary work for the entire country (and, frankly, had to run much of the Church as well). My companion, Elder Jim Thomas, and I used to look at each other, shake our heads, and wonder how the heck we ended up in that position. But at least no one died on our watch.
..bruce..
March 8, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I guess the rebellion depends on how strict your mission was. I felt guilty and confessed to my MP when we stopped in front of a video store in Australia just to watch the trailers for the latest releases on their tv. It was the only television I watched my whole mission. And then I had a companion report me because I bought book of Australian history that I’d occasionally read on P-Day. Not one of the approved books you see.
If I would have let P-day go until 5 p.m instead of 3 p.m. so we could do more sightseeing, or if I’d let my district cross a mile into another district to see amazing sights, would it really have hurt anything?
One of my biggest regrets on my mission is not bending the rules occasionally.
March 8, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Hmm, that’s probably a violation of immigration law (the part where foreigners are supposed to keep their documents with them or nearby), but if it keeps the missionaries from breaking mission rules, then so be it!
Shenanigan:
Sledding off an embankment, seeing who could catch the most air, a particular sister not wanting to let the boys show her up, a particular sister beating the elders by a mile, a particular sister laying on the flat ground far beyond the embankment with the wind knocked out of her, a particular sister going, er, hobbling to the doctor and being diagnosed with a broken tailbone.
March 8, 2008 at 12:26 pm
I was the real rebel.
I spent my P-days working.
Teaching Discussions, Tracting, Service projects, reading the latest anti-Mormon literature given to our Investigators and preparing responses based on scripture.
Obviously I was the only one around here who actually bucked the system.
March 8, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Truer words were never spoken.
“Hey, dudes–Dachstein?”
“Sure, man. Isn’t there like a glacier up there?”
“Won’t know until we find out!”
March 8, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Pete,
I’m sure I told you about the proposed Upper Austria/Steirmark/Salzburg meet-up on the Dach? Didn’t come off (I don’t think). I have to say that as a pretty obedient missionary, such proposals made me nervous.
March 8, 2008 at 1:46 pm
They made me nervous because disobedient missionaries who climbed mountains were sure to fall and perish. After all, that’s what happened to a kid in the MTC in 1995 and boy, they made sure we learned the “moral” of that sorry tale.
March 8, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Sorry; I was a particularly well-behaved sister missionary. The only “folly” I can think of was refusing to memorize the 3. – 6. discussions; we never taught them, so why bother? (I feel vindicated by the new missionary program that doesn’t require word-by-word recital.)
However, I did want to mention the mermaid.
As I started my mission, there was a cigarette advertising campaign (1993, Germany) that featured large billboards of a very buxom mermaid. No seashells for this gal.
The elders told us after interviews that the mission president asked them, “So has the mermaid gotten you yet, elder?”
March 8, 2008 at 3:19 pm
The Paris, Britney, and Lindsay part was a nice touch.
March 8, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Just last weekend we were cleaning and my 11 year old daughter started going through my old pictures. She was pretty amused at the picture of me and my companion, along with a few others from the district, cooling off after a long day of tennis in the hot, hot south.
The picture happened to be of a few of us eating popsicles and soaking in the baptismal font.
March 8, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Most of my PDays were pretty boring (having no money and no car), but I remember one where the whole district got a cold, so we hung out at the ZL’s apt and played monopoly. We used two monopoly boards in a figure 8 pattern, three dice, and made up some funky rules. The game went on for over 8 hours until the ZL lost to his comp. I knew a lot of missionaries who did much worse stuff (dance clubs, Nirvana concerts, leaving the mission to go to Marti Gras)
March 8, 2008 at 5:04 pm
On storing passports (34): we stored passports in our mission office even though we were thousands of kilometers from any border. I don’t know if it violated immigration law or not but it did prevent passports from being lost or stolen–the Mission President said an American passport had a street value of US$3,000.
