In the year 2025, it’s easy to look at the internet as a whole and wonder “was this ever a good thing?”. I mean, we have social media corrupting the minds of our youth, we have Facebook convincing old people that social security is somehow bad for them, and now we have AI tools which gives any schmo the ability to create any kind of story they want.
The best example of the internet fouling up a perfectly good thing is April Fools’ Day. Every April 1st, I wake up, grab my smart phone, and remind myself that today is when marketing and social media teams deploy 3 months of brainpower to tell me that their brand is launching itself to Mars or something extremely lame like that.
But in the before times, back before the internet ruining it, April Fools’ was my time to shine.
My favorite April Fools’ joke happened back in 2004 or 2005. I’ve always loved a good practical joke so April Fools’ was like my day to really deploy whatever I’d been dreaming up the previous year. That year I was working as a software developer for an internet service provider. Three of us on our team sat on the edge of a huge call center full of customer service folks. Since we were building software for them to track issues, bill customers, etc, they’d frequently come by our desks if they were having issues.
On that particular April Fools’, one of my teammates and I had the BRILLIANT idea to plant a remote controlled fart box under the desk of our third buddy. The box was positioned just so that he couldn’t really hear but anyone walking by his desk, hovering over his desk, or leaning on his desk could certainly hear it.
In an act of self restraint that I have never since replicated it, we very casually and very cautiously deployed the fart making machine to maximum effect. We’d trigger it at most once every few days after initially planting it. Some people coming to visit him would hear a tiny fart. Others would hear a righteous fart. But the real pleasure was triggering it and watching their reactions. People would try to pretend like they didn’t hear anything, but much like lightning and thunder, once you hear a fart, you know a deadly cloud is heading your way in 3…2…1. People would abruptly end their conversations and walk away.
We ended up letting it go for about 3-4 weeks until we couldn’t handle it anymore. We broke the news about our April Fools’ joke to our poor pal and he thought it was hilarious. It was a fun group that every year we had some prank or some stunt that we’d howl at.
Several years later, the internet would dig its claws into the purity of April Fools’ and every social media platform would be overrun with some joke, some some prank, some new media release that make it a little less fun every year. Now in 2025, you just don’t see that many jokes anymore. The joke has been played out.
So as Megan and I were winding down last night we talked for a brief moment about punking the girls somehow today. Maybe we’d pretend like school was canceled. Or we’d hide in the garage so when they came to find us in the morning we’d be gone (great idea if we wanted to spend the next 10 years unwinding that trauma). In the end we decided, nah, we already prank these kids enough as it is. We’ll leave April Fools alone.