Do y’all pull April Fools’ Day pranks on your friends and loved ones? It sounds like Jill Biden is a committed prankster: According to the VP, she “disappeared” on Air Force Two one April 1st and then leaped out of a baggage compartment. Impressive.
My mom was an April Fools’ Day prankster. When we were kids, one time she left the clear wrappings on the Kraft singles in our school lunchbox sandwiches. She’d give us “chocolate milk” that was actually milk and Worcestershire sauce.
One time she convinced us that the Soviet Union had launched a nuclear attack, which was kind of mean. We got her back by making very convincing paper mâché cat turds and leaving them in her purse.
My daughter and I have pulled some minor pranks. It took the mister forever to learn to use cell phone settings, so we used to set his ringtone to something embarrassing like “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” or “Baby Got Back” and then call him incessantly. We’ve made up terrible lies about things the dogs did.
What’s your best April Fools’ Day prank?
aimai
I’m just not a prankster and, luckily for me, my husband isn’t either. I admire some pranks and pranksters but I’m glad its not a household thing for us.
ruemara
I don’t prank and people don’t prank me. I’m too earnest to prank.
donnah
I’m not clever about pranking, but my youngest son is. He fastened a rubber band around the spray nozzle on our kitchen faucet one April Fool’s morning and when I went to run water for my coffee, I was soaked and scared half to death. Little shit. I had to go change into dry clothes for work.
schrodinger's cat
Best prank I have participated in was dusting the chalkboard with talc powder. It made our horrible substitute teacher cry, when she could not write anything on the black board.
Looking back, I think it was kinda mean.
Tommy
I am too boring to do any Aprils Fools jokes. And if I tried I assume they wouldn’t be very funny and I’d just most likely piss off some people. Wish this wasn’t the case, but alas it is. Now I do really, really love a good joke and/or prank. I can laugh at myself :).
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
What’s embarrassing about Tie a Yellow Ribbon? Are you people commies and/or subversives?
Betty Cracker
@donnah: Oooo, that’s a good one!
schrodinger's cat
Take a voyage across the Universe with science kitteh.
Original Lee
My dad was a big prankster. He got us nearly every year. We only successfully pranked him once. We switched out the sugar in the sugar bowl he used for his morning coffee – it was all salt, instead. We were able to distract him long enough while he was adding the “sugar” and cream that he was down the street before he took a sip and explosively expectorated. Good times.
cleek
i hate Aprils Fools day.
raven
The Shanesha Taylor fund is over $26 k now.
Betty Cracker
@raven: That slightly mitigates my general disgust with humanity.
dmsilev
My classmates and I in grad school used to do fairly elaborate April Fools pranks. Like hoisting a 15-foot diameter UFO (paper mache over a wooden frame, then painted) into the rotunda of our department’s building (and bringing in grass cuttings to create crop circles on the floor) and then constructing an elaborate X-files-esque conspiracy structure about how all the faculty were aliens in disguise bent on uncomfortably probing the students.
That took a lot of people and a lot of prep work.
Rosalita
A co-worker and I quietly grabbed the boss’s keys and moved his car to the other side of the parking lot… sounds risky I know but he was a smartass who had it coming…good times
The Ancient Randonneur
Always loved April Fools Day pranks. One of my faves I pulled on my dad when I was a teenager. We had one of the old style sugar dispensers you find in diners with the glass container and metal screw-on top. I unscrewed the top, carefully placed a napkin over the exposed opening, flipped it over, carefully removed the napkin, then placed the metal cap on top to make it appear as it should. The next morning when my dad was having his morning coffee prior to leaving for work I heard a few VERY loud expletives prior to my name being shouted out. I laughed so hard I couldn’t get down the stairs. Sigh. Good times.
Come to think of it my sense of humor hasn’t changed much in the 40+ years since.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
I’m not creative enough to get away with any serious pranks, and honestly hate a lot of the more invested pranks that happen on the day, as it is. I have enough trouble wading through a normal day’s mendacity.
Violet
@raven: I’ve been monitoring it too. So heartwarming. The details say they’re keeping her until March 31st, though. WTF? Why? The bail money is there now.
