Replace the cookies with Christmas lights = Glowing Nuclear Disco Monkey...sorta.
Despite what the weather in NYC is telling me, today is the first day of April. We’re well into spring, but the weather is playing me for a fool.
Growing up, I mostly thought April Fools’ Day was just mean. Maybe that was because it grade school kids aren’t very sophisticated in their humor, and are just kinda jerky to each other. Or maybe it was because my brother short-sheeted my bed one too many times.
In college, some friends and I pulled of a good one on some friends in the hall immediately below us. We snuck into their room and “kidnapped” what we all referred to as The Glowing Nuclear Disco Monkey–a giant plastic monkey-shaped cookie tub, full of chaser Christmas lights–and held it hostage for nearly two weeks. We sent ransom notes, including a cassingle (I’m showing my age here) taped over with Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey,” all the while trying to help our friends reclaim their Preshusssss. They never caught on, even after we returned it. (Although if they google “Glowing Nuclear Disco Monkey”? Whoops. Sorry, K & K!) Good times.
With that single exception, I was never very good at pranks, really, and I don’t plan on playing any today. But I appreciate a hearing about a clever or masterfully executed one, so today’s FFT is a chance to brag about your great tricks, or to recall (complain about?) the times others put one over on you. Salt in the sugar bowl? Meddling with all the clocks in your house? Of course, I guess you could invent an elaborate lie about your trickster past, thereby fooling us all…
My little brother switched the bags in the cereal boxes one year. I also woke up at 3 a.m. once to find him resetting my alarm clock. Funny in retrospect, but absolutely infuriating at the time!
I was a notorious prankster, both growing up and in college. My poor siblings could never catch up to me.
One of the best pranks I did in college. My two roommates had two bfs, who lived together, along with two other dudes, and together we all did stuff, all the time. I decided to prank the guys, and my roommates were happy to help. They let me into the guys apartment, and I hid all their mattresses, then made the box springs like their mattresses were still there. (These guys were the NEATEST guys ever, and always had their beds made). I hid the mattresses in their freakishly large closets, and then for kicks, took all the christmas lights they used for mood lighting, and plugged in the blinking bulbs.
We then went out with the guys that night, drinking, and when we went back, first the guys were confused with the blinking lights (which were in EVERY ROOM) and then one went to jump on his bed, and was like what? Needless to say, they tried to get me back for a long time, but never did
This is more a revenge prank than an April Fools’ one, but many years ago, one of my best girlfriends was living with a horrible dude—good-looking, but mean and controlling. His name was Rick, and my friend’s sister once observed that “the P is silent.”
Anyhoo…Rick had a significant CD collection (a couple hundred discs, at least) that was meticulously alphabetized. When my friend finally got out of the relationship, I went over to their house to help her pack her things and move. While there, I took about 20 of the CDs out of their cases and switched them. Put the Jethro Tull in the Isley Brothers, the Dr. Dre in the Joni Mitchell, etc. Knowing how controlling and obsessive he was, I knew it would blow his fucking mind when he discovered a CD out of place…and that he’d wind up emptying out and inspecting and re-alphabetizing all 200+ CD cases as a result.
MUUUUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Unfortunately, I still run into Rick about once a year, since we frequent the same restaurants. I’ve always resisted the urge to ask about his CD collection.
It took me a while to figure out the difference between sill and mean. In French the day is called “poisson d’avril”. Poisson means “fish”. So one year I put frozen smelts in my mother’s coffee. Not good. Now that I have a child, I am really trying to emphasize the silly side. So….tonight’s supper will start with dessert: cupcakes (which is actually meat loaf with pink mashed potatoes for icing). Then the main course: chicken pot pie (which is actually dried food and candy in vanilla pudding, in a pie shell). Much nicer!
Carole, that silly dinner sounds amazing! How creative!
