Let me preface with: I hate April Fool’s Day. I am a paranoid person anyway, and the fact that someone could easily be out to get me and make me look stupid is, in my opinion, not a worthy cause for a holiday.
Anyway. The day went along with nary a practical joke, but I was getting cranky at general incompetence in the world as a whole and decided it would be prudent to run across the street and acquire myself an ice cream cone.
When inquiring with the rest of my department if anyone else to go, they declined, but offered me a cookie. I then noticed they had four cartons of those really good store-bought sugar cookie, the kind with like a quarter inch of frosting on them. Naturally, I was curious as to why they had so many cookies that they were now wanting to pawn off. Looking somewhat dejected, they explained that they had come up with a Really Good prank but something had interfered with their plans and it was ruined.
As much as I hate April Fool’s Day, I’m pretty much all for anything that involves cookies. So I pressed them further.
A little backstory is required here: the company I work is located right in the middle of our downtown main street area. It’s quaint and charming and severely limited on parking. Aside from possibly the Wells Fargo down the road, we probably employee the most people along the stretch and thus require the most parking lot space. There is a lot out back, but as it is a city lot, each side is restricted parking - 2 hours and 4 hours, respectively. And our city police are just as eager as our campus police to enforce any and all parking restrictions and write out as many tickets as they can. I bet they have contests. Anyway. Frequently, you will see building-wide emails or hear frantic pages announcing that the parking guy has marked tires or that HE’S OUT BACK TICKETING GO GO GO and then everyone scurries out like cockroaches into the dark to play traffical chairs and it’s quite exhausting and maybe it’s only a $10 ticket but those can add up and quite frankly I have better things to spend $10 on. This is a pretty common occurrence, especially in the spring/summer - when it’s nice out, you can bet our parking nazis are out in full force.
My cohorts’ master plan was thusly: send an email saying that he was out back ticketing, and when everyone ran outside in a panic, they’d yell “April Fools!” and then give everyone a cookie. You know, to make it fun. (Our office loves food.) Unfortunately, the parking man DID come out earlier and ACTUALLY ticketed and that kind of put the kibosh on their plans. I was greatly amused by their plan and pointed out that they could very easily do it again - he’d only ticketed the 2-hour side earlier (I narrowly avoided this - he was literally parked behind my car and had to move so I could leave - I am quite convinced he already had my ticket all written up), and so theoretically, he could have come back to do the 4-hour side. In mass excitement, our entire department ran out the back doors then called our receptionist to send an email. Basically, it was awesome. A couple of people were genuinely distressed about the potential parking ticket, and others had gotten wind of the cookies and came out solely for those. Either way, it was awesome, and even though I hate AFD, I approve.
The end.
