Friday Fun: April Fools

Brant Schroeder
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March 31, 2022

Today is April Fools’ Day. 

“Although the day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery. Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes.” – history.com

  • My question is do you celebrate April fools’ day? 
  • If yes how and what is your greatest prank?

When I was a kid, April Fools’ was something me and my siblings participated in.  The day was full of pranks that seemed to escalate as we grew older.  From rubber banding the sink sprayer to short sheeting beds pranks abounded in our home.  My parents were great at wrangling in actions that were inappropriate or harmful.   This helped keep it fun and enjoyable.

Now that I have my own kids we occasionally engage in April Fools’ day but we really do not engage in the traditional pranking like I did growing up.  Thus it is a fading tradition that I think I need to put some work into in order to revive in my family.

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Jimmy Seddon
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March 31, 2022

Great topic @Brant Schroeder!

I'm not super big into April Fools, but a few years back there was a guy I worked with who's desk was covered in stuff.  We left a note on his monitor telling him to try and figure out what we moved.  He spent all morning trying to figure it out.  We moved nothing.

That I believe was my greatest prank.

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Monique vdB
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March 31, 2022

hahahahaha omg evil genius!

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Lars Maehlmann
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April 1, 2022

In my company, we follow the tradition of Atlassian and try to come up with something funny and Atlassian related on April fools.

Last year it was this one 8-bit for Jira Cloud. I am still in love with this one and believe it might be feasible to implement it. Thanks for it. 

Maybe you will find a good one in the marketplace this year (related to JSM 🤔) Have good Aprils fools' day.

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Laura Campbell _Seibert Media_
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April 1, 2022

My colleague just shared that her kids served their dad a tea with salt this morning, and I think it's a well dosed prank: surprising, not harmful, and easy to do.

In my husband's family, it has become lore the one time my brother in law, a young computer science student cira 1998, created a program that launched at start-up for my father-in-law's computer and asked "Do you want to reformat disk?". No matter what you pressed, a fake progress bar started running. I think my father in law still hasn't forgiven his son 😆

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Brant Schroeder
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April 1, 2022

That is pretty good.  It is like the blue screen of death screen saver we used to put on people's computers as a prank.

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Martin Bayer _MoroSystems_ s_r_o__
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April 1, 2022

Great topic @Brant Schroeder , I woke up my 4years old son today and I told him, he has some stain on his T-Shirt...when he wanted to check it I lightly touched his nose with speaking "April fool's". It was really easy prank but I just wanted to introduce the day for him and explain what it means. I think I succeeded because few minutes later he tried the same joke on me :).

You are right that when we were kids, our pranks were to much taugher. I remember that we for example hidden the shoes to our friend so he went home barefooted.

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Darryl Lee
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April 1, 2022

That is so adorable!!

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Darryl Lee
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April 1, 2022

My prank is to trick my wife that I fell in her prank and she still believes in that until now XD

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Elizabeth Barr
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April 1, 2022

Now, that is a prank that doesn't hurt anyone—the best kind!

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Tom Kakanowski April 1, 2022

I choose not to incriminate myself.  Someone who I don't know at all, and a few of his friends, with the assistance of a friendly janitor, moved enough books from some high school library to the school principal's office and filled it floor to ceiling, corner to corner with books.  I seem to recall that principal was not very happy...

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Monique vdB
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April 1, 2022

I'm just waiting for someone to earn the April Fool's badge I set up in the kudos program 😂

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Brant Schroeder
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April 2, 2022

I was wondering about that.  Is it the badge worth one kudo?

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Heth Siemer April 1, 2022

I don't prank my boyfriend for reasons I won't get into....

But when I was a kid and living in my parents house April Fools was a WARZONE.
Classics like saran wrapping things, packing peanut explosions from opening cabinets, someone's glasses ended up being the add-in to a jello dish once...

For my senior prank we moved all the desks into the halls. I don't think the teachers and staff ever got the right amount of desks back into the correct rooms after that haha

My favorite prank though, was my mother's senior prank. My mother is the QUEEN of pranks, so she organized (almost) every student to hold a marble in their hand. When they went up to shake their principal's hand for their diploma, they handed him the marble. By the end of it his pockets were bulging out from his pants and jacket from the amount of marbles he was having to deal with XD the photos are hilarious.

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Brant Schroeder
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April 2, 2022

Your mother sounds great.

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Heth Siemer April 4, 2022

Shameless mother bragging... My mom is probably one of the chill-est yet craziest people you'd ever meet. She's a goober.

She's also immortal. Survived two lightning strikes, two severe cases of chicken pox, a brain clot that came back twice (so she had it a total of 3 times), and cancer twice. We're waiting on the second boat to run her over...

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Brant Schroeder
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April 2, 2022

I did not see as many companies do April fools this year.  I wonder if it is slowly phasing out.  Here is a pretty good round up.  https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/april-fools-day-2022-butterfinger-mayo-invisible-earbuds-and-other-jokes/

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seanaty
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April 3, 2022

I don't do April fools pranks myself but I do enjoy some of the ones that tech companies do. Usually it's in the form of some fake product launch. Atlassian has done several of those over the years.

My guess is that it wasn't a popular year for April Fools since it fell on a weekend this year.

Here are some favorites from Atlassian over the years:

Jira Jr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9shZslfbaS0

Atlassian Space Services: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygSJ5Cu2sbM

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Brant Schroeder
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April 4, 2022

I remember those.  Thanks for sharing.

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Marjorie
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April 4, 2022

My husband is the king of practical jokes and I have been the receiver of ALOT of them. However, one time he and a friend went to a co-workers house, jacked the car up onto blocks, took all the tires off, and took the lug nuts home with them.

The next day was Saturday. The guy they pranked, his wife got up early to hit the yard sales. When she called at 6 am, I answered, handed it to him and said... it's for you.  Prank success and prank fail....

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Brant Schroeder
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April 4, 2022

Did she make him drive her around so she wouldn't be late?

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Fabian Lim
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April 4, 2022

Great post!

The one memorable one was when we pretended a new boss joined the team via email and asked everyone to welcome him. Everyone was panicking thinking there was some "restructuring" happening soon.

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Karthick S
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April 5, 2022

I don't do April fool. But, I do enjoy a lot many memes/posts/interesting funny stories that come up during this day!

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Angela Bloomer April 8, 2022

I wish I had known about this community 7 days ago because it would have been fun to read about the history and the pranks on my birthday. Yip! April Fool's Day is my birthday. Growing up, I didn't play many pranks because I was always trying to prove it was my birthday and the party invitations were "real". LOL

I'm older now but I still love birthdays (mine especially). In fact my husbands birthday is on Feb. 2 (Ground Hogs day), so we decided to get married on St. Patricks Day. You could say we made date remembering "fool proof". :) 

Have a great day!!

Angela

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