Helen Sitther, exchange student from India, Business Major – “This wasn’t really a prank played on April fool’s day, but I somehow consider this a funny prank that I played on a friend. Once I took a friend out for dinner to an expensive restaurant and I pranked her by telling her that I forgot to carry my wallet along. Fortunately, since I had specifically told her earlier that the dinner was on me, she did not have her wallet either. The funniest part of this prank was that I actually played it very convincingly by actually pretending to make a few calls to ask help from a few friends who stayed close by to the restaurant. When my friend actually found out that I had been pranking her all the while, she totally flipped and actually slapped me. So yeah, that was a funny shock!”
Patrick Groschan, sophomore, Business Major – “This happened on an April Fool’s weekend 4 years ago. My twin sisters had come back home from college and I took that opportunity to get them to wait on me hand and foot (literally) by faking a leg fracture. It lasted for a day or two and then I revealed that it wasn’t actually fractured. Oh, they were pretty mad when they found out, because they actually did a lot of my work for me!”
Justin Scarborough, sophomore, Biology Major – “In high school, I guess the best prank that I had played on a few kids at my school was zipping their bags inside out. It was fun watching them struggle to flip their bags back to normal. I also remember that once I actually planned to prank my whole class by asking my Dad (the detective of our school) to arrest our teacher. But, I never actually got around to doing that due to other priorities.”
Van Weigel, Professor of Economic Policy Seminar – “There is this one funny incident that I fondly remember about a time when I expressed my opinion about a student’s paper, which differed with my opinion, on the ‘Development as Freedom’ book by Amartya Sen. I set his paper on fire in front of him and walked through the building to the class to express my opinion on his paper (though the paper was fabulously written). It was funny because a lot of people actually thought that the building was burning down!”
Nathaniel Stutzman, Assistant Dean of Students/RD –
“I have not participated in any April fool’s Day jokes as a professional; however, when I was a student at Eastern University, I did play a good joke on my roommate. I ended up changing the time on his watch, alarm clock, both of our computers, etc. I also got the hall in on the joke so that they would be on board with the time change. I set the time about 3 hours ahead, so that when his alarm clock went off at 10:00AM, it was really 7:00AM. My roommate went for a run, studied in the library, and then went to lunch at (what he thought was) about Noon in the Dinning Commons. In hindsight, he said he wondered why they were serving breakfast food. He finally realized the joke after three total hours-when he went to his first class of the day at what he thought was 1:00PM but walked in on another class that was already in progress. He came back to the room laughing and thanked me for giving him three extra hours to his day. The only other April fool’s memory that I have is asking my now-wife, Marianne, to be my girlfriend on April 1st of our senior year. I probably should have chosen a better day because she thought I was joking at first.”