You may have noticed I didn’t play an April Fools’ joke this year.
I’m sorry. But if you haven’t got a corker, don’t play one. Which reminds me…
In my time, I have played a few good jokes. Here are four of my favourites – the last one in the list being quite possibly one of the best practical jokes I’ve played!
Website Hack Attack
Year: 2005.
To be honest, I didn’t think this would work at all. I had recently taken over the development of the BUSY website. We wanted to create a little publicity. April 1st was fast approaching and we were about to launch a vastly revamped website. What better way than to add a little mischievous action in there? So, we pretended the website had been hacked the night before and sent an email round to Baptist Union people on the morning of April 1st to say the website had been hacked by someone in another country and everything might not be working properly for a couple of days, so please have a look at the website in a couple of days to see if everything was back to normal…
Next thing we knew, we had half a dozen churches praying the hacker would give himself up and for protection from the devil’s work. Alas, we had to come clean. Church folk, it seems, aren’t quite so on-the-ball. Still, we gained some good publicity for the website – job’s a good’un!
Political Defection
Year: 2006.
This was a pretty obvious one. I wrote a few long posts bemoaning the state of the Labour Party. So, at 3am on April 1st, I published another long article, detailing why Cameron’s Conservatives were the way forward, announcing my defection to the Tory Party. A few didn’t fall for it, but loads of people did fall for it. I guess it helps when you have a Tory accent…
Anyway, despite all my protestations to this day, many people still think I’m a Tory! I can confirm – no April Fools’ – that I have never been a member of the Conservative Party. I am still a member of Red Ed’s army… despite the persistent rumours from Sheffield-based/networked Labour members to the contrary. Towing the party line is another matter, however!
I guess this worked so well because my political views often fall right between the two parties. If I’d made a post saying I’d turned yellow, this would never have worked.
Rwandan Recruitment
Year: 2010.
This was a good effort. Only a couple fell for this one, but plenty of people said I really had them going for a while and that it had enough plausibility to keep it going – and that’s what makes for a good April Fools’, keep people hooked with enough tiny details and it plays on the back of their mind!
This one is actually in the website archive for you to see for yourself! I think what made this work was that it tapped into something I do a little of (web design/coding – although far less than I used to) and incorporated small details like the Rwandan national language, contract details and the all-important detail of a guy to translate the whole website into French. I think that sealed the deal for a couple!
This was finished off with a link to the “Rwandan Government website”. In reality, I spent an hour using Apache’s mod_rewrite function to make a link that looked like it went to the website, but instead went to another page to put you out of your misery. I was quite proud of this one!
Hooters Girl
Year: 2008.
This post was actually inspired by the friend I played this trick on, as she emailed me today and it reminded me of this. She was on a similar course to me at the University of Sheffield, studying a slightly different stream in politics and international relations. She is a bit of a feminist, although by no means the most extreme I know. Still, at the time, Hooters submitted an application to open a branch in Sheffield, which received significant opposition, including from myself, I should add, but I spied a fantastic opportunity for a prank.
I do have a tremendous amount of respect for this person, and it make me think twice, three, four times or more about whether I had pushed this a step too far, but in the end, the prankster in me just couldn’t resist. I had to accept the possibility of this going horribly wrong and did wonder if I may get punched in the face for it…
I wrote a letter, purporting to be from Hooters, thanking them for signing a petition in support of a new branch of Hooters in Sheffield – there was a real petition, by the way, this was not completely fabricated. I took the Hooters logo from their website, as well as their UK HQ address. The letter thanked her for recognising that women should be free to express themselves and their beauty. I quote from my letter:
Just as sport uses athletes’ athletic ability, our chain uses and actively encourages women to use their attractive nature within their work in our restaurants. Political correctness should not be allowed to stop women from having full freedom of expression, whether that be to go to university, work in the city or become a Hooters Girl, which is a serious and promising career.
Sex appeal is legal and it sells. We emphasize the Hooters Girl and her sex appeal within our company, and it is a vital part of our success. Women are at the very heart of our business model and their liberation in this field is no laughing matter.
The letter then closed with:
If you would like to pursue a career with us as a Hooters Girl, please get in touch again.
I then signed it as a Mr Brian Large (B Large… yes, I really did). Realising that it needed to arrive in the post with all the rest of the mail, I sent it first class on March 31st and primed one of her housemates.
I was informed that she was perplexed, didn’t have a clue whether to take it seriously or not and discovered it was me only upon interrogating said housemate, who couldn’t quite deny all knowledge. I believe this may have taken a few days… I think it was the next week when I was asked if I had anything to do with it!
Thankfully, she saw the funny side. You can see the full letter for your amusement. I can also add that she did not demean herself by becoming a Hooters Girl either. That would have been a stain on my conscience. Nor did she ever get me back.
Any other April Fools’ joke I play has to live up to that. So I’m sorry, but this year, I couldn’t quite live up to the standard. And if I ever play a practical joke like that on you, take it as a compliment.