This isn’t an April Fools prank, but it’s a shitty appalling prank.

The trouble is many people don’t go for the harmless prank. They know what scares some people and use it against them for laughs. A friend was robbed at gunpoint when she was younger and another “friend” thought it was hilarious to come up behind her and pretend to shove a gun in her back. He was a complete asshole…

Short but very awful story.

Today.

About twenty years ago, on April 1st, my boss and his boss walked into my office and fired me.

Looking back, this is an even more awful prank than I first realized. My best friend is from a different country. She immigrated here with her family when she was in fourth grade, and this prank happened when we were seniors in high school, so she had been living here for a long time.

The cruelist joke My dad ever played on me was on April 1 when I was like, 8. He convinced me that my dog had been hit by a car and killed. He did this by pulling over on the side of the road and pointing to a red stain, actually cranberry juice or some shit, and saying thats was where Logan had been run over. Then he…

Tina Turner, the last of my four goldfish had died. What was a 8 year old to do but hold an elaborate burial with all the neighborhood kids invited, complete with passages read from a Greek Orthodox Bible and homemade tombstone and coffin? The pitter-pat of the spring rain falling on the tent of golf umbrellas…

I can’t think of any others past, but an acquaintance of mine, who I don’t see often and am fond of, thought it would be hilarious to update his Facebook status that he had passed away last night from a massive heart attack. Incredibly not cool or funny asshole.

My mom has a real vicious streak and as an adult I’m appalled at the “jokes” she played on my dad when I was a kid.

One year, we had loaned a brand-new car to a friend. (Or not? I was 10 or so and it could have been set up for her “prank”.) So she took the car and parked it around the block and when Dad got home from…

I went to a residential high school for gifted students, so I was obviously a high strung over achiever. I get called out of dorm room by the hall director, who yells at me and says I’m getting written up because I was unaccounted for at the last fire drill. I’m starting to freak out because I knew I was there. I…

I got married on April 1. Like most pranks it seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t.

While it could be deemed an awful prank. I still think it’s pretty great.

I guess my worst experience was also my most hilarious. I worked at a non-profit case management agency for a director who was the most anal retentive, had no humor, and no sense of irony.

I convinced the other case workers to call in sick at 8:45am, and we would be in the reception room, watching his head spin. Well…

6th grade. The teacher told us this book project that was like 50% of our grade and that was the first high-school like assignment of middle school (so we were all super stressed over) was no longer going to be graded.

ding dong

Years ago, my husband’s family convinced us that his little sister had run off to get married to her crappy boyfriend. We spent hours freaking out, worried about her and him and their future, only to find out that it was not true.

I suspended what was effectively a scarecrow from the ceiling of a friend’s dorm room.

It was back in my call-center days and my fuckwad of a “coach” announced that he was getting transferred to another (apparently nonexistent) site and then said that he liked us too much to leave.

My older brother had his best friend call me to tell me that my brother had just been arrested. Supposedly they were out being shithead 19 year-olds (no doubt), a cop took exception to their antics (also not a surprise), but my brother needed me to tell my parents so he could get bail. I told my brother’s best friend…