Yes, today is the day. Many of us have April Fool’s Day jokes or pranks we either pulled on others or had pulled on us. We share a few of our favorites with you today, and ask that you add your own stories in the comments section below.
Contributing editor and Ask the Therapist author Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. gets the ball rolling:
My grandfather read the morning paper over breakfast every morning for years and years. Breakfast was often punctuated with his remarks, scowls, laughs, and invitations to comment on something he’d read out loud. One year, my grandmother carefully saved the April 1 paper.
The following year, she put it next to his breakfast plate with a warning glance at us kids. Grandpa started reading. Grandpa looked quizzical. He flipped the pages. He looked at the front page again. “Unbelievable!” says he. “So and so is doing the very same thing he did last year!” At which point, we kids started laughing so hard we were snorting our milk. “What? What?” he asked. This led to even more howls of laughter until one of us shouted “April Fool!” He totally appreciated the joke and Grandma looked very, very pleased with herself.
Here’s the best part: She did it again the next year and it still took him a few minutes to catch on!
Candy Czernicki, our Managing Editor, has this good one to share that sports fans will appreciate:
My parents were gullible-slash-unknowledgeable enough to fall for something a radio DJ pulled. I was 13, maybe. This guy came on the air and said the Royals had traded George Brett (a superstar by then) to the Phillies for Bake McBride (who was an, um, rather underwhelming player).
The folks were afraid I’d hit the ceiling, and they didn’t want to be there, so they left me a note telling me. And then left the house. I woke up, found the note, said to myself, “That can’t happen, it’s past the interleague trading deadline!” and THEN glanced at the calendar.
The next one comes from contributor Therese Borchard, blogging over at Beyond Blue:
Every year my dad would tell my sisters and I there was a dead horse on the lawn, and every year we would look.
Looking back, it was kind of a sick joke, you know? We still call up each other every April 1 and say to look out the window at the dead horse.
And I’ll leave you with this one:
One year at work, we convinced one of our co-workers that the website needed to be redesigned to focus more on the needs of our visitors. We enlisted the CEO’s help in order to drive home the seriousness of the need for a redesign, and called a meeting with our coworker (the web designer), myself, the CEO and another colleague. I got the ball rolling:
“So we did this survey last month of our website visitors, and found that they’re not able to find the information they want as easily as we’d like. Some visitors complained it took them 3 or 4 clicks to find information. We want it all to be available in one click.”
Trusting co-worker responds, “Sure, okay. One click. Like a list of stuff on the homepage, and then they click from the list?”
“Yeah, something like that,” our helpful CEO chimes in. “But you know what? A list of all the possible things they could click on would be too long. How about just one big button with whatever it is they’re looking for, they just click on it?”
“That sounds like a great idea!” I enthusiastically endorsed.
“Works for me,” said the other colleague.
“Yeah, okay, we can do that,” responded my co-worker, haltingly. I could see the puzzled look on her face. “But how would we know what to put on the button for each visitor?”
“Well, couldn’t we just get that from their cookies or something?” I asked. Since cookies seemed like the solution to so many Web problems back then, it sounded like a reasonable suggestion.
“I dunno… I’d have to look into it,” my co-worker said.
“Excellent! Sounds like a plan!!” said the CEO. “Can I see something by end of day? Say 4?” It was 10 in the morning.
“Yes, I think we can pull a mockup together by then,” I replied. My co-worker gave me one of those, “You’ve got to be kidding me!?” looks.
The meeting broke up and we went back to our respective cubicles. Five minutes later, my co-worker comes over to my desk, “The CEO’s joking, right? We can’t read the minds of our visitors!”
“I dunno…” I replied noncommittally.
“C’mon… you can’t be serious!”
“You’re right… I’m not. Check the calendar.”
Share your own stories and April Fool’s day jokes below!
4 comments
As a teacher, I found a perfect opportunity today to pull a prank on some of my students.
We have an exam scheduled for Friday, so when they started to come into class today I told them in a very serious way that I’d been confused about dates and their exam was actually today. I had half a dozen of them pulling apart the desks before I couldn’t keep a straight face any longer.
Today, April 1st, is my birthday and it never fails that I am victim to multiple April Fool’s jokes. Besides the traditional “we all forgot your birthday” from friends and family, I have also had the blessing of my mom packing all vegetables in my lunch as a kid then showing up at school with pizza. One year I recieved a cookie cake that said “You’re an April Fool.” (That one I didn’t find so funny) And the last one I’m going to talk about is not nececarrily a joke played on me… Ususally when I tell people that today is my birthday, they don’t believe me because they think I’m playing a joke on them. This was especially hurtful when I was a child and my teachers didn’t believe me.
Every science blogger seems to have posted an April Fool’s joke, but my favorite is today’s RealClimate farewell. The comments include a link to their previous sheep albedo effect story and to the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/04/farewell-to-our-readers/
http://www.newsy.com/videos/april_fools_and_the_media/ has video of a few different pranks from this year. It also has video from a prank pulled by the BBC about spaghetti trees from years ago. The funny part is that people were calling in to see how they could get one for themselves!