April Fools pranks
DB_Cooper
Manhatin' 7,823 Posts
Anyone getting down this year? Also, please to share stories of pranks gone right, and those gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Comments
Well, in the end it didn't. Nobody can ever reproduce a thing of beauty. Or should ever try for that matter.
I should have just bought the kit you sell for $599.99
Oh well...
C'est la vie
I opened my first store nine years ago today.
Also fitting.
My first job out of college was working at a Printing company. I worked the night shift from 3PM ? Midnight which overlapped 2 hours with the day shift. One of the owners(there were 3) was a tropical fish fanatic. His entire house was wall to wall fish tanks with both salt and freshwater fish. After I was at the company for 3-4 weeks he approached me and said he noticed I lived 30 miles away and wondered if I ever went to a specific Pet Shop that was in my town. I said I did and he asked if I could do him a favor. He had been looking to buy a fish called an Arrowana, a long eel like fish that were apparently hard to find. He said he had heard that the Pet Shop in my town had one and he asked if I would go by the next morning and buy it for him if it was indeed there. I agreed to do it and he then told me he didn?t have the cash on him but would pay me back the next day if I laid out the money for him. I told him that would not be a problem.
My evil mind began to hatch a plan?.the first thing I did was tell folks from both shifts to make sure they were at a certain place in the building the next day at 3:00 when I arrived to work. The next morning I went to the Pet Shop and sure enough they had the fish. It was one of the more expensive fish in the store at $39.99 but I bought it knowing the boss would pay me back.
Now one thing you need to know about this guy was that he was very na?ve, a dude who?s whole life revolved around printing and tropical fish and not much else.
At 3:00 I showed up and went to the designated area. Like a little kid on X-Mas my boss came running up asking if I had ?gotten it?. He asked me what he owed me and handed over the 40+ dollars. With a crowd gathered around I pulled out the brown paper bag that most aquariums place the plastic bag with fish in, and handed it to him. He opened it up and with a puzzled look on his face slowly pulled out the bag of oregano that I had placed in the bag. He looked at me, held up the bag and asked ?What?s this??. To which I replied ?Marijuana, isn?t that what you wanted?. This dude?s face turned bright red and he threw the bag down and literally ran into his office, slamming the door. Of course all his employees were laughing their asses off. I timidly knocked on his door, apologized and handed him the REAL Arrowana.
Two days later the majority owner partner called me in his office and I was sure I?d be fired. Instead he told me what a great joke I had played and that he wished he had done it.
Mazel Tov to us both.
A few years back at ARC my buddy found a test pressing of The Osmonds "The Plan" LP. Plain white labels and no indication as to what it was. We identified it by playing it, especially the one KILLER psych cut. There was a legendary psych dealer from Canada who was our target.
He came up to the Hotel room that night where everyone gets a shot at playing records, drink, smoke and have a good time. After a couple of hours when everyone was in the correct state of mind, my buddy puts on the Osmond mystery disc and sure enough, our Canuck buddy flipped out. he came over to the turntable demanding to know what this mystery record was. As planned, after that one cut the LP came off the turntable, put back into it's plain white jacket, and put away for the night.
It became an obsession with Mr. Psych dealer....all weekend he harrassed us about buying this unknown monster psych LP.....He started with a $300.00 offer and it went up from there and by Sunday he was like "Just name your price".
Last month I was sitting around at home one night, checking out Facebook, when just to be funny I cooked up a make-believe news item regarding the Osmonds playing a Monsters Of Rock gig in the UK with Motorhead, Saxon and Metallica. I Googled a 70's-era photo of Donny Osmond, printed the text alongside of it, and even included a phony quote from a phony representative ("Nigel Stigwood"), claiming that the Osmonds'Crazy Horses has been recognized in the UK as a seminal starting point for British metal, and they wanted to show respect by adding them to the festival.
Lo and behold, I got quite a few positive responses that actually thought this was going to happen. And then the fake post started taking on a life of its' own - I'm going up and down my FB home page, only to find out that two Facebook buddies, both of whom are in the L.A. music business, actually REPRINTED it. Next thing you know, all these forty-something hipster girls all came out of the closet one by one with their tales of how Donny was their first crush. A lot of the male correspondents all agreed that the Osmonds' short-lived heavy metal period produced some classics, and it was good seeing them get some long-overdue hipster cred. Jokes were made ("finally, Donny and Lemmy together!"), but no one caught on that it was a joke in the first place.
I started to e-mail my L.A. friends offline, stopping the ruse before it went too far. I noticed it was the California music-biz Facebookers who seemed to be the most ecstatic about this news, but I figured, naaaaaah, if it's not hurting anyone, I may as well let the joke play out. That was an amusing couple of days worth of posts.
i kinda want to hear that cut too, now. whats it called?
It was one of these two.....
always fun when the pop stars come through with some crazy shit.
now that i think of it, i got an osmonds record with a nice and upbeat open drum break. i actually got doubles
It wasn't just one "cut."
The Osmonds had two albums in a row where they were going for a noticeably "heavier" sound, Crazy Horses and The Plan. And when they broke in the UK, it was during this phase of their career, so a lot of people overseas thought that they had started out as a hard rock act.
Yeah, like that copy of Lawrence Welk's funky Condition Of Man that you found at your parents' crib? You said it had loops like Hula-Hoops...
*I got the idea to do this from NZ Shadow, who posted it in a thread. Credit where credit is due.
About 17-18 yrs ago my mom kept saying she was hearing a kid crying some where in her house and of coarse my brother & I kept tormenting her. So, April 1st came and it was on. We got out fishing cord and tided it to everything that could slide, neatly, across the hardwood floors. We had plants shaking, tables moving, lamps sliding across the floors. MAAANNN, she started screaming and started having trouble breathing and schitt. She ran out of the house and almost fell on the damn ground! It took us like an hour to calm her down and convince her it was all a joke. And she has never let that schitt go, to this day.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/01/in-n-out-april-fools-pran_n_522002.html
I feel for New Yorkers.
Damn! I feel bad for New Yorkers, too.
And to Mike2600: Sorry I deleted your "APRIL FOOLZ" reply. I wanted to let it breathe
for a while!