April Fools

Today is April Fool's Day, and for some odd reason, it's the day for practical jokes. There are standard practical jokes—covering every surface in someone's office or apartment with aluminum foil...sending someone into the woods at night for a snipe hunt..."is your refrigerator running." Once, a couple of co-workers and I plastered the inside of every window of an IT man's car with Post-It notes, although I don't recall waiting for April 1st to be naughty.

When I was an innocent child at the mercy of my older sisters, I would often fall victim to their cruel pranks. I learned it will not be fun if I stick my tongue on the ice tray. I learned that if someone is uncharacteristically kind and offers you ice cream for no good reason, it might actually be a spoon full of shortening instead of creamy vanilla. And I learned if someone tells you to go brush your teeth and they have already put toothpaste on your tooth brush, be wary. If they say it's a new kind of toothpaste that looks different, it just might be bar soap from the bathtub.

When I was in college, we occasionally played jokes on unsuspecting fools, April 1st or not. If someone was careless enough to leave her door unlocked at night, she might find that someone else slightly brighter had rolled the vacuum into her room, turned it on while it was unplugged, and threaded the cord out into the hallway where there was an outlet. I hated that one. Very frightening in the middle of the night. Not so frightening was pushing all the buttons in the elevator just before stepping out. While I didn't hate that prank myself, I'm sure I was hated for doing it.

I lived in a building in Chicago that bordered a fairly unsafe part of town, and security was tight after dark. After midnight, the elevators didn't go down to the lobby anymore but to the second floor, and you needed a key to get through the door to the lobby or the room with the vending machines. One night when we were all up late studying or whatever, we decided to pool our meager funds and send a representative down to the vending machine room to fill some shopping bags with snack crap. We sent Kathy, our very funny friend who deserved better. She was a heavy girl and was wearing her nightie, something pink with lace, and she wore slippers. We waited a few minutes to make sure she had enough time to get down to the first floor, and then one of us called the guard at the main desk. On duty that night was a handsome young man with a heart of gold, always ready to help out a needy soul. We told him our friend Kathy had gone down to get snacks and had been gone so long we were afraid she had forgotten her key to get back up to the elevator. Would he please unlock the vending machine room and go in to make sure she was OK.

The young man did as we asked, and he walked in to find poor Kathy standing in her jammies, her hair in knots, and her arms full of shopping bags bulging with candy bars, bags of chips, and cans of soda. We laughed and laughed and laughed, but Kathy did not.

That's the thing with pranks. The people who perpetrate them usually have a great time, while the victims just plot their revenge. And so the cycle continues. The IT man at work never found out who covered his car windows with sticky notes, which is fortunate. He would have followed with something more devious, and then we would have had to decorate his office in foil and slipped a whoopee cushion on his chair.