An awesome prank we played in high school was to sign our buddy up for everything we possibly could. We had his name, email address, and phone number, and that was basically all that it took. Soon he was receiving the following: invitations to Business lecture series and time shares in the Bahamas, vitamin supplements, as well as a lot of items that would help with feminine hygiene and the stress caused from PMS. It went a little south when we tried to sign him up for NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Association, whose mission is “to end the oppression of men and boys who have mutually consensual relationships.” That did not go well with our principal.
Living in Hong Kong now, awesome fake identity pranks don’t really exist anymore. Today—as I write this—is April Fools’ Day, a celebration of consensual relationships between men and boys. Whoops—I mean it’s a celebration of practical jokes. Has anything crazy happened? No. Nothing happens here. In the States I would wander around in perpetual fear that I’d find my name posted on wife-from-russia.com and soon begin receiving poorly written love letters from Yuliya in St. Petersburg. Instead, I get emails asking me to evaluate financial models. Not models, financial models. What happened to all the fun?
My only silver lining was last year, when we told my colleague Alex that he had been relocated to England and his stuff had been shipped. The CEO (in on the prank) spread the news and poor Alex wandered the halls in anguish and prepared to find a flat overseas. In the end he found his stuff in Conference Room C. And we dropped a box on his head from the ceiling. It was—in a word—excellent.
But that’s it. Alex swore revenge but none came. All my stuff is still on my desk, I’m not missing any teeth, and the only “prank” to date is the realization that 20 percent of my life is spent using Microsoft Excel. True, I’m happy my laptop isn’t covered in shaving cream and duct tape but what’s missing is the something special that commemorates today. It’s often missing many days in Hong Kong.
So I’d suggest you go out there and do something special today, April 9, 2010 or whenever you read this. Go to Sham Shui Po and get some big cheap speakers and play your favorite high-school song, host a cooking class for your friends, buy 100 balloons and fill up your significant others’ apartment, make a kite and fly it on the beach, invent and make a crazy elaborate drink at a bar, paint a picture of someone you see in a shop and give it to him/her. Just something fun, silly, different, and that makes you feel like today is a special day. If you get stuck give me a call. We can always relocate Alex to Borneo.