This one got me the hardest. But there were many that got me. I'm easily gotten.

My sister got up at 4 a.m. and switched her 10 and 11 year old daughter's rooms. Which apparently made things very confused this morning. hee.

This one about renaming Croydon got me, because it's not actually a terrible idea, especially given most of the London boroughs' names are entirely invented (in 1965) anyway.

Sil - she moved the kids or moved the furniture? Either way, classic!

the diamond hoax makes you do the hokey pokey to check your ring, very funny.

Ha! TPS's link would totally have fooled me, if I had a diamond ring.

So many conflicting reports about Project Runway came out yesterday - it's hard to figure out what's true and what's a prank.

I came home and there was a printed notice in big letters on my front door: Please Use The Other Door. Huh, I thought as I was obediently walking all the way around the house, through the yard gate and up the steps to the back door, that's weird, it's probably an April Fools thing, but what if, what if - and I came into the house to find nothing at all except, between the screen and front door, a 1971 booklet entitled How Satan Is Stealing Your Children (rock n' roll, mostly) and a postcard for Brain Salts. Yes, my friend the prankster totally got me again. I called her up and she was all cackling with evil glee. "I put them on my neighbor's doors too!" she said, "I'm sitting by the window with a drink waiting and watching for them to come home from work!"

She's good. Although, as I told her, Satan got all of us including the kids years ago. ;-)

Not a neighborhood prank (or any prank at all), but....

I think I've told the story of the big pig before. The April Fool's pig? I was in high school, my brother (10 years older) was living at home. His room was next to mine. Early in the morning of April 1st, we both woke up to the sound of grunting outside our window, along with furious barking. Turns out someone's very large hog had escaped, and dogs had chased it all through the neighborhood. It finally got exhausted in the flower bed outside our house, and it was trying to dig itself a hole in which to hide.

The story is much longer than this, but the nutshell is that we spent the morning of April 1st dealing with a huge, injured swine. It's now popular family lore. (More context: My mom had recently had a hysterectomy, my dad had thrown his back out several days before and was heavily drugged, and the dog was recovering from being hit by a car. So my brother and I were walking on eggshells at this point, and now there's this big pig.)

So I called my brother yesterday evening. I was going to remind him of the story. I had the conversation all worked out in my head. It was going to go:

Me: "Do you know what today is?"
Bro: "It's April 1st."
Me: "Do you know what else?"
Bro: "Um...."
Me: "IT'S THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIG PIG!"

I called him up, we did the chit chat, and I launched. It went like this:

Me: "Do you know what today is?"
Bro: "It's April 1st."
Me: "Do you know what else?"
Bro: "Yeah, it's the 20th anniversary of the big pig."
Me: "GODDAMN IT!"

I couldn't believe he remembered. And he said it exactly the way *I* was going to say it. I was so pissed.

Guess I got pranked after all.

I have a strong suspicion I was pranked yesterday by a woman who called in around 5pm to say that her 24-year-old daughter hadn't returned home from her appointment with her neurologist, four hours earlier. It happens often enough (though mostly with elderly opthalmology patients who either give their transport drivers the slip and get back to the nursing homes on the bus, or who have to hang around for six hours for various tests) and since the information the woman gave was perfectly plausible, I went through the process of paging everyone I could who might have information about her, as well as overhead paging the daughter in the hospital on the off-chance she was still there.

It happened, of course, that the neurologist she was supposed to have seen had his pager signed out and was completely unreachable by any other method. It also happened that the daughter's information didn't show up in the database to which either I or the neurology residents on call had access.

I kept calling the mother back to make certain the daughter hadn't contacted her and to update her, but at the same time her own responses to my questions grew vague and hesitant in a way that was almost evasive while her lackadaisical tone began to trip my bullshit detector. It did not help that she sounded rather younger than 40 and possibly either mildly mentally impaired or on a combination of drugs. Finally it came down to calling a condition (which would require all the nurses, security, maintenance, and housekeeping people in the entire hospital to stop and search for her) or walking the mother through a missing persons report with the police since she didn't seem to be getting around to doing it herself. I called her back with the intention of asking which she wanted to do first, and asked one last time if she'd heard from her daughter. "Oh," she said, "yeaaah, she came home a little while ago. Thanks!" Click.

Ah. Thank you for letting us know. I'm pretty sure at this point from the combination of things-that-did-not-compute that it was another neurology patient out for lulz. Hilarious!

And... The absolute best punchline ever!

They really did have their baby boy yesterday, and his initials really are LOL.

Mother and son are doing well, despite him being a little over 3 weeks early. I have a feeling he'll be blessed with a wicked sense of humor. :)