April Fools is my favorite day. Probably because it was Mom’s favorite day. She would get us all involved. Nothing was mean…it was things like one of us hiding Dad’s real lunch behind his seat while she put a can of dogfood and a can opener in his lunchbox. That one backfired in a way that made us laugh, btw. Dad opened his lunchbox, pulled the contents out and said that his wife was mad, then left to look in his truck for the lunch he knew would be there. One of the secretaries didn’t get his laughing, so went out and bought Dad lunch and wanted to comfort him about his evil wife.
I was so used to getting waxed paper samwiches that I just assumed that I needed to look.
As we got older, she got more creative. Once she had me blow up a bunch of ballons to fill my sister’s car.
The best year was when she didn’t prank my sister because sis had a new baby. Poor sis said she was jumping all day when she did things like look in her fridge because she KNEW that Mom had done something to her. When she finally figured out that she had spent a day paranoid for nothing, she called Mom to say that the non prank on April fools was the best that Mom had ever done.
Today, we hid the shredder from my boss. I’m not talking about one of those little desk things, I’m talking about am industrial sized machine that will eat phonebooks and spit out little pieces. Its about as long as my car. My boss has a problem with situational awareness, so we took bets as to if she would notice.
As it happened, she didn’t notice, until she saw that the lights were on and then looked around because I make sure that the lights are always off in unused parts of the warehouse. Had I not left the lights on, I would have won nickles from my crew.
I want to apologize for these posts. They were harsher than needed. I realize everyone has different tastes and humor is certainly not universal. My bad.
Some are really not funny. We turned on the TV on 4/1 to find Cartoon Network was showing TV-MA shows. Including a very graphic suicide scene! When we called Directv, they said this is a recurring April Fools joke on the part of the network (not Directv, as they do not control the signal)
Maggie, was it a hoax? I hope not, assuming they’re both decent people & make a good couple. And if it was, it’d serve them right if you played it like it was real:
“Well, that was the shortest engagement in history. Who cheated?” followed be lots of ‘uh-huh’, ‘likely story’, and 'if you say so’s. If their relationship is a joke, then its no harm for you to point your finger at them & say ‘ha ha’.
There’s book smarts and there’s butt smarts. Both will teach 'em.
I’ll tell you what my fucking dumb ass did a few years ago.
I did the stupid pregnancy prank on Miguel. And yay he was so excited to find out I was having a baby. And he had no idea what April Fools was, so it pissed him off mightily when I explained it to him. AND I got the bonus of finding out that he’d lied to me about not wanting any more children so I felt like a shit for not bearing any more of his babies. It screwed things up with us for a while until I finally said fuck it, I don’t want any more kids. He’ll just have to get over it and besides, the last thing we need is for me to have another baby. But I STILL feel guilty.
April Fools is not allowed in my house any more, ever again.
my sister in law dipped the tip of her kids pencils in nail polish so none of them would write. I thought that was funny. So did her kids (home schooled)
The Spanish equivalent is the Feast of the Innocents, December 28th.
My uncle (by marriage, eh! I am not biologically related to him) M has a ton of siblings; one of them, J, lived in the other end of the country and his wife was from Madrid. They would spend Christmas day with her family, then drive up.
One December 28th, M went next door and told his parents that J had been in a car crash. No survivors.
The joke was discovered when M’s parents called M’s wife and children in and my aunt said “wait a minute, there have been no phone calls, how do you know that? ” “Haha, Fools!”
It took his mother almost a year to sort of forgive the ass, but only sort of. And I’ll give you one single chance at guessing how did J die, five Christmases later It wasn’t notified by phone, two cops came to the parents’ house to tell them.
I think what most of us are saying, though, is not that we hate all pranks; we just hate the dumb one that can barely be called pranks. I thought the Google Motion thing was hilarious. But most of them resemble this interaction I had with a co-worker:
Coworker who is three months pregnant: Hey guess what! We found out we’re having triplets!
Me: mumbled socially obligated congratulations
Coworker: Three boys! Can you believe it?!
Me: How bout that.
pause pause pause
Coworker: Ha, I got you! April Fools!
Yeah, I’ve been “fooled” a few times because it’s been stuff I don’t give a shit about. It’s small talk, people - exploiting the fact that nobody listens to you anyway doesn’t make you Loki the Trickster God.
There’s an article that makes the Internet every year that Shigeru Miyamoto has died, but it’s just a straight obituary, nothing funny in there about dying by having his head crushed by an irate plumber or eating too many mushrooms. A complete waste of time.
A couple of 4/1’s ago, a subordinate called in to say he had been in an accident on his way to work and that his car was pretty messed up, but he was having a friend bring him to work so he was going to be a little late. He sounded pretty badly shaken up; he had a habit of calling in sick when he was actually just hungover, but this time it sounded serious, and I could tell he was outside, calling from the side of a road. I told him to not worry about coming in, to get to an emergency room and get checked out, to take the rest of the day off to tend to his own business, I’d re-assign his work, etc.
Two minutes later, he walked in, cracking up. He had been phoning from the parking lot. I was relieved and thought it was pretty funny, but one of his peers was furious at him, and reamed him out in front of everyone for abusing my trust and goodwill. I let her do it, too.