Happy Friday - What is Your Best April Fool's Prank?

My heart skipped a beat last year.

One time when my brother was in a very deep sleep. So for April Fools I decided that I was going to wake him up. I blasted the nuclear airhorn sound on the stereo system. It woke my brother up real fast. I rushed in the room and told him that Russia had finally done it, and that we sent nukes of our own in  retaliation. His face turned pale instantly, and he got on his knees and started to pray to God that we would somehow survive the nukes! After a while I started to feel bad for him, and turned the stereo off. Before I could finish saying April Fools he had already swung and hit me square in the jaw, and it hurt like hell. But I think I deserved it, so I just started laughing and so did my brother. We laughed for at least 10 minutes straight before we calmed down and gathered ourselves. It has been years since that happened and my brother and I still talk about it to this day.

Some of my co-workers prepared a fake scholarship offer letter and sent it to my house a couple months before I was going to start grad school. They let it ride a couple days, too. I had already told my mom about it before they fessed up.

In the late 1990s, I worked for a company where the IT department was insane.  Several of the employees had worked together for ages.  One of them complained to the boss that another was extremely pissed off about something.  The allegedly pissed off guy barges into the office with a (fake) gun and shoots the complainer in the chest.  The guy that got shot starts gushing blood (ketchup) and drops to the floor.  Naturally, the boss is totally freaking out and sure he's about to die when the rest of the department barges in and starts cracking up laughing.

With the scourge of school/office/random shootings these days, this prank probably wouldn't be very well received today, but it was legendary back then.

Fake lottery tickets.  It is a winner every time.

It wasn't April Fools, but my best prank was in high school when I convinced a girl that a boy with hooves was born in Arizona.  She then informed our senior government class the day he allegedly "died" for her current event report.

I'm not clever enough for this sort of thing. 

Over on the CFB subreddit today they changed all of the flairs to Pokemon and the Pokemon subreddit now has CFB flairs. The results have been pretty hilarious. Michigan is now Machamp.

A group of sales people worked in a several story building. While one guy is in the bathroom they take his car keys and move his car in the parking lot. They then have someone call him posing as the assistant to a key executive he has been dying to meet saying that the executive is free to meet him in 30 minutes.

The sales person grabs his keys and heads down to the parking lot. Everyone lines the windows of the office watching him frantically try to find his car in the parking lot. After a few minutes he rushes back up to the office to borrow someones car when he gets welcomed by the whole office.

The second is a small one. We would take the cord from a corded phone handset and put a bit of clear tape on the end to prevent the headset from working. Then we would call the phone often from the next cubical and would hear "hello, hello?". Then the phone would slam down. Repeat often.

When I was a kid my dad would eat Wheaties, with a little sugar on them, for breakfast before going to work.   One April fools day I put salt in the sugar bowl.  Dad was not happy.  I would not recommend doing this to your dad on as an April fools joke!

When my kids were little they would call and pose as customers trying to buy something. The fake adult voices and giggles always gave them away.

So this one time, I created a spoof MgoBlog account. You may even be familiar with it, I still post from it pretty frequently. Anyway, I used the account to troll everyone by being overly enthusiastic and adding new posts about every little detail of apparel issues. I even made my own logo! I continued that schtick for some time, but the best part was later when I got Dave Brandon fired. It was probably my best prank yet.

In the aftershocks of M's win over Kansas in the 2013 Tournament, and the Mitch McGary dong-punch incident, I may have circulated the following, reporting that Michigan had been disqualified from the Tournament for failing to wear protective gear in accordance with NCAA regs.

and a female co-worker was bringing some items into the office and left her car parked in front of the building, doors unlocked.  I climbed into the back seat and then called her to tell her she forgot to park her car.  She came down stairs, got in the car and I grabbed her from behind the seat.  Possibly my best prank ever. 

It wasn't on April 1st, but in November-December 2014.  It had multiple parts and ended with Jim Harbaugh hired as our head coach, as if one of the most successful NFL coaches in history would come back to college!  Luckily, the NFL reporters didn't bite and kept us informed of the real truth.  Ah, "Searchbits", a true Internet classic...