March 8, 2008 at 5:38 pm
#43:
Well, I suppose it depends on the country, but most like to keep track of their foreigners and letting them run around undocumented doesn’t suit that end particularly well. But missionaries carve themselves more than a few exceptions to the law in this regard, like not bothering to renew their visas, so no big deal I guess.
Ronan, you did tell me about the proposed, ahem, summit on the Dachstein–my inspiration for the dialogue.
Like those black sheep who sullied the spirit of Preparation Day by referring to it as “p-day”?
March 8, 2008 at 5:46 pm
WM Morris,
#28,
I think I remember my trainer tell me about that trip. My trainer was Krister Anderson.
March 8, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Forget the law – there’s a huge ethical problem involved in removing someone else’s passport from their possession.
March 8, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Actually the most disobedient thing I did wasn’t on a p-day. My companion and I had a car and the Elders in our district didn’t. It was FORBIDDEN to give them a ride anywhere, but the poor kids were on bikes and there was ice everywhere and we were all going to the mall to ask all the unsuspecting shoppers if they would like to learn more about Jesus Christ. So… we put the Elders in the trunk. They sang Weird Al songs all the way there and smiled and waved at the folks who were staring in amazement as we exhumed them in the mall parking lot.
March 8, 2008 at 10:14 pm
I was told that my passport was taken to keep me in the country. I guess they had some problems with mystery flights in the past. I must have looked like a flight risk.
March 8, 2008 at 10:48 pm
My mission president was very strict about us wearing our full missionary attire at all times on P-day except to play basketball. While I was his AP I innocently asked him why he thought this was necessary. He leaned toward me, looked at me with a straight face and said, “What am I supposed to do when Elders walk around all day in shorts and then go home and masterbate?!!”
Despite his “shorts-induced-masterbation theory” and his strict P-day policies, my mission president still had to send a good handful of missionaries home for getting drunk and hooking up with chicks. I never heard if they were wearing shorts at the time.
March 8, 2008 at 11:10 pm
In one of my areas, there was a shady part of town with lots of these billboards (and real-life girls, too) on the way home. I remember laughing out loud when riding by on my bike for the first time. My companion yelled, “Put your head down, Elder!” and proceeded to bike full-speed through the area, eyes to the road, nearly running over a few people. No doubt we drew a lot of attention to ourselves being there. I’m sure the victorian upbringing of most of our missionaries produces a lot of these situations.
March 9, 2008 at 12:09 am
After reading these stories of P-days, I’m grateful I was born in an earlier generation. I was a rebellious kid in my youth and went to Juvenile Court for breaking my neighbors garage windows and then knocking out the plywood he put in to replace the glass. After leaving the Court I decided to “shape up” before they caught me for keeping my street in eternal darkness by shooting the street lights with my with my “flipper”.
By the time I was 20 (that was the earliest back then that an Elder could go on a mission)and left for my mission, I had overcome my rebelliousness, I had had a responsible summer job for five summers, two years of college studying Electrical Engineering, and I was already settling down as a serious person.I was used to being away from home and being responsible for myself.
I served most of my time in West Virginia in 1956 and 1957. My companion and I were the only missionaries in our area. One of my companions had a car, but missionary cars back then were furnished by the family not by the church. We had no bikes and we walked everywhere. The referral system hadn’t been introduced yet, and our missionary work was 100% tracting.
We had no P-day, just some time on Saturday or other day for shopping, house cleaning, washing clothes, etc. As I said, I was already a serious college student, and becoming a serious missionary was not a big adjustment. My mission only had a few rules, so they weren’t a problem. We saw the MP about every six months at a conference, and our Supervising Elders once a month for two days. The rest of the time, my companion and I were it.
The draft for the Korean War was still active, and I knew that I would be drafted as soon as I was released. Instead of waiting to be drafted, I joined the National Guard, served 6 months active duty, and then returned to college. Being a serious missionary helped me handle the stress of Army boot camp.
As I said at the beginning, there are advantages to being an old geezer now.
