As a way to lighten up our usually somber and antisocial work environment, playing an April Fool's joke really appealed to me this year. "Hey," I typed in the chat box of a Scrabble game with one of my coworkers while other people actually did their jobs, "We should totally play a joke on someone tomorrow." I was hoping he would have a killer idea and all the supplies for an epic prank that he'd been sitting on since pledge week in his frat 10 years ago. He didn't. I also don't think that he was ever in a frat. Some dreams die young.
So next I did what all real pranksters do to come up with a moment of hilarity: Serious internet research. I Googled "best office pranks" and "top ten April Fool's jokes." Lots of them were too tech-heavy. Like, if I knew how to override the network systems in my office to send messages as though from Microsoft itself and write a "pretty basic" code that would literally turn the internet upside down, then God help me if I were still sitting here in this office. I would be running Apple if I could do that, friends. Running it. The iPad? It would have come out five years ago under my stewardship in that sideways flash reality.
So what ended up happening? This morning I came up with a really simple plan that couldn't have been easier to set up. I removed the key to our office from its hiding place, went in and locked the door from the inside, and left a note for my office mates that there was an emergency meeting in Conference Room 2E (which doesn't even exist... Aaaaah hahahaha). Unfortunately, I didn't get my office mate who arrived at the same time as me on board, so while he let me turn out the lights as a part of this most clever rouse, he- unlike me- didn't sit on the floor giggling out of view when the first victim arrived. Our locked-out office-mate looked for the key for about ten seconds, and then said, "Hey- I can see you in there and I know there's not a meeting. Open the door." I opened the door. April Fools!
To make up for this first failure, we did talk about ordering pizza to be delivered to the office-mate who'd triumphed so easily over the fake meeting situation, but the three of us planning it out couldn't come to a consensus on the toppings- which we realized was because we all secretly hoped that we would be the one who actually got to eat the joke pizza- and things pretty much fell apart from there. And that- all the disagreement, whispering about someone while they were in the room, and general nefariousness- kind of made it feel like a real holiday, a family holiday, and so a success after all.
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