My father is probably one of the biggest practical joksters I know. As a matter of fact he honestly thinks that April Fools was created especially for him and just happens to be everyday of the year. Fourtunately for myself and my mother, he is also technologically impaired. He can’t work a simple remote with out messing it up. My favorite prank pulled, was by myself on him, a legend in his own mind.
I guess I was about 19 or 20, still living at home and bored to tears one day. Knowing that my dad couldn’t work any of the technical equipment around the house, I decided that I was going to play a joke. I re-recorded the “outgoing” message on their answering machine and then paged my dad. We waited and about 3 minutes later this is what we heard…
A-M: Thank you for calling. If you know your parties extension please dial it now followed by the pound sign. To reach “MOM” press 1, to reach “DAUGHTER” press 2 and to reach “DAD” press 758421 followed by the pound key and then the star key"
The first phone call we here the pressing of what we assume was the number 1, because then we heard my dad calling thru the machine…“HELLO!! PICK UP!!” He hangs up and calls back this time he dials number 2…same thing yelling to pick up. Finally he calls back a third time and we hear him talking to himself…
Dad: What the hell was that number to my desk?? F@ck!!..then numbers just pushed at random and the slamming of the phone.
When he got home he asked me what the hell I did to the answering machine. I said what the hell were you thinking trying to call yourself??
He still hasn’t lived that one down… 
I still love the story of
Well, I’m confused as to how that last post happened. Someone played a practical joke on me, I guess
I was trying to tell the story of the famous prank played by Hugh Troy, when he made a fake ear out of hamburger and slipped it into a Van Gogh exhibition labelled as the actual ear Van Gogh cut off and sent to a hooker.
My sister hung tinsel all over the inside of her then-boyfriend’s car. Dashboard, steering wheel, ashtrays, glove box, you name it, every internal square inch was covered with tinsel. All done while he was at work. Imagine walking out to your car and finding it glittering in the afternoon sun.
A few months later, she crawled under the car and wired small jungle bells under his engine compartment (nowhere they would cause actual problems), but it drove him insane trying to find the souce of all the pinging from the engine. Took him long enough to think about looking underneath the car.
One of my dad’s favorite tricks was to send off cards for free samples, magazine subscriptions and so forth, in the name of people he didn’t like.
His all-time prize prank of that nature was when we were in the Minneapolis airport and my dad found a kiosk with cards to send off for a free demonstration of, of all things, earth-moving equipment.
He promptly filled in the name and address of a major horse’s patoot of our acquaintance and mailed it off. Pity we never heard what became of that one (the guy lived in Nebraska).
My brothers and I are rather pleased with the memories of a couple of pranks we pulled with real-estate signs. One Halloween we went out and swiped a for-sale sign from one real estate agency and planted it on the lawn of his biggest competitor. And on another occasion we swiped a sign advertising the numb-nut construction agency that had built our house and planted it in front of a tumbledown old wreck of an abandoned shack out on a dirt road just outside the city limits.
A friend of my parents’ later told us he’d driven past that place and just about drove off the road, he was laughing so hard.