Have you ever had an April Fool’s joke backfire on you and lead to unintended consequences? Or, have you ever been the victim of a prank where you ruined it for the jokester? It doesn’t even have to be an April Fool’s joke necessarily since people pull pranks year-round.
I don’t have any stories of my own to share since I am not one who takes kindly to being on the receiving end of practical jokes and most people who know me are wise to avoid such antics, but I’d like to read about other people’s experiences.
The last time I ever pranked anyone (going on 14 years ago), I let the joke go on waaaay too long. I was doing a junior year abroad in England. One of my fellow American classmates pulled a little joke on me. I retaliated thusly: near the end of the year, when he was trying to sell his bicycle, I invented a fictitious English chap named Simon Irving, who was very very interested in buying my classmate’s bike. Problem was, Simon was terribly difficult to get a hold of, and could only meet at very inconvenient times in the far corners of Cambridge (including, once, a non-existent street address). Simon had a nasty habit of missing appointments, then apologizing very sincerely for the inconvenience. Simon ony communicated by notes left in my classmates’ mailbox (this was before email). By a strange turn of events and bureaucratic snafu, Simon himself had no mailbox. But, he was always very very interested in purchasing my classmate’s bike.
This would have been funny for, like, a day or two. Letting it go on for a week or more, was, however, kind of dickish. My classmate seemed to get really down over the whole thing. The anxiety over possibly not selling the bike really got to him. By the time I let him off the hook, it wasn’t a playful prank, it was me being an ass. (He did, finally, sell the bike to a real guy). Anyway, you’ll note that was the last time I ever played a “practical joke” on anyone.
My sister and I got my dad one of those fake lotto tickets for his Christmas stocking one year. I remember he was sitting there and scratched it and just quietly said “I won.” We all played along and my dad almost was to the point of tears of joy. I guess at that time my parents were in a financial hardship and REALLY could have used the money. When he realized it was a joke he just got all quiet. I still feel bad about that.
The line between something being plausible enough to get people to co-operate with the rest of your scheme, and being plausible enough to involve them emotionally is pretty darn thin and should be handled with more caution than those involved did.
(I’m not going to provide more details, but it was kind of the equivalent of **Mouse Maven’s ** thread in MPSIMS where her husband thought it would be funny to “swipe” their baby, and she screamed bloody murder.)
I once set up an elaborte prank for a co-worker. At the time I worked at a small movie theatre. The owner was a good friend and his sister was the target of the prank. She was going to find a ‘dead body’ when she came into work.
The thing is, she was late for work and I had to ditch the plans as we had to open the theatre.
I was going out the back door with the dummy and there she was sitting in her car with her boyfriend. She had been there the whole time but she was just confused as to when she should start.
At school, we had a drawing for prizes at Christmas and one was a fake “winning” lottery ticket. When the ruse was discovered, it went over like a turd in a punch bowl.
It wasn’t really a practical joke…but one year at Halloween I went over to my gf’s house. I put on a sheet and a mask and hid in the bushes. When I heard kids coming up the walk (I couldn’t see them), I’d leap out and scream bloody murder. The first couple times, I got young teenagers who were totally blasé about it. “Oh, whatever,” they’d say.
The third time, I screamed and discovered it was this little 2 year-old. Scared her to death, really. Took off the mask…feel better? (NONONONONONO, wailing inconsolably). I felt pretty cool then :smack: :rolleyes: . She’s probably still in therapy.
Not one that I did or was even around for, but I’ll tell how it would have ended very differently had I been the “mark”.
My sister was telling me about her dive trip over to Catalina this weekend. In the middle of regaling me with tales of the undersea, she pauses to tell me, “And oh yeah, those shitty little teenagers I came across…”
Apparently, on April Fool’s Day, she was just coming up out of the water and heading for someplace up the shore, when a gaggle of little 12 y.o. gigglebitches came up to her and asked if she would take their picture. My sister, being a congenial sort, of course agreed. They handed over their camera. She remarked that it was the smallest camera she’d seen. They explained that here was where you pushed the button, and blah, blah, blah.
Sister pushed the button and got a shock. She didn’t react. The gigglebitches all looked confused. Sister asked them if she was supposed to get shocked, and they said, “Yeah.” She handed the camera back and said, “HaHA.”
Now, even on my best day, I’m not known for being tolerant of jackass gigglebitch teenagers. Had this scene involved me instead of my sister, I would have, directly after saying, “HaHA.” instead of handing the camera back, thrown it at the ground as HARD AS I COULD.
Do that stupid shit to your friends. Inflicting an electric shock is not what you do to strangers.
When I got back from lunch on 4/1 my boss was in my department. This happens rarely, because our area generally runs very smoothly and he spends his time in others areas that…don’t. Anyway, I figured he just stopped by to say “Hi!” and let us know he was still alive. Instead, he came up to me and worriedly stated “Your department is out of compliance on sevice levels for all clients!”. Now, SLA’s at my employer are a Big Thing and you do not go out of standard. We get a daily dashboard report via email that shows compliance figures for all departments across the country. If an area is out of complliance it shows in red. Knowing full well my area was well within standard, I looked at my boss and said “Weak attempt! I know what day it is and I know my numbers!”. He said “You’re bleeding all over the fricking report! Red everywhere!”. I said “You know me better than that. You know that I know my SLA numbers and I would be giving you a heads up before you ever saw the report if we were going to be out of SLA, which we’re not”. He said “I’m serious! Open the dashboard report!”. I said “Not a chance, I’m not falling for this today”.
