Best April Fools Pranks
I'm a big fan of April Fools Day (I know, shocker, right?). Believe it or not, the French take April Fools Day pretty seriously. All day long, I've seen people walking around Paris with paper fish on their backs, a la the "Kick Me" signs of old. That's the tradition here: one running gag, hanging a fish on someone, and that person becomes poisson avril (April Fish). Kinda lame, but kinda funny all the same.
In the States, however, April Fools is elevated to an art form. Pranks run the gamut from scary, to funny, to really elaborate and creative, to downright lame (like Google announcing they were changing their name to Topeka this morning).
So I went in search of the best April Fools Day pranks of all time, and this is what I found. Some of them are pretty epic, like George Plimpton's 1985 Sidd Finch classic. Wall Street has had its share of pranksters as well (and I'm not just talking about the kind that help sovereign governments conceal their true financial condition from their EU partners -- Lloyd, you practical joker, you!).
So let's hear it. It's been too long since we've had a solid prank post. What are some of the best you've heard of, seen, or been involved with?
Comments
Here's a pretty cruel prank I
Here's a pretty cruel prank I just heard about.
Any New Yorkers who've spent time on the West Coast and have experienced the transcendent culinary orgasm that is In-N-Out Burger probably got pretty pumped about this one:
http://ny.eater.com/archives/2010/04/this_is_eithe...
Alas, it's just a cruel hoax.
I remember when I was in
I remember when I was in college one night I pepper sprayed the captain of the girl's tennis team, shoved her into the trunk of her plum colored Volkswagen Pasat and drove for 40 miles before pulling over, letting her out of the trunk and spraying her once more before running into the woods.... that was a classic April Fool's prank..... although I think it was November.
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Marcus, being a University of
Marcus, being a University of Second Choice alum, I know you love you some In-N-Out...
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Today, we sent one of our
Today, we sent one of our first year analysts over to the precious metals sales desk to do a "favor" for the pm sales team (this was all arranged beforehand). The pm sales team then explained to the analyst that they had sold several bars of gold (400 oz a piece) to the a private client 2 days before hand (commodities are T+2) and that the client would be coming by the office today to collect their purchase. They then explained to the analyst that they had to go down to "the vault" a few floors below the 1st floor of the bank, go through a few rounds of security, to retrieve the gold bars in a cart, and meet the private client in the security officers room on the first floor to transfer their gold to them and ensure it was placed in a Brinks truck outside the office. After receiving all of the instructions, the analyst left and literally didn't come back to the trading floor for over an hour. Apparently, he had been caught by the security officers when trying to get into one of the boiler rooms and was interrogated before being allowed to return to the trading floor.
Posted a couple days ago.
Posted a couple days ago. This is brutal:
Wow if someone burned my
Wow if someone burned my macbook I'd kill them, straight up.
Wall Street leaders now understand that they made a mistake, one born of their innocent and trusting nature. They trusted ordinary Americans to behave more responsibly than they themselves ever would, and these ordinary Americans betrayed their trust.
I know, right? My laptop is
I know, right?
My laptop is my cash register. I could live without a cell phone for a few days.
We played one on my boss.
We played one on my boss. He's incredibly forgetful, so we "invented" an intercompany project with a serious bigwig in the global headquarters. Then we cooked up a forged email to the PA saying that he'd been waiting for our completed project for a while, and that this was making us lose credibility with a long-term client. So the PA forwarded it to him and said there was an important email waiting. We made sure the email had come from a Blackberry-type font (no html), that the project name followed his pattern, that it was a sufficiently small budget that it'd be realistic that he'd not paid any attention to it...
He completely fell for it.
The appropriate prank back would've been to forward it to the bigwig in question, copying us in, saying that he'd check up on why it wasn't completed yet.
That long (stupid) gay
That long (stupid) gay brother story reminded me of the Dallas Cowboys initiation they did to a rookie right before training camp. They take all the rookies out, get them incredibly drunk and slip a roofie into one of their drinks. Carry him back to his hotel rooms and slather icy hot on his assholes. The next morning the rookie would wake up completely out of it and having no idea how they ended up in their room or why their asshole was burning... at camp everyone stuck to the story that they got really drunk and they asked a bouncer to escort him back to the hotel. The best part was that they never told the rookie about the prank, so he basically lived the rest of his life (until someone outed the story) that he got ass raped by a bouncer.
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