As for pranks, no that’s not really me or my immediate family. My cousins go to great lengths to prank each other every year though. Sometimes they even double cross with the pranking. Like two of them will team up to prank a third one. But what one of the first two doesn’t know is that the third one is in on it and the prank actually turns back on the first one. They go all in, involving families, kids, neighbors, etc. Hilarious to hear about afterward.
PurpleGirl
@schrodinger’s cat: I was a member of the Biology La\ b squad in high school. We did various things around the Lab room and helped teachers. One Parent-Teachers conference day we decided to leave a note for one of the biology teachers who we liked and sort of hung around with. In large letters on the front blackboard we wrote “Hail to Thee, Marc Antony”. We didn’t leave enough time for him to clean the board before parents began to enter the room. (His name was Marc Anthony L…..)
maurinsky
I don’t really like pranks, but that’s because I’ve only been pranked in a way that caused me a massive headache to clean up from. Note to others: pranks involving paint are not a good idea, unless the paint is the kind that washes off with water.
Cervantes
Good grief.
Anyway, here’s a prank I had absolutely, positively nothing to do with.
By the way, if you’re going to the trouble of mâché, then you probably want papier- to go along with it. (Technically. So there.)
elmo
I don’t typically like pranks, unless they are entirely harmless and not all that embarrassing. The only one I remember doing myself was when I was about 12 or 13, I went into my parents’ bedroom and moved around all the drawers in both their bureaus. All the drawers were the same exact size, shape and color, so it was easy to move the underwear drawer down to the lower left, for example, and move the sweaters up into its place.
Harmless, not embarrassing, and nothing damaged, but my mother was very very confused until she figured out what had happened.
windpond
My dad was a mean prankster. Once he woke me out of a sound sleep (I was in 4-H) to tell me dogs had chased my pet sheep into the reservoir and they all drowned. I staggered out of bed crying, ran down to the pond only to realize it was a April Fool. So, later, in college, I phoned him on April 1 to say I was pregnant. The resulting verbal barrage was impressive. I closed with ‘April Fool.’ He never tormented me again.
Gindy51
Nope, no pranks. I personally find them childish and stupid. It’s all fun and games until someone gets physically or emotionally hurt. They happened too often to me as a fat kid and I don’t condone or participate in them.
Roger Moore
@Original Lee:
We managed to do that in my home even though my parents used the kind of rock salt that has red flecks in it. My brother dissolved a pound or so of salt in water, which left the red flecks behind because they’re less soluble. Then he filtered them out and used them to decorate sugar so it looked like the salt. We still had some white salt for when we didn’t want red flecks in stuff, and he used that in place of the sugar. It was completely unexpected, since the color difference made it “impossible” to pull off the switch.
Most of the best pranks I’ve participated in were in college, since I went to one of the great prank powerhouses. Some were fairly simple, like using the periodic table in one of the chemistry lecture halls as a message board, but others were more elaborate. The best one I personally participated in was turning another student’s room upside-down while he was away for spring break, including having the curtains hanging the wrong way and moving the still wired light fixture to the floor.
elmo
@Violet:
I would have thought that was obvious. To punish her for embarrassing them and being sympathetic, and to see if the attention dies down over the weekend. IOW, because they are sadistic assholes – for which a synonym is “cops” – and they can.
Phylllis
Filled up a college classmate’s dorm room with balled-up newspaper one time. And I mean filled floor to ceiling. Wish I still had the photo.
Super-glued a favorite professor’s receiver to the handset another year. When we merry pranksters had to pay for the replacement phone, we retired from the hijinks trade.
ETA: I did enjoy swapping the s and l keys on a former supervisor’s keyboard one year. The ‘what the…I don’t…this doesn’t make any sense’ from his office lasted a good five minutes before he figured it out.
Mnemosyne
I’m not a fan of everyday pranks, probably because I have four older brothers and tended to be the butt of pranks.
I don’t mind professional pranks, like when the radio stations here in LA switch deejays for the morning. That’s kind of fun.
boatboy_srq
I’m a small-scale prankster.
