Members of USC's Alpha Delta Pi sorority were surprised Feb. 23 to discover a key to their sorority house up for auction on eBay.com, the result of a prank by three USC students.
In a strange chain of events that began about a week and a half ago, third-year business student Jay Harper proposed a plan to his friends, second-year business student Brett Younker and second-year English student Shawn Eubanks, to play a joke on the sorority. The three obtained the key to the Alpha Delta Pi house from a member of the sorority and took photos of themselves holding the key.
They then logged on to eBay, an online auction site, where they entered the house for online auction with a $10-million minimum bid, to ensure that nobody would purchase the house key, they said. In place of a photo of the house, which normally appears on an eBay auction page, they posted instead the photo of the three of them holding the key to the house.
As more and more people viewed the site on Monday night, it became apparent that not everybody was taking this as a joke.
"A lot of people were confused and didn't know if it was real or not," Alpha Delta Pi member and first-year business student Elizabeth Jenkins said. "The advisers and some of the sisters don't know these guys, and so they were afraid because, as far as they knew, the key to their house was just out there floating around in the open."
Word spread of the Web page overnight, and the three received a call the following afternoon from Kara Lane, a third-year exercise science student and president of the sorority's USC chapter, asking them to take the Web page down.
"Most of the girls knew these guys, and so they knew it was just a friendly joke," Lane said. "I even thought it was kind of funny, but I can see from an adviser standpoint how the prank really does pose a serious safety hazard with people knowing the key to the house is out there somewhere. There was no choice other than to take the page down."
The students did not face any punishments for their actions, but the Alpha Delta Pi's sorority mother did report the incident to regional Alpha Delta Pi Housing Corp. President Belinda Gillespie, who called from Spartanburg to have a talk with Eubanks.
"She basically just called to explain the legitimate reasons why we had been asked to take the page down," Eubanks said.
"I don't think there are any hard feelings - in fact, most of the sisters thought it was funny and even sent around a mass e-mail with a link to the eBay page on it for everyone to see," Younker said.
Harper spoke for his two friends when he said, "It was just supposed to be a friendly joke, but it got so big so fast. In retrospect, we wish we hadn't done it."
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