I love April Fools’ Day. Most of the year I spend getting called a fool by pretty much everyone. “Get down from there you fool!” “Don’t put your hand in there, fool.” They say those kinds of things to me. And even if they don’t outright call me a fool, I can tell they think I’m one by their facial expressions.
An easy way to tell if someone thinks you're a fool is if they’re raising an eyebrow the whole time they’re talking to you. That means they aren’t buying whatever it is you’re saying.
Another way is if they look really mad and they have a big old vein bulging on their forehead. That also means they think you did something foolish.
I usually prefer the raised eyebrow guy over the angry guy because it only hurts my confidence, not my body as I get a swift punch to the gut.
But on April Fools’ day, it’s all different. I’m not the fool anymore. I’m the one who makes a fool out of everyone else. I always have a whole slew of pranks lined up.
When it comes to pranking, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, you have to make sure to prank the same person twice. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” I like to end things with the shame being on the other guy.
The other thing is that you’ve got to make sure you aren’t ending up with the egg on your face after a prank. That can happen a lot, especially if you've got a prank lined up involving a dozen eggs and a trampoline.
I’ve had a lot of pranks backfire on me. One time I wore a realistic gorilla suit and snuck into the ape enclosure at the zoo to prank the zookeepers into giving me free meals. I hung out there for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
But then I painted the back of my gorilla suit gray, to try to prank the gorillas into thinking I was a silverback. Let me tell you, the gorillas saw right through that one and gave me a thorough, ape-style beatdown.
And once I had this other prank where I put buckets of water above the doors in my house. That way all my guests would get soaking wet. I forgot that I don’t have many guests though, so I kept spilling them on myself. And I had to keep refilling those buckets.
Another time I went to the pet store and taught all the parrots to speak a bunch of gibberish. People get annoyed at me when I speak gibberish, so I figured it’d be even more annoying if a parrot did it.
That one came back to bite me though when I wanted to buy a parrot the next week and the only ones left were the gibberish ones. Now I’ve got one perched in my kitchen, and let me tell you, I was right. It’s the most annoying thing in the world.
One year I showed up to work and smoked a bunch of cigarettes at my desk. I guess the idea was to prank people into thinking I liked smoking a lot, so much that I couldn’t even be bothered to leave my desk. In retrospect, it wasn’t a good prank because all that ended up happening was me getting written up and addicted to cigarettes.
This year, I think I’ll keep it simple. It’s harder for things to go wrong when you keep them simple. I’m going to do some classics, like putting a whoopee cushion on my boss’s chair before he has a big meeting. Or changing my boss’s clock to be off right before he has a big meeting. Or if my boss is presenting something at a big meeting with important clients, and I’m there, I’ll yell out, “What dumb ideas!” when his back is turned. Then when he turns around I’ll be looking around going, “Who said that?”
I guess the theme this year is simple pranks that mess up my boss’s big meetings. I really don’t see how those could backfire.