Best prank I ever encountered was the day KITS in San Francisco changed its call sign to KGAY and went “all gay, all day” – playing Erasure, FGTH, Sylvester and a whole bunch of other LGBT artists nonstop.
PurpleGirl
@dmsilev: For years it was traditional at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences to produce an April’s Fools Day edition of the weekly seminar/lecture bulletin. This edition poked fun at the high level professors, their research projects, various other people in the administration. It was prepared/written by a group of grad students. Some years it was better than others. They usually did manage to really skewer a bunch of people.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: You really can’t resist, can you?
beth
I used to go to a movie theatre that was next to a pet store at our local mall. One day some teenagers went into the pet store, separately, and purchased some mice that they sell to feed to snakes. They then took said mice next door and let them loose in the movie theatre. While I wasn’t in the one they set them loose in, and while I certainly don’t condone what they did, I had to give them props for originality and sheer chutzpah.
Betty Cracker
@windpond: Awesome revenge!
schrodinger's cat
When I was about 13 there was a girl in my class who was kind of a tattle-tale, always sucking up to the teacher, she also loved to knit and sew. Once in our sewing and needlework class which I hated, I tied her the ribbons on long braids to the back rest of the bench on which she was sitting. Hilarity ensued when she tried to get up. She was so engrossed in her knitting, that she didn’t even notice.
Betty Cracker
@beth: One time we were at a school play in the auditorium at my kid’s middle school, and a mouse ran through the audience. You could tell just where it was by the panicked reaction of the people around it. After circling through the audience, it barreled straight for the principal, who calmly reached down, grabbed it by the tail, walked to the side stage door and freed it into the alley.
That was a shithole of a school, so I never thought much of the woman’s administrative skills. But damned if I wasn’t impressed by how she handled the Mouse Incident.
raven
I ran a 186 team softball program that had it’s share of conflicts. One particular pain in the ass team manager bitched and moaned about everything imaginable. He called me one night to whine about something so I waited until 4am and called him back. “I know how important this was too you so I got your answer”. When I left to move here I set up a great “prank” on similar guy. His team played the last game of the season and he was always bitching about the umps. I got together with my head umpire and we put one on each base, behind the plate, on the baselines and even one in center!
beth
My daughter’s class put alarm clocks in the drop ceilings of their classrooms all set to go off at the same time during finals week. The principal was not amused.
burnspbesq
My college roommate was involved in the great Sun Microsystems April Fools prank in the 1980s.
There was an artificial lagoon in front of the corporate headquarters with a sculpture (actually a rectangular platform) in the middle of it. The employees pulled the furniture out of the CEO’s office and set it up on the platform, complete with working phone and data lines.
When the CEO pulled in in the morning, he saw what had been done, and pulled right back out again. He came back shortly thereafter with an inflatable boat. He inflated the boat, rowed out to his “office,” and worked there all day.
schrodinger's cat
@Betty Cracker: I would have been standing on the chair, if it were me.
Ferd of the Nort
I arranged for a guy to be “arrested” for possession of an illegal penis bone. Long and involved story, with actual penis bones (walrus bacculum).
shelly
I was too much of a good-two shoes as a kid to do pranking. I think I once put salt in the sugar bowl, but that was about it.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
So…why I shouldn’t be surprised…Leland Yee, hypocrite extraordinaire, is being used to attack gun control as a whole, because obviously one guy pushing it being caught in mafia bullshit means the entire thing is a hypocritical attack on the only freedom that matters in this country.
As well, I’m not surprised people are taking it as a credible point and proof that all gun control advocates are super evil Anti-American super-fascists.
I fucking hate this country so much.
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: Damn meeses!
cckids
@Mnemosyne:
About 15 years ago, two deejays here in Vegas did a fake news story about the County Commissioners passing a new tax on pets – $1 per pound, and they included horses as pets. People were calling in absolutely screaming mad, cursing politicians & taxes in general. How the deejays kept it together, I don’t know, but it was hysterical to listen to.
MomSense
@donnah:
The kids do that one every single year and someone gets soaked by it every single year!!! The best is when the prankster gets pranked by his own prank!