March 9, 2008 at 8:10 am
Sadly, here’s a reminder that I just picked up on the newswires today of the real damage to the Church missionary effort that some “p-day shenanigans” can cause:
Idiots. This is going to do wonders for the missionary work in and interchurch relations down in southern Colorado/northern New Mexico. ..bruce..
March 9, 2008 at 10:03 am
There were four sisters in my mission who decided to visit the border and take pictures of themselves on the other side: “Hey look, mom! I’m in Honduras!” Yeah, well they crossed the bridge and took their pictures. However, as they turned to come back home, the nice man with the big gun asked to see their papers. Obviously none of them had their papers – their passports were all safely locked up in the mission office.
They had to call the president and tell him they were stuck in Honduras. President dispatched the APs who drove the mission van over the bridge and picked up the sisters, only to be told by the nice man with the big gun that – not only were they to be fined for taking an unauthorized vehicle into the country – they had to stay in Honduras for 24 hours before being allowed back into El Salvador.
There was only enough money for one hotel room. The APs and the four sister missionaries had to spend the night together before returning in shame to El Salvador the next day. President threatened to cancel p-day for the whole mission after that.
March 9, 2008 at 10:27 am
I was one of those jerks in the mission who tried to keep all the rules all the time.
I did hear a story about some elders sent to Polochic who kept life interesting on p-days by purchasing diazepam at the local pharmacy. Guatemalan pharmacies would sell just about anything over the counter.
March 9, 2008 at 12:51 pm
I think this now. But as a young, innocent missionary, I didn’t think anything of it. I was stuck on a big rock called Great Britain. To leave the country required more than shenanigans.
The only reason I even asked to see mine later was because I had a companion whose received a 6 month visa with a requirement to check in at the local police station anywhere he lived. The mission had to get an appropriate “free-range” (for lack of a better description) visa for him shortly after he arrived. Being obsessive-compulsive I wanted to ensure my passport was stamped correctly. Never once did I need to present papers to any British authority as I went about my business.
March 9, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Here’s an article with some pictures regarding the incident Bruce mentions above. This goes beyond youthful idiocy; this is serious stuff. I feel terrible for the poor MP who is left to try to deal with the repurcussions.
March 9, 2008 at 1:31 pm
My mission was fairly strict about P-Day time. We typically had only 4 hours for P-day – we were expected to be back out working after lunch. There was one time when I really didn’t pay any attention to that rule and spent the day playing in a pick-up band at a local music store. I wrote the whole thing up a couple of years ago and posted it to soc.religion.mormon. It would be too long to post here, but if you’re interested, you can go to groups.google.com and enter “group:soc.religion.mormon insubject:p-day” (without the quotes) into the search box and click on search. Mine will be one of the two results returned.
March 9, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Oh wow! Yeah, there are articles appearing everywhere about those missionaries vandalizing a Catholic shrine.
Here is another one. It is really sad.
March 9, 2008 at 8:20 pm
We had to surrender our passports upon arrival because, a few months before, some greenie had stolen the Book of Mormon kitty and fled to Okinawa.
March 9, 2008 at 9:50 pm
How about the time when my companion and I were the only missionaries NOT to go to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir concert! By some coincidence (or divine providence) the only two missionaries in the Japan Kobe mission who would rather proselyte than spend all day (and a good chunk of money) traveling to see the Choir happened to be companions. I felt very rebellious given that our mission president wanted everyone to attend …
March 10, 2008 at 9:44 am
I live in Southern Colorado, so these idiots are serving where I live. I just feel glad I don’t recognize them.
A fun P-Day for us in Korea was to take the bus as far as it went and start hiking from there. My favorite memory was when we happened on to a Buddhist temple that was celebrating its 2500 year anniversary. The monks thought we were Amrican Buddhists coming to pay our respects, and so even though the feast was over before we arrived, they got out the leftovers and set us up a spread. We even got a commemorative medallion, with a picture of the stone-carved Buddha on it.
