Foo - Your best/favorite April Fool's Day prank...

I'll start...

A business customer and I colluded to get the salesrep from our company on April 1. The customer called the rep in the morning to complain that the system I had implemented several months earlier was acting up and not printing the results correctly (medical testing information). Calls went back and forth all day, with the customer becoming more agitated and the rep getting more frustrated with the lack of resolution from me.

Finally we set a conference call for late in the day. The rep tried to be the middle-man, brainstorming on all the things that might be wrong. My responses to his suggestions ranged from "I don't know" to "That might be the problem but I doubt it", etc... generally, I was no help at all. The customer continued to sound more frustrated and you could hear the rep really trying to control himself. Finally, the customer asked me "Do you think it might have something to do with the date?", and I said "You mean the fact that it's April 1st?".

About 15 seconds passed in silence before the rep realized what we had done. It was classic. :lol:

I have posted this before. Back in the day, I ran around with a bunch of guys with fast cars, money and no respect for authority. This combination lead to a large number of unpaid traffic tickets and more than one trip to jail for said tickets.

So one April 1, we decided to pull a prank. We drove to the city police station and used the pay phone in the lobby to call a friend and say that one of us had been arrested and that they need to go get a few hundred to bail him out. Then we go to the parking lot and wait.

Not longer after, the prankee pulls up, goes in and tries to bail out a person who is not in jail. That is when we let him know it is a prank. He thinks it is so funny, he calls his wife, and tells her he got arrested bailing out his friend when they found he had unpaid tickets. Same story, she goes and gets cash and heads down.

I think before it was over, we got four or five people to go get cash and come to the police station in Plano that night.

At my previous job, I slipped in a bit of code into our web server that made it return 5 year old versions of pages when accessed from the machine of a staffer known to make strange technical complaints. Everyone else saw the normal website. Naturally, I included a hidden toggle so that anytime I or anyone else went down to look at her machine, everything was fine.

I hypothesized that she'd suffered from "cache freezing," ran all kinds of crazy diagnostics and security scans, and made her go through all kinds of bizarre and confusing procedures to alleviate the "problem" which never was visible when I was at her machine. Since she knew I regarded her as high maintenance, she assumed I thought she was just being a loon. After a couple hours, I let her in on the joke. She was actually flattered.

BTW, a fun but very easy technical prank to play on someone is to just hit ALT + CTL + DOWN ARROW (or left or right arrows). This will set the display upside down (or left or right respectively) depending on the chipset. It doesn't work on all computers, but it works on a high percentage of machines, including laptops.

Most people don't know about it (a surprising number of tech support people don't either) so they'll assume they caught a virus or their hardware is effed up. But a lot of people will set their monitors on their sides so they can continue working....

ALT + CTL + DOWN ARROW (or left or right arrows)

I had no idea about this. Thanks!

My sister got married about 3 years ago, and my mom is obsessed with little kids. Babies to toddlers my mom loves them, and since my sister is the only one of us married, she impatiently awaits the arrival of her first gradkid. As you can see where this is going, my sister called up my mom and told her she was pregnant. She led her on about it for a while, and my mom was really freaking out with excitement. When my sister told her it was a joke she was partially crushed. It was pretty hilarious, and well played on my sister's part, though kinda cruel..

I got my daughters boyfriend this morning, I told him that NASA had found finger nail sized crablike creatures under a rock on Mars, at first he didn't believe me but I reminded him about the "blueberries" on the rocks they found not so long ago and told him the little "crabs" were found feeding on the "blueberries!" He jumped on the comp and googled it but of course he didn't find it, he spun around and yelled,"Government cover up! They pulled it!" and was as serious as a heart attack! LOL! He then asked me where I saw the report and I replied, today, April 1st, thats when he got up slowly with a sour look on his face and said,"Haha, very funny, I feel like an ass!" LOL!

MV found crablike creatures under his rocks.

how do you like my new "trollheim star"? The whole of BF is like trollheim for me now. I am unmoderated ass kicker.

when can I start throwing the feces?

I think before it was over, we got four or five people to go get cash and come to the police station in Plano that night.

So did you all have a big party once you were all there at the police station w/ all that cash?

A coworker sent this list out, I have to appreciate the one going back to the reformation in London:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-31/classic-april-fools-hoaxes/?cid=hp:vertical:r#gallery=1478;page=1

Ah, the spaghetti harvest. I love it when the spaghetti trees ripen at the same time the marinara flowers bloom. Nice link Hardy, thanks! Now off to wash the lions. Better late than never.

When we were kids, my sisters put tons of sugar on breakfast cereal. I filled the sugar bowl with salt. :) Tasty, not.

Ah, the spaghetti harvest.

If it's on BBC, it must be true!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27ugSKW4-QQ

Years ago the Guardian newspaper in England had a whole travel section on an group of islands called Sans Serif. Politics, native dances, and a geologist expaining how the islands are eroding on one side and depositing on the other, slowly making their way across the Indian Ocean.