Here’s a new thread about** Shagnasty’s ** post. Cease the derailment!
Nah. Although I do now occasionally get brand new scam emails addressed to Crandall Spondular.
“Gigglebitch”. Holy shit. That’s perfect. It’s the most useful word I’ve learned in years.
About eighteen months ago, I went on a week-long vacation, and my coworkers wrapped most of the items on my desk in newspaper. Many of the things are still wrapped, ruining the fun of any future desk pranks they might consider pulling on me.
Hampshire and racer72 - those are both pretty bad and seem from your description to cross the line that separates funny from cruel.
EmAnJ - if you gave the fake lottery ticket on Christmas day, then it really isn’t an April Fool joke, right?
Last year my mother-in-law showed up at the house on 1 April and asks me where my wife (her daughter) is. The imp of the perverse prompted me to reveal to her that my wife was seeing the minister of our church for advice and had taken the kids with her. I had just been sued for child support from a child I didn’t know I had and my wife was very upset about it. The child was six months old (keep in mind we’ve been married for seven years.) My mother-in-law was just staring at me with mouth agape until I said “April Fool!” She didn’t think it was funny at all.
That would depend on when they celebrate Christmas now, wouldn’t it? Perhaps they’re in the southern hemisphere.
Hahaha, FINE! I just saw pranks gone awry, to be honest.
This Prank generated a few calls from the on site printer techs to me to check out the queue setups. (I manage many thousands of print queues across the country for a large company)
One of my favorites so far, and though it came a few days later to my desk, it gave me quite a smile.
When I was a kid, my sister and I thought it would be hilarious to swap the contents of the honey bear and the shampoo bottle, since our shampoo was exactly honey-colored.
This idea remained hilarious until my dad spread a heaping glob of shampoo on his morning toast and actually bit into it and started chewing. We really thought he’d catch on earlier. As it was, he suddenly started literally frothing at the mouth and dashed into the kitchen, where he vomited. And vomited again. And one more time.
We felt really bad about it.
I don’t go in for pranking - don’t enjoy it done to me, and won’t do it to others - and this was only reaffirmed for me some years back when a woman I knew posted on her April 1 blog that she had discovered she was pregnant. She went into all the anxiety, all the fear, all the “should I have an abortion”…
She apologised later, after people became VERY WORRIED ABOUT HER. She didn’t think anybody would really believe it. Because (evidently) the date alone would make it not true.
Or scream like you’re about to die, gyrating, and make sure to throw the device as hard as possible into something concrete. Then recover and give them a knowing grin as you walk away.
That prank got a co-worker in hot water just yesterday. He’d forgotten he’d done it, thus forgot to set it back, it was encountered by a manager with no sense of humor, and as a member of the security team we had to give him a sound drubbing about the head and shoulders with a rubber hose. (no, not really.)
Funny thing was, when I got the call, I asked “is it just the printers on the IT floor?”, answer: “yes”, me “have you talked to <person here that actually did it based on past experience with person>” “Not yet.”
A few minute pass, phone rings “Guess who it was?”
One spring we had three employees from my group leave in pretty quick succession. The boss had become a bit paranoid that people were bailing on him. So I thought that I would mess with him. He may have thought something was coming. The prior year, we stole our team leader’s car.
I fabricated an email from a client offering me a job and made sure that it was left on the printer where he or the AA could find it. What I didn’t know was that one of my co-workers took pity on him and told him the joke.
So that afternoon, he copied me on an email to his boss at Corporate HQ, telling her that I had received an offer and while he was increasingly concerned about the high turnover, did not feel that there was anyway he could keep me. I became alarmed that my joked had now backfired and went to speak with him.
He started laughing and pointed out that he had misspelled the name on the email address, harmlessly resulting in a bounced email. That was the last time I played a joke on a manager.
Heh. Glad I could spread that one to someone who appreciates it. I don’t recall where I picked it up, but it is very useful! 
The Boy, age 17, decided it would be funny to tell me he’d knocked up his girlfriend.
Unfortunately for him he tried it first on my husband, who, figuring The Boy was more use to us dead than alive, gave me a heads-up.
So when The Boy dropped his “bombshell”, I was ready. I grabbed him around the neck and went into Outraged Disappointed Mother mode, yelling and screaming.
The look on The Boy’s face was priceless until I ruined it by busting out lauging.
I finished by thwapping him over the head and saying, “April 1st was 2 days ago, child!”