The Spirit of April Fools Days Past

Some years ago now, I was a senior in college and April Fool's day was on a Thursday. A few days prior to this, one of my friends sent out an e-mail to all of our group of friends except for our friend nicknamed Shark. It read something like this:

Fact: April Fool's Day is on Thursday this year. Fact: The school newspaper comes out on Thursday. Fact: Shark always leaves his car unlocked. Does anyone else see the connection between these three facts?

Well, we all did. We grabbed several stacks of newspapers, the rough drafts of our senior projects--any source of paper we could find, really--and crumpled them up to stuff the entire car absolutely full of paper. We gift-wrapped it in toilet-paper and threw a few blown-up, um, balloons, on the antenna. It looked something like this:


Actually, it looked exactly like that. 

Our gratification had to be delayed, however, but it only made it all the sweeter. The next Sunday we enjoyed a beautiful afternoon together playing frisbee golf. We had a course we always played, more or less, but we found ourselves at a point that was a little less defined, so we were making up the next hole. We were on top of the hill that overlooks the parking lot, which is a great launching point for any hole downslope. Shark scanned the area and started chuckling.

"The next hole is that car somebody f***ed with."

Pause as realization sinks in. "My car."

Priceless. And great that so many of us could be there to see his reaction, too.

It was almost as funny a few months later when I visited him over the summer and his car was still filled with all of the paper except what he needed to remove to sit in the driver's seat and drive!