April 3, 2010

Day 85 - Carry Out an April Fool's Day Prank

Date: April 1st, 2010

You know what's great about April Fool's Day?  Freaking nothing, that's what.  Every year - every single year - I hear about a new invention or a spectacular event or some wonderful friend of mine hitting the lotto.  Then what happens?  The clock hits midnight and Cinderella loses her darn dress in the middle of the ball.  And every year I fall for it.  Maybe I'm naive or maybe I just really want to see amazing new inventions or friends doing well.  I don't know what the deal is.  What I do know is that come April 2nd, I'm left wondering why three of my friends were only engaged for one day (and why one of them was going to marry the ghost of Elvis).

Not this year.  Oh no.  Thanks to this project, I saw April Fool's Day coming back in January.  I knew it was on its way and when I woke up in the morning I was ready.  I didn't fall for a single, solitary, individual joke.  Ok, except one of my friends really did seem like the type who'd be getting engaged so that doesn't count.  Well, and, another friend of mine said he was running for office in Oakland County.  But he's super smart and really political so that's not my fault.  And... ya know what, nevermind.

The point is, this year I decided it was time for me to get in on the action.

I spent almost a month doing intermittent research on pranks to decide what the best course of action would be.  I thought about the fake facebook engagement or staging a wedding.  Both of which, though highly amusing in my head, seemed less than appealing to actually carry out.

How cool would this have been though?

Then I tried to think about creative and interesting hoaxes of the non-matrimonial variety that I could pull off.  Honestly, the hardest part about picking an April Fool's Day prank was finding one that wasn't too mean.  I mean, you can always just pick something to lie about, but who really wants to make their family think they were in a car accident or that they flunked out a law school or something?  Neither of those really seemed particularly creative either.  I mean, lying requires little to no creativity whatsoever.  Especially if you're intending to be caught.

More than that, I wanted to pull an actual prank.  I narrowed my prank options down to two main choices and I rejected one of them because I would've needed to commit breaking and entering to pull it off.  While I saw no possible way that could go wrong, I still decided to go with option B.

See, my parents just got a new cable box cause their old one stopped working.  Now, the new one hasn't exactly been working great either, which has been a bit of an annoyance for my dad.  So I decided I would sneak over there while I knew my folks would be watching TV and use my remote (since there's only one viable cable company in Ann Arbor... freakin' Comcast) to change the channels around.

Pictured: Weapon of Mass Distraction

It was a bit less simple than I planned.  I couldn't get the channel to change easily through the window cause I was a bit too far away from the TV.  I also found myself concerned that, though my parents' dogs are the worst guard dogs on the planet, they still might see me and flip out.  So I got it to change a couple times, but it wasn't the epic, mind-bendingly awesome, prank for the ages that I'd hoped it would be. 

Though it did seem to give my dad a start when I came walking into the house from the back patio completely unannounced.  So... that counts for something.

I think the moral of the story here is that I am just stunningly terrible at April Fool's Day.  That doesn't bother me.  I've decided its endearing.  I'm the queen of the gullible.  Though that's a title I just gave myself, I'm pretty sure that if I just start telling gullible people that I'm their queen, they'll believe me.  So I'm going to go back to believing that spaghetti grows on trees and that Google would rename itself Topeka and live happily in my little world.  Its nice here.  Especially during spaghetti season.

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