For the record: I hate April Fools day.
Just like I don’t need a Valentines Day to tell me when to be romantic, I don’t need a special day to tell me when to be a prank monkey.

It is sooo lame. You get all these amateurs trying to Get Their Funny On. Like putting tape over the sensor on your optic mouse. Or taping over the mute button on your phone. Or sending out emails warning people not to go use the toilet because there’s a skunk in there. Or leaving you a message stating that while you were away from your desk you received a phone call saying that your cat is dead.

I actively discourage people from messing with my desk on April Fools day. This works (so far so good…) because I subscribe to a little policy that I like to call Pay The Mother-Flockers Back.

It’s like John Travolta in the movie Swordfish:
“They bomb a church, we bomb 10. They hijack a plane, we take out an airport. They execute an American tourist, we tactically nuke an entire city.”
You get people back ten times worse than they got you and they think twice before messing with you ever again.

Last year a manager thought it would be funny to fill one of my drawers with polypropylene pellets.
The same drawer that had my lunch in it. The same lunch that I could not eat once it had been contaminated with polypropylene pellets.
In as much as I don’t find fart jokes funny, I don’t find any jokes that involve tampering with food destined for my mouth funny.

So what did I do?
I got my hands on as many bags of polypropylene pellets as I could find, and, while he was in a meeting, I filled up ever single one of his drawers. I filled up his paper clip cup. His coffee plunger. His In-Tray. His brief case. The pockets of his jacket. His wallet. I dismantled his keyboard and filled that with polypropylene.
This was a year ago. He’s still finding little polypropylene pellets in the most unlikeliest of places. It’s the prank that keeps on giving.

Another guy tried Something Funny, probably like swapping the D and M keys on my keyboard. So I enlisted some help and moved a spare desk on top of his. Then we left him to work out how to remove it by himself.

I accessed donkey porn from someone else’s computer and got them fired. I stuck anthrax on another monkey’s phone handset. Oh how I laughed, and laughed until I cried tears of laughter.

But there have been tears of anger in the past.
The truth is, I hate April Fools day because it brings back painful childhood memories.

My dad thinks he’s a Funny Guy. He paid particular attention to April Fools day. I’ve mentally blocked out most of his pranks, but I do remember him coming in from the cowshed one morning, quite excited, to inform me that my horse had given birth to a foal.

I jumped into my gumboots and ran to the back of the farm, where the horse was kept. When I got there I saw just one horse. My horse. No foal. And I could hear my father laughing his ass off all the way back at the house. Ahhhh, he got me. There was no foal. It was actually physically impossible, given that my horse was a boy horse…
I got him back though.
I dismantled his tractor.

My dad’s greatest joke though … well, where do I start?
I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy when I was five-years-old. I’d heard some ugly playground rumours and I decided to confront my parents with these allegations...

But I ABSOLUTELY BELIEVED that my father could walk on water until I was about 11 years old. (!)

He used to try teaching me how: “You’ve got to think light thoughts.” I’d think light thoughts, step out, and always fall to the bottom of the pool.
When I’d ask him to walk on water for me, so I could see what I was doing wrong, he’d always come up with some excuse, like the water was too cold, or he had to go milk the cows. Yet I still went on believing he actually could walk on water.
Until, that is, my mother decided it was embarrassing for one of her sons to still be believe this crap and she Told Me The Truth.

I was devastated. My father, the king of convincing bullshit artists, just laughed and laughed until he cried tears of laughter.