April Fools April 1, 2009

April Fools’ is always a tricky day. If you’re going to pull a prank, you have to decide how far you’re willing to go and at what expense to personal and professional relationships. There are cute ones like this GMAIL Autopilot. They give a chuckle and are well crafted, but in the end are totally unbelievable (like this kid quitting Twitter).

Then there are the mean spirited ones where the pranksters are committed and take the Daniel Day-Lewis method acting approach to selling their hoax. I’m talking about the pregnancy scare and death in the family type April Fools’ jokes. These unavoidably end in tattered friendships or real-life pregnancy scares (Just to spite the partner for April Fools’ing him with a fake scare, he then pokes holes in a condom package. Minutes after copulating he realizes that the prank he just pulled will cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in child support. Panicking and despondent, he calls a local suicide call center.

The operator decides to answer as if he is a pizza delivery chain. He does, but before he can exclaim April Fools’ and talk down his now pizza craving caller out of ending his life, the caller hangs up and heads to the local gun store. Still bitter over the Brady Bill, the gun shop salesmen decides to sell the suicidal, soon to be father a gun with a box of blanks.

Little does he know that his co-worker switched the blanks with real bullets, assuming he would catch the mistake when doing inventory. Little does the salesman’s co-worker know that the salesman is lazy and never checks inventory. Little does the salesman know that even though the blanks are real bullets, the gun doesn’t work properly.

It is something he would know if he checked inventory. Little does the boyfriend know that he actually slept with his girlfriend’s twin sister (the girlfriend decided to pull an April Fools’ twofer by faking a pregnancy scare and getting her twin sister to copulate with her boyfriend), who is already pregnant. All’s well that ends well).

If I were to pull an April Fools’ joke, I’d convince a girl to get my name tattooed on her body. I’d sell it by telling her I’d get her named tattooed on my body. However, before doing this I would’ve paid off the tattoo parlor, so when we went in she’d be getting a real tattoo while I’d be having a temporary tattoo inked on me. I don’t think there’s really any legal precedence for this type of deception, so I’m pretty sure she couldn’t sue me or anything.

It would definitely be a win-win for me. If she didn’t really love me, she’d show that by not getting the tattoo. If she did love me she’d get the tattoo, and I’d feel even stronger about her. However, I’d still have the option of letting her go later on down the road without having to live with regretfully inking her name onto my body.

I’d just keep getting the temporary tattoo re-done until I was 100% positive she was the one. That way, if she dumps me, I still win because then I can show her that my tattoo is fake, so only one of us would be spending thousands of dollars on tattoo removal procedures.

It is a much more well crafted prank than a fake pregnancy scare, in my opinion, although it would still probably end with a trip to the gun store (this time she’d be the one buying the gun and real bullets though, and it would have nothing to do with being suicidal).