In my opinion, the greatest hack of all time was the Great Barber Pole Hack. It was well organized, well executed, included a cast of hundreds, and pissed off the Cambridge Police, so all in all, a smashing success and a marvel of political organization. Ya gotta love it.

Two students approached a local barber and asked if they could buy his striped barber pole for $200.

“Sure,” said the barber–adjusted for 2006 dollars, it was probably like offering him a G-zer for it.

“The only catch,” they told him, “is that we can come take it whenever we want.”

“Okay,” said the barber, and they happily concluded their transaction.

The time the students chose to come get the barber pole was in the middle of the night. They sawed it off and began furtively sneaking through the streets of Cambridge with it. It wasn’t too long before a police officer stopped them and questioned the students’ legal and moral integrity.

“Honest, officer,” they told him, “it’s our pole.”

The police officer got the barber on the phone (undoubtedly getting him out of bed at that hour), verified that it was indeed their pole, and sent them on their way, at which point they resumed furtively sneaking through the streets of Cambridge with their perfectly legitimate striped prize. They were of course repeatedly stopped and questioned, with each successive officer getting the hapless barber out of bed to verify the students’ story.

After the barber lost patience with this arrangement, the police put a general call out on their radio band, saying something like, “If you see two young men sneaking furtively through the streets of Cambridge with a barber pole, don’t stop them–it’s their pole.” It was at this point that the student sitting in a dorm room with a police radio confirmed that the call had gone out, and 200 guys with hacksaws swarmed into the streets, cut off all the barber poles in Cambridge and piled them up on the Cambridge Common.