From applying for jobs barefoot to bartering in a fast-food drive-thru, a group of Houston pranksters is blowing up social media.
Their latest stunt involved duct-taping a guy to a road sign near the intersection of Wallisville Road and Beltway 8.
“I’m going to go with the Rockets no matter what. He went with the Warriors,” said Miguel Chavez, explaining the losing bet that led to him being the subject of a now-viral video.
Chavez said he knew he’d lost the bet, but he was unsure of the consequences until his friend Matt Gonzalez showed up with four rolls of duct tape on Wednesday.
“I said, ‘Let’s tape him. Let’s duct tape him.’ He was like, ‘That’s a good idea!’” Gonzalez said.
He gave Chavez two options: get taped to a car or a sign. A coin flip decided Chavez’ fate. The video that followed shows his friends wrapping him in duct tape, securing him to the yield sign, as drivers honked and shouted at him.
“Everybody was recording,” Chavez said. “I had friends stop because they saw me. Some people almost wrecked.”
The video shot by Chavez’ friend, who goes by the name “My House Is Dirty,” blew up on social media over the next few days. But it’s not the first time one of their videos has done so.
Last summer, a video of two men in a rousing one-on-one game of basketball in the middle of the Gulf Freeway feeder road made headlines. That led to one of the men getting arrested on an unrelated charge.
When Harris County deputies responded to the duct tape prank on Wednesday, Chavez admits he was a little nervous.
“I was like, ‘Man, they’re going to give me a ticket,” he said.
They didn’t, but a spokesman for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office says deputies in no way condone the behavior that wasted the agency’s resources, albeit for a short time.