A couple years ago, I was living in a rural-ish Japanese town with only four other white people (a married couple and a guy from the States, and a guy from England). Some kindhearted Japanese gave the marrieds a gift of “kaki” or persimmons… a LOT of kaki. More kaki than anyone could ever need or want. The kaki became munitions for a great prank war. I’d come home and find them on my stoop. One guy would arrive at his place and find them lined up on his balcony. The other saw the hood of his car covered in them at one point. The entire thing culminated in English and I breaking into the Marrieds’ home (they left their kitchen window unlocked) and not only did we leave kaki in various strategic locations, we also:
a) traded the contents of their bedroom bookshelf with their kitchen pantry
b) planted a small garden under their kitchen table (plastic flowers, real dirt, including a tiny white picket fence)
c) decorated their living room with dollar store Hello Kitty banners
d) left cheaply-bought underpants scattered all about
e) photographed ourselves doing these things and other things like jumping on their bed
f) developed the photographs and stuck them wherever relevant (the jumping-bed one was placed over their bed, the planting-garden one in the kitchen)
g) for one photo we had put on some of their clothes (off their laundry line – I thought going into their dressers was crossing a line) and posed like in their wedding photo; this one we framed and placed beside their wedding photo.
They were gone for the weekend and the whole time I was texting them hints like, “You sure have a lot of books! They’re very heavy!” and “Your kitchen has lots of vegetables, it needs more flowers…”
I still think that was pretty epic.
Unfortunately that was the high point of the prank war. Soon enough they tried to turn it on me, but it ended very, very badly.
(We all went out and got drunk, me especially, so as a group they walked me back to my apartment. I gave X my keys, who passed them on to Y, who went ahead and let himself into my place. He switched things around like putting the TV remote in the silverware drawer. However, the big thing I noticed when we got there was that he’d moved my bed, and I panicked. I totally thought someone had broken in and was trying to send some sort of message, and even after learning it was just a prank I could not stop sobbing, and I felt out of sorts for ages afterward. Maybe I overreacted, and maybe I can dish but can’t take, but even now, years later, I think that’s the kind of prank that’s just not too funny when played on a young woman living by herself in a foreign country.)
One of the best pranks I ever witnessed: A guy in my office hated pennies. He had all of these complicated theories about why we should get rid of pennies – and could go on and on about it. Well, my boss and her friend would sometimes egg him on, just to see how long he could talk about it, and then eventually moved on to things like sneaking extra pennies in his change bin in his desk, making sure a large portion of the change that came back on lunch outing was in pennies, etc… This happened over the course of several months and with each new incident of “found pennies” he would run back to my bosses office and shout, “See? I’m not making it! It’s like they just come out of thin air!” Hi-larious.
That should say, “not making it up!”
My father used to drive me to school every morning in the seventh grade on his way to work. On that April Fool’s morning, 1964, in the seventh grade, I stuck a “Just Married” sign on the back of the car.
Mm, another time my twin sister and I were mad at a third sister (big family, four of us shared a bedroom at one point).
“Ugh, let’s push her bed out into the hall,” I said.
“Let’s go one further and put it outside,” she said.
“Too much work to take it up and down stairs,” I said. “If we’re going to go to all that trouble, we might as well put it on the roof.”
See, the house had a flat, commercial-style roof, and our bedroom windows happened to open right out onto it. Convenient for sunbathing, and also as a stupid-sister-bed-repository. We disassembled her bed, carried the pieces through the window, then reassembled it on the roof, bedsheets and blankets and all.
It was totally worth the months-long grounding, didn’t have much of a social life anyway.
A high school buddy of mine got us pretty good one year. We were a month away from our AP tests and two months away from graduation, so we were *stressed.* He had to miss a class on 4/1, so he got the teacher to make an anouncement that “A___ will not be joining us for the rest of the semester. Any questions should be directed to the administration.” Cue wild speculation from all sides. By the time he came in for afternoon classes, the rumor mill had been at it for a few hours and the prevailing theory was that he had been expelled for . . . starting a fight in defense of his church? releasing all the critters from the biology classes into the gymnasium? trying to set up an unscheduled hydrazine demo in the back parking lot? He was a good student, so we didn’t have a lot of plausible material to work with, which only made the speculation more fun and ultimately more embarrassing.
My thesis was due on April 1st, so I called my mom a few hours before the deadline (after turning it in) and told her I was having trouble printing it out because the file was corrupted. She says I informed her that it was a joke just in time to prevent the heart attack.
Once I reset my dad’s alarm clock, and he got mad because he was almost late for work. I’m not good at this. XD