Friday, April 01, 2005

Why April Fool's Day is no better than Valentine's Day

Everyone bitches and moans about Valentine's Day saying that showing love should be more than a once a year thing - well, I feel the same about April Fool's Day - why show your sense of humor just one day? What about the other 364 days of the year? People are expecting pranks on April Fool's Day - how interesting is that? Unless it's a big prank, like changing the programming on an entire radio station for the day or introducing a fake product line on a website that millions of people access all day (read the FAQs, it's hilarious), don't put out the energy today, people are looking for it.

One of my best pranks (that I'm not legally barred from discussing) took place nowhere near April - I used to work for this sociopathic social climbing asshat who liked to talk. He liked to talk about himself. He liked to talk about himself ALOT. For the most part, his anecdotes were long and rambling and not-funny and had absolutely no point other than to talk about some celebrity he'd met or a VIP room at some VIP club at which he'd drunk expensive cocktails.

*yawn*

Once, in a less guarded moment, he related that he was afraid of birds - yeah, birds - this big guy, 6'2", probably 250 was afraid of small birds, sparrows, jays, the little songbird types, you know? Apparently, one day while walking to work, he had walked too close to a tree with a nest in it or something and a mother bird attacked him - sounds kind of scary, doesn't it? Sure... until you remember that it was a fucking sparrow, they weigh, like, an ounce. In any case, he was scared of birds to the point that he wouldn't go outside the building alone if there was a flock of birds anywhere in sight (way to be a man, dude).

As I do whenever I find out the irrational fear of anyone close to me, I held onto the information, wondering how I could exploit it. It took me less than a week to hatch (sorry - pun intended) a plan. One evening after work, I stopped by a craft store and purchased one of those little tiny fake birds commonly used by weirdos and old people in hats, decorative cages or weird floral arrangements - you know, the little styrofoam birds with glass eyes and real feathers? The next morning, before he was at work, I went into his office and affixed my little feathered friend to the top of his blinds in the most menacing way that I could (no, not so menacing, really) and waited.

He came in and started about his daily regime of extreme asshattery and went to meetings and talked about himself and called clients and talked about himself and called his wife and talked about himself and all the while, he's failing to notice this 3 inch long feathered devil. One girl in the office was so irritated that she was threatening to go into his office and fake an "OMIGOD, what is that?", but I begged her not to because a joke's not funny if you have to beat it into someone's head (Dear Robin Williams, please note this fact and restructure your routines accordingly)

Finally, about 3 in the afternoon, he was lounging in his disturbingly expensive shiatsu massage chair with his pigeon-toed feet up on the desk, in the middle of yet another long winded ME-fest with an an extremely important client when he suddenly stopped talking (This was HUGE - the guy NEVER shut up) A full minute of silence passes and then he remembers that he's on the phone. "C-c-can you hold?" he stammers to the client. The string of expletives he shouted immediately after pushing the "hold" button made it all worth it.