Speaking of. One year I put a scary looking fake spider in the bathtub, forgot it, and scared myself.
chopper
@Cervantes:
Mr. Mosby!
cckids
Back in the mid-80’s, when gummi-everything was growing up, my husband found a life-size, solid grey gummi rat. He put it under his sister’s pillow. The after-midnight scream when she found it was epic, followed by the cursing & vows of revenge.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
Resist? Oh, I appreciated your taking the trouble to get it (half-)right!
Mine was just a silly joke, getting back at this, that’s all. If it harshed your mellow, I apologize.
Aside from having to deal with my comments, though, how are you doing? I saw that you’ve condemned all of 2014 but, really, how are you and the family? In particular, how is your grandmother?
Trollhattan
Two jobs ago at a company that didn’t “believe in voice mail” we had a receptionist who’d page people for phone calls. Our receptionist was very soft-voiced and unbeknownst to us the intercom volume was cranked. Paris (no, not that one) left, to be replaced by Shirley, a battleaxe of a woman with a voice to match. Every page had us jumping out of our shoes and of course, we spent the days having one another paged until IT turned the volume from kill to stun.
Fun week.
Cervantes
@chopper: Glad you, at least, got the joke!
Roger Moore
I guess I’ve been involved in some good pranks at work. One involved a fairly standard filling somebody’s office with helium balloons.
The other involved the laboratory equivalent of fake vomit. One of the guys in the department had an old dewar flask (aka thermos-type container for liquid nitrogen) that he had repaired. It had a thick plastic compound at the bottom that had to be melted out before it could be fixed, which then congealed and looked exactly like what you’d expect goop that had melted out of a piece of equipment and fallen to the floor would look like.
A little while after another person in the department had a serious problem with his instrument (his NMR magnet quenched, a very expensive failure) and was in mildly hot water because it looked as if it might have been the result of negligence on his part. We waited until after his magnet had been re-energized and then sneaked into his lab and put the melted glob of goo under the instrument that had just been repaired. As luck would have it, the next time he went into the lab it was with the department chairman and the head of administrator and they all saw what looked like another serious instrument problem. The odd part is that once they figured out they had been had, they jumped straight past trying to figure out who had pranked them and on to figuring out who they could get with the same basic prank. The process got repeated at least three more times the same day, with varying degrees of success.
gbear
I used to carpool to the U of MN with a woman who was scared of heights. At that time there were a couple of wood-slat walk bridges that crossed a busy street that ran through the campus, and we’d cross one of those bridges every morning on the way to classes. One morning while we were crossing the bridge, I dropped to my knees, threw my hands up in the air and fake-screamed. I was very lucky she didn’t have a breakdown or heart attack right there on the bridge. I scared her to death and she wasn’t amused at all.
dmsilev
@PurpleGirl: Yeah, mocking the faculty was the main point of the exercise. Most of them were pretty good sports about it (some even got upset if they got left out). A few however were extremely aggrieved. Which, of course, just made them bigger targets the next year round…
aimai
@raven: Do you know if she has a lawyer yet?
JGabriel
Favorite prank?
I’m not big on pranks, which usually strike me as kind of sadistic (c.f., Mitt Romney).
That said, I don’t know why – maybe because it’s so benign and most of the “victims” seem to enjoy it – but the scary snowman prank cracks me up every time.
George W Bush
“What’s your best April Fools’ Day prank?”
Invading Iraq.
Roger Moore
@JGabriel:
I was taught that the first rule of pranks is to know your victim. If your prospective victim can’t take a joke, pulling a prank is a bad idea. The only exception is when a prank is used to get back at somebody powerful who genuinely deserves it and who you can’t easily get at any other way. It’s another example of punching up rather than kicking down. Mitt Romney’s “pranks” were a way of masking bullying with a thin veneer of humor to make them superficially acceptable, i.e. kicking down. When properly used, though, they can be a powerful tool for mocking the powerful and showing they’re just as human and as vulnerable as anyone, i.e. punching up.
Betty Cracker
@Cervantes: Nah, it didn’t harsh my mellow. I am fascinated by pedantry, possibly because it is a trait I constantly struggle (and often fail) to quash in myself.