March 10, 2008 at 9:47 am
I remember going to Loch Lomond in Scotland on a beautiful summers day. Looking out across the Loch and nobody in sight my companion and I looked at each other, looked at the water, read each other’s minds, stripped, ran and dove in!
Following this we played “Salt lake-opoly with half the MALE YSA’s in the ward until the early hours and ordering curries and pizza’s in the process! THrough all this for some reason we still insisted on listening to borderline music like Braveheart (fitting), Last of the Mohicans etc. etc. rather than the British Mod music I am was more accustomed to!
March 11, 2008 at 11:40 am
We too surrendered our passports in South America. Then my mission president ordered the shooting of a congressman and news crew who had come to investigate our colony. He then induced us all to drink poison.
Which is to say, the passport-confiscation practice fails Ronan’s ever-helpful test: If it seems cultish when someone else does it, it’s cultish when we do it.
March 11, 2008 at 12:01 pm
John Deacon, the worst that my companion and I did on the banks of Loch Lomond were ride our bikes too far so that we could not get back in time and made ourselves sick on the berries that we picked and ate on the way. The only musical problem that I had on that trip was my companion incessantly singing “Ye’ll tak the high road and I’ll tak the low road,” until I could have screamed. From your musical references you were there MUCH more recently than I was.
March 17, 2008 at 9:32 am
The Trib’s Robert Kirby is making a bid to one-up everyone so far.
http://www.sltrib.com/faith/ci_8579246
March 18, 2008 at 2:18 am
Well, missionaries in the Korea Pusan Mission might have beaten that!
It happened shortly before my arrival in the country, so I’m just giving the review of events here.
Hot humid summer, American missionaries, 3 floor multi-family home with a 1 meter high wall surrounding the roof, an interior door removed and re-positioned to block off the stairway entrance to said roof, lots of items to block off the roof drains, and a garden hose.
P-DAY POOL!
Then, the unrealized fact that the roof was not engineered for that large amount of water on it. It collapsed, flooding out the missionaries’ apartment, and giving the other families below quite a sight out their windows as the water quickly exited out the missionaries’ doorways.
March 19, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Ronan #38: they weren’t kidding you. I was in the MTC when that missionary snuck out to go rock climbing and I well remember when we had explained to us what had happened. It was a very sobering day and I’m not surprised they’re still repeating the story.
March 22, 2008 at 12:51 am
When I was in Guatemala, the tough mission work was compounded by the rough living. Sometimes the rules didn’t even seem to apply to our bizarre situations. Many of us ended up using the rulebook as emergency toilet paper.
In southern Guatemala on one memorable P-day we went with the family we lived with to a cool place called “Andamira”, which were caves you had to swim into. Seemed rather cool at the time.
Also we went to a lovely beach called “Las Lisas” for the day. I would love to go there again. Someone had to paddle you to the beach through a swamp on these little log canoes. You can rent these Gilligan Island huts for 50 cents a day. Yes, we got a little sunburned.
Hiked three hours to a cool waterfall in the jungle on the coast of Guatemala with our district missionaries. Fine, except a couple of elders didn’t want to go and stayed back and about an hour in I realized we were on a double date with two hermanas. That one did end up back at the mission president for some reason. Wasn’t me.
Crossed over the border into el Salvador just so I could have an authentic “pupusa”. Even though we didn’t have our passports (strange, when I think about it now), the border guards let us pass when we gave them some of our “valuable” folletos. They were still reading them when we crossed back into Guate. Maybe we changed a life???
Since I was into Mayan ruins, we made a day-long trip across the country. I had been feeling a little peeved that I couldn’t see some of these things that some other missionaries told me about. So we went. When I looked at the guest signbook at the site, there were a couple of general authorities signatures and all the office elders. I signed my name in real big letters.
Let me tell you, I was a good, solid hard-working elder. I’m surprised now as I review the sum total of some memorable p-days. But our president let us see movies on p-days, and we did some fun zone activites, too. Heck, we climbed a volcano with lava, with our entire zone one p-day.