My senior year of high school I had had enough of my school's stupid arbitrary rules and general shitiness so when I got a $25 parking ticket I put off paying it until the very end of the year in hopes that they would forget about it. It should be mentioned that the money from the parking tickets paid the salary of the guy who wrote them and that by the end of the year 3/4 of the parking lot was "staff" parking. Two weeks before the end of school I started getting threatening notes saying that if I didn't pay my fine I WOULD NOT GET MY DIPLOMA. This scared the crap out of my mom, but after a little research I realized that they wouldn't hold your final transcripts until you had $50 of fines. This cleared the way for me to exact my revenge: my $25 parking ticket paid entirely in pennies. I started going from bank to bank and getting a few dollars of pennies at a time during my open period and by the last day of school I had them all ready to go, unrolled and in a pillow case.
When I took them to the office they told me that they would not accept my particular form of payment (as I had suspected the would). When I told them that was fine, but this was the only form of payment I had they told me that that meant I would not be receiving my diploma. I told them that was fine and asked the secretary how many times she had used her high school diploma since receiving it. She stammered that "well, sometimes they ask for it when you apply for jobs." I told her I would take my chances and walked out.
I never did get my diploma, just an empty diploma holder which makes for a nice metaphor of my high school experience. They actually put my diploma in the safe because they knew I had an in with one of the teachers who was equally disillusioned with the leadership and had the previous year stolen the diploma of the valedictorian who had to be forcibly removed from the stage during his valedictorian speech because he had turned it into a string of expletives aimed at our incompetent principal.