My grandmother is just such a pendant, only her critiques have been confined to slovenliness in others’ appearance instead of grammar and factual nitpicking since she went stone deaf a decade ago.
I took her out to lunch this past weekend, and she’s still sad — we all are — but she’s not as desperately distraught as she was in the immediate aftermath. Thanks for asking. ;-)
Mnemosyne
@cckids:
Another big radio deejay prank they did was pretend that the Mall of America — West was opening on April 1st. Apparently there actually were some people driving up and down the freeway trying to find it.
ETA: To be clear, there is no Mall of America — West.
raven
@aimai: Public defender I think. Burns was pretty sure she’s get a high profile Bro Bono attorney.
Cervantes
@aimai:
Not that the court is aware of. (I spoke to them earlier today.)
Ms. Taylor had hearings scheduled for yesterday and Monday, but both were canceled. A next court date has not yet been set. She is still in custody. As things stand, she will not see a (court-appointed) attorney until some time in May. Oh, and the court does not know for sure where her kids are: CPS may have them, or they might be with relatives. (I did not call CPS — they are busy enough, I am sure.)
Cervantes
@raven: No public defender, yet.
Cervantes
@Betty Cracker:
Glad to hear it! But pedantry? And … nit-picking? You wound me, dear heart.
As for quashing and what-not, who said this recently?
Wasn’t me. (Granted, I dragged it kicking and screaming out of its context.)
Anyhow:
Nothing will end the sadness, of course, but I’m glad to hear the pain is easing a little.
Love and hugs to all of you.
PurpleGirl
@cckids: My former boss had one of those and put in random file drawers. I knew about it so it didn’t bother me but other people often had panics when they opened a drawer and found it.
shirk
My mother used to pull food-related pranks on April Fools. My favorites:
Flannel pancakes: she cut circles of cloth and baked them into the pancakes she made for breakfast. Hey, why are these pancakes so tough to cut?
Flavorless jello: Knox blox made with completely unflavored gelatin and food coloring to make it look cherry. The contrast between what your mouth expects and the actual taste was hysterically repulsive.
String cookies: Normal chocolate chip with a coiled length of string baked into each one.
Thunderbird
I tried to pull an April Fools Day prank on my older and much larger brother once. Once.
He proceeded to beat the pranking spirit out of me for good, and beat a hatred of pranks into me as well. I don’t even go online on April Fools Day anymore.
raven
@Thunderbird: Funny how one ass whuppin can change us!
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
In a comment about pedantry? I know you did that on purpose.
Cervantes
@SiubhanDuinne:
@Betty Cracker:
See? I resisted.
LongHairedWeirdo
I can deal with some pranks, so long as they’re not hurtful. There is one thing that I hate, though… I hate people who tell fake stories and then act like it’s comical when I believe them. Maybe this makes me somewhat humorless, but – it’s like, okay, it was *you* telling me the story, so, I *trusted* you even though the story was a bit strange – and now it’s *funny*? Ha ha, how could I ever trust that if you told me something, it might actually be true?
I’ve seen some variations on that idea that can work. If you keep leaking more and more outlandish bits until the person finally realizes you’re pulling their leg, that can be funny. But if you let them walk away, trusting a story, it ruins the joke for me.
Long Tooth
I lived in earthquake country (right on top of the San Andreas Fault) and one April 1st called my Mom to describe the devastation just caused by a major quake. I started by excitedly asking, “Did you just feel that”!? (she lived a couple of counties away), and proceeded to describe the street scene I could see because my apartment walls had tumbled down. It was a scene of mayhem, fires everywhere, people stumbling around in a daze. I really had her going.
JAFD
Back in the antediluvian age I got into an extended argument with the phone company, and was out of electronic communication with the world for a few months. Eventually reconnected, sent letter to parents “We believe in The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number. The new Greatest Number is 11,234,567,891*. It goes into effect on Tuesday.” (*not my actual new phone #)
Called them up Wednesday, was asked “What did that stuf in your letter mean?”. Then I asked why they hadn’t called…
rikyrah
Never been a fan of April Fool’s.