After another few minutes of back and forth I smugly opened the report and immediately saw my areas - all glowing red. The dates in the report weren’t the ones I had keyed in to the master database. A quick call to the database admin showed that someone had keyed their numbers over mine in error. The database accepts multiple entries for the same day and the report pulls the one with the latest time stamp, hence the wrong dates.
My boss won’t let me live this one down for a while. A least he found it funny.
I had a coworker a few years back who was head-over-heels for pop singer Jason Mraz. She played his music in her cubicle, hummed his songs, talked about him non stop-stop, and got tickets for his upcoming concert. Drived me nuts.
Then I heard her telling another coworker about how she just signed up for his online fan club.
So, I created a new yahoo email account with the address something like jason.mraz@yahoo.com.
I then e-mailed her a personal thank you for joining my fan club and said I was looking forward to my upcoming concert in her town.
She totally bought it. She replied with something and I wrote back that it would be cool if we could hang out while I was in town since I had never been to Minneapolis before.
I was ready to let her in on my prank but then I heard her calling her friends all giddy about talking to Jason Mraz and how she was going to be hanging with him.
I let it go on for a few more days asking her a lot of personal questions and asking her what she thought of my music.
And then…
instead of fessing up like a man I just quit e-mailing her cold turkey and I never told her what I did.
It was a Halloween prank rather than an April Fools prank but I was talked into something that I never thought would work in a million years and didn’t really want it to. A friend enlisted me to switch places with him in the middle of a love-making session and then switch back again before his girlfriend even knew it. Everyone knows that is impossible…yet it worked perfectly because we had the same build, same type of hair, and same clothes on that night.
We just used an unusually dark room at another friend’s house and subtle cues to stand up and quickly switch places between the bed and a closet. This wasn’t some minor trick either. My part in the bed lasted about 20 minutes with not a single bit of detection on her part. Luckily for me, she was one her period and we didn’t have actual intercourse. My semi-friend and I switched back perfectly at the end and she had no idea of any of it that night.
After that night, some people couldn’t wait to spill the joke and I couldn’t ever figure out if she believed in the joke or just the fact that others thought that it was an outrageous thing to say. She was a friend of mine and neither of us ever mentioned it at all ever. To this day, I have no idea about the motivation of her boyfriend. I just know that it was a perfect joke in the sense that, when I was in, I was committed to it even against my will. Every second made me feel the need to protect myself even more and, in the end, I pulled off something that ensured that at least for reasonable doubt.
Er, I’m not sure what this means–the last few lines about reasonable doubt and protecting yourself. It sounds an awful lot like the Dear Abby column that Dan Savage debunked recently…but even if it is true, are you really cool with admitting that you did something that, even if it doesn’t necessarily meet the legal definition of unwanted sexual assault, is seriously creepy?
About 10 years ago a cousin of mine got his first computer for Christmas, I helped him get online and set up his email. On April 1st he received an email from a “daughter” he never knew. I used the name of a former neighbor of his from when he was in high school as the mother. The daughter told him that his mother had passed on years earlier from a rare blood disease and had left her a large amount of money. The daughter had just discovered that she too had the rare blood disease and only had a few months to live and because she had no family to leave her money to, she would give my cousin a large 6 figure inheritance.
I toyed with him for a couple months, the daughter would have a bad day or week, the doctors told her to get her affairs in order, she needed his name and address so she could have a cashier’s check sent upon her death. About the end of May the daughter suddenly quit emailing. About the end of June the daughter sent one last email, she had found God through the *Landover Baptist Church and was going to leave all her money to the church. She was sure he would understand and that she was sorry she never got to meet her “father”.
On the 4th of July I saw my cousin for the first time since I helped him with his
computer. He was devestated about his “daughter” and he had spent some money he couldn’t afford to spend because he was counting on a windfall to be coming. In a strange or of way I felt sorry for him, not about his “losses” but that he was so gullible to believe a stranger would email him out of the blue with a tale of whoe and offering a large amount of money.
*For those that don’t know, the Landover Baptist Church is a parody of a mega church located in Landover, Iowa.
The story is 100% legit and I written longer versions of it here but I just wanted to skip to the chase. One odd point is that the female was either 18 or 19 and I was a 17 year old high school student. It didn’t play out as an assault and I never knew why the whole thing was conceived in the first place.
Why in the world would it matter how old anyone was? She didn’t consent to have sex with you. She consented to having sex with him. Ergo, you had sex with her without her consent. It was sexual assault, it doesn’t matter if you were a minor. He was a co-conspirator. This is not an ethically, legally or morally ambiguous situation.
There is nothing about this that isn’t creepy. Your “I didn’t want to” and your reasonable doubt BS makes it worse. She was a friend of yours? Whatta pal!
