Pranks + Ice Cream Cones: Life's Unnecessary + Necessary Party
A good prank matters more than you think.
A daily column about freedom, exploration, life in general, and creating work and a life you actually like. There are stories.
Words come up short to describe how much I love a good prank. I like doing them, I like hearing about them, I like watching them, and I have been an appreciative recipient of pranks.
The lengths we’ll go to to make someone laugh, and laugh ourselves is a wonderful thing. It’s hard to choose just a couple of prank stories from over the years, but I’ll force constraint today.
Prank 1
In college, my girl friends and I booby-trapped our guy friends’ apartment while they were at church. We turned their robust silverware collection into bead curtains of sorts, stringing them throughout the house, and took-for-ransom some of their priceless treasures.
Their retaliation wasn’t swift, but it was sure. A few days after our escapade, Heidi, Jess and I returned to our apartment complex from grocery shopping to find their entire living room moved and recreated in the middle of the complex. Couches, entertainment center, rug, shelves, the contents of the shelves, and—I seem to even recall—crumpled up papers that hadn’t yet been thrown away.
They thought of everything—and carried it all down an inconvenient flight of stairs, knowing that they’d need to rewind it all at the end of the prank. There is more to this particular prank war, but my editor (me) tells me to save those stories for another day.
Prank 2
The final prank I’ll share with you comes from one of my early corporate experiences. It’s the sort of thing that would be…ah…frowned upon these days, now that we’re super into security and that sort of thing.
But back in those less stringent security days, my coworkers and I figured out how to take advantage of a coworker leaving her computer unlocked, and make her Microsoft programs autocorrect an ordinary word.
While she was out of the office, we changed her settings so every time she typed the innocuous word “the,” it was automatically replaced by the phrase “dancing monkey.” Hours went by with no complaint from her. Did it work? Was she bugged?
Finally, we asked her if the phrase “dancing monkey” meant anything to her. It did. But she thought it was a Microsoft-wide April Fool’s Day prank, and that made our own prank all the sweeter.
Pranks are great for a lot of reasons. Here are some of mine:
You don’t prank people you don’t like. If you’re the recipient of one, take it as a real compliment.
It takes intelligence and emotional maturity to know if a prank is actually funny and if it will be well-received.
It takes a society of at least two to prank. It’s impossible to prank yourself.
Pranks take effort, sometimes a lot of it.
My final reason why pranks are so great is also my favorite: Pranks are so wonderfully… unnecessary. They’re kind of like adults eating an ice cream cone. Ice cream eaten with a spoon is like any other dessert. But eating it on top of a cone o’ carbohydrates and licking your way through it, spoon be danged? You’ve just turned that act of consumption into a party.
If you’ve got any great pranks to share, I’m all ears.
P.S. Not an April Fool’s prank: The April Toolkit guide for paid subscribers is live as of this morning. It’s called Your Money Life: Core Financial Practices for the Life You Want and it’s awesome. It contains the no-fluff, principle-based financial practices every intentional life deserves.
My favorite prank was in college, circa 1968. The college was one of the earliest to have an on-campus computer network. Connections from the remote terminals were via phone lines and acoustic-couplers. To connect, you dialed the computer's three-digit (campus) phone number, heard the trill of the computer's acoustic port, then stuck your phone's handset into the acoustic-coupler, to start your session.
One day when I went to a favorite professor's office, he wasn't there but his office was open. On the blackboard within, I wrote the message "Please call x769 immediately," where 769 (or whatever) was that computer-line number.
He told me later that when he saw the note, the number looked sort of familiar. He wandered down the hall, asking other profs if they'd left the note (No) or knew what the number was ("Maybe the library?" one suggested). So he went back to his office and just dialed 769.
Then, he related, as soon as he heard the computer's trill, he knew who'd left the message!
I like the furniture moved prank.
It took planning, was memorable, enjoyed by many (and “outsiders” no harm, no foul.
My best was to leave voice messages for a favoured client, a solid golfer over 50, at a time I knew he could not answer his phone.
I said that we’d learned of his very good round and low score the weekend before at the course where PGA Senior Tour would be playing in two weeks and wished to offer him a sponsor’s invitation to the tournament.
Said my name was William Da Better Li (pronounced Lee)
Fortunately no call display back then. I said I was travelling and would try calling again.
Working with his admin, I’d call a day or two later, leaving this same message.
On the fourth call, I shortened my name to Bill da Better Li
We did speak live on the fifth call (now in the week leading up to the event) and connected in person, announcing my self as “Bill, Bill da Better Li although some pronounce it as Build a better lie”
(For the non golfers, we frown on those players who would fluff up or build, a better lie)
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