M. Bouffant
Oh, sad memories. A friend & sexual associate used to pull the Jill Biden on me: We’d come home, I’d be laden w/ packages or bags I might take into the kitchen, then I’d go to close the front door & Doris (now late, & R.I.P.) would be behind it waiting to go “Boo!” & scare me out of a few yrs. of growth.
Pulled an April Fool prank that worked (No one harmed, just slightly embarrassed by their lack of guile.) two yrs. ago.
Betty Cracker
@SiubhanDuinne & @Cervantes: Muphry’s Law. It’s real.
Bex
Great recipe for April Fool’s day: http://allrecipes.com/Recipes/Cat/Poop/Cookies/I/
hitchhiker
The time younger daughter set the autocorrect on her older sister’s computer to change older sister’s name to “s&ithead” and her own name to “goddess.”
That was pretty funny, & older sister thought so too. I have a friend who has been soliciting terrible Netflix movies so she can play them on her husband’s account & hose up his recommendations . . .
Interrobang
The best prank I ever played on anybody wasn’t even at April Fool’s. I’m ecumenical that way, I guess. I had this guidance counsellor in high school whom I actually really rather liked, and at the time, he was sort of helping me look at postsecondary applications.
So I left a note for him telling him that there was this small, private liberal arts college in the US, somewhere in New England, that I’d heard of and thought it sounded really interesting, and could he possibly find me some information on Miskatonic University?
He later told me that he went absolutely nuts looking through all his materials and couldn’t find anything, and then called a friend of his, who was also a guidance counsellor, albeit at another high school, to ask if he knew anything. And then he said, “And my friend said, ‘[Name], you’ve been had.'”
Fortunately, he took it in the spirit in which it was intended, and we had a good laugh about it all.
cailte
@cleek: I’m in that club too. It just occurred to me that I won’t have to deal with the stupid April Fool’s pranks at work this year since I retired three months ago. Yet another thing to like about retirement.
Pogonip
@elmo: The prosecutor could drop charges and they’d have to let her go.
Best prank I was involved in wasn’t April Fool, it was a colleague’s honeymoon. While he was gone we buried his desk in file folders and Halloween cobwebs. The guy thought extremely highly of himself and had no sense of humor at all. Watching him fume during the hour or so it took him to unload his desk was hilarious.
Cervantes
@Pogonip:
Has she been charged?
Ruckus
@windpond:
The best pranks are revenge pranks.
And that was a good one.
@burnspbesq:
Worked for a CEO who was sort of a pain in the ass but he could take a joke, even at his expense. It sounds about as well as the Sun CEO.
Pogonip
@Cervantes: Can they keep holding her if she hadn’t been charged? I think in Illinois the max is 72 hours (not sure though); does anyone know for sure about Arizona?
Ruckus
My ex was/I’m sure is a prankster. She didn’t need April 1st, she was good to go any time.
Once she bought a life sized and equipped doll and stuck it in a friends hotel room shower. She had worked this out with his wife. He turned on the water and jumped in without looking and freaked out because there was a woman in his shower.
Another time on my birthday she had invited all the people I work with to dinner and hired a stripper/lap dance for me. Told her later that if she was going to go that far she should have gotten a stripper with bigger boobs. She just laughed and said, “You got a stripper, you don’t get everything.” Great girl, lot of fun.
Cervantes
@Pogonip: She has been charged.
When I called the court earlier today, they told me it could be mid-May before she’s arraigned. They did not seem to be in a hurry to put an end to her misery. She still does not have a lawyer. I asked Amanda Bishop about this but have not heard anything definitive; meanwhile the fund-raiser is proceeding apace.
JaneE
This was my mom’s idea, I just was the delivery gal. Chocolate covered soap. We saved the slivers of soap when they got to the size of See’s molasses chips, then dipped them in melted chocolate. We had saved the paper cups and a See’s candy box, filled it with our fake molasses chips and passed it around. Most people would chew about 3 times and get a really strange look on their face. Then they would recognize the taste and spit it out.
Jackie
I’ll get back to you. I have 3 actual “Best Ever” April Fool jokes. Just ready for bed; have to get up at 4:30 a.m.