Monday, April 1, 2019

April Fool's Day 2019

Well, it's good old April Fool's Day again.  In a moment of alcohol induced inspiration, I decided to list a few April Fool's jokes that either took place on April first, or didn't but were good anyway.  I also decided to list one or two that equate roughly to two redneck friends with a case of beer and a .22 pistol, who decide it would be fun to shoot cans off each others' heads.

Keep reading for a few politically incorrect and potentially disastrous jokes and stories.



Rainbow Room
On a contract down in South Carolina, I tied up with a few good old boys who started telling me about a professional lunatic they only referred to as The Contractor.  Evidently this guy would do stuff the rest of us wouldn't even dream of, and although the staff liked him, they wanted to pull a prank on him.  So...

One genius decided it would be fun to sneak out to the parking lot and affix a bumper sticker or two to The Contractor's pickup truck.  What sort?  Well, the local gay pride group had an office nearby, and The Contractor hated gay guys, so the natural choice would seem to be a rainbow bumper sticker.  Or maybe two or three.  This is a fine idea, right up until the time they realized that someone would have to go to the gay pride office and pick up a few things.  And what if you got seen coming or going?  So they drew straws, with the loser having to go to the Gay Pride office.

I don't remember just who had to go down there, but the man returned with three rainbow bumper stickers including one that said Honk if You're Gay.  They also registered him with the official Gay Pride organization, made a small cash contribution in his name, and signed him up with the weekly newsletter.

It was over a week before The Contractor found out why people (guys, mainly) kept honking at him as they passed.  Then his wife got the welcome package and the first newsletter.

Black Powder
Meanwhile, back at the old Medusa Trap and Skeet club, a foursome is out breaking a few clays.  All these men load their own, and as they walk out to the skeet field another member waits like a retriever in a duck blind.  What's up with this, I wonder aloud.

"Just watch.  Those four know each other, and Fred swapped out a few of Don's shells."

Sure enough, on station three there's a loud KA-BOOM! and a cloud of smoke.  This is closely followed by expressions of dismay, profanity, and groundless accusations.  It seems that some unknown has loaded up a few shells with black powder instead of the nice clean smokeless stuff.  Getting the residue out of an autoloader is going to require a complete disassembly and a bucket of Hoppe's #9.

Critter Loose
Back in the old MS-DOS days a fellow I know was employed, and I won't say where.  One complete and total ass hole in particular was always giving this bright, talented young man a hard time, and so one day...

A little squeak noise and a funny scurrying sound was heard.  The women who heard it hastily pushed away from their desks and held their skirts out of harm's way, looking for a critter.  No luck.  This went on for a few months, with good old Victor mouse traps being set, opinions about cruelty to animals being voiced, and one lady swore that something had been at her lunch.  Eventually the noise happened when some dumb propeller head was waiting for a drive to format, and being a busy body, he called his boss to voice a few suspicions.  The IS Department ding-a-lings perpetrated a search of all hard drives, found the executable on one machine (loads with the autoexec file and at random times runs a command file that produces the noise), then went looking for the alleged perpetrator of this noxious and decidedly unfunny hoax.  Guess where the source was found?

The ass in question got a chewing out, and gave my friend dirty looks for several weeks thereafter.

Home Invasion
Joe (not his real name) was a funny guy, always pulling tricks on everyone.  Frank was a fairly serious sort, was likeable and good company.  April first rolls around, and Joe, not able to keep his trap shut, says that he has the perfect joke to play on Frank.  He knows that Frank watches the Eleven O'Clock News every night, so he's going to put a mask on and pop up outside the picture window behind the TV.  He'll knock on the window to get Frank's attention, and then fire six .38 blanks from his revolver at Frank, thus scaring the living crap out of him.  Just for a joke.

Funny, right?

Well, Frank got wind of this comic act and got his S and W revolver, which he loaded with blanks.  He kept the revolver in his lap, hidden under a newspaper, and turns on the news.  Sure enough, Joe knocks on the window, raises his gun, and about died of a heart attack when Frank jumped up and let fly with six shots of his own.  Blanks, of course.

Joe didn't think it was a bit funny.

Revenge on the Plain
Old Cowboy, out in South Dakota, came from a medium size family.  He had a little brother, about five years his junior, and this being South Dakota and all, he and his friends were a bit hard on the little tyke.  Anyway, out west everyone is armed and dangerous one way or another, and Cowboy's little brother was no exception, having a .22 rifle.

One afternoon Cowboy, about 16 years old, had a few friends over, and they were teasing his little brother kind of hard.  The kid's only ten, so he can't wind up and take a solid swing at any of them, but they make him just as red-faced angry as anyone can get.  He promises to fill all of 'em full of lead, and storms up the stairs.  The group is downstairs laughing and generally carrying on, then they see little brother coming down the steps - and he's got his old man's 12 gauge pump, and he's stuffing shells into it.

Holy shit!  Cowboy's little brother's flipped his lid, and he's going to shoot!  Run!!

The entire group ran for the front door and tried to fit through it.  They heard little brother rack the slide just as three spilled through the door, down the steps, and ran like hell for the barn.  Shots were fired behind them, and the rest of the group followed hot on their tail.

Turned out that little brother had taken the shot out of the shot shells, and torched off three rounds while watching the teenagers run like hell.  In the end they all got a solid talking to by their father, who I guess was trying not to laugh at 'em too much.  Mom said it served 'em right.

Hunting Season
Back out in South Dakota, the Why Two Kay crises was in full swing, and the state hired a bunch of scum sucking contractors to help out.  Just imagine ten or eleven guys in a converted store front downtown, all with not much to do except work.

One guy was from Canada, and in my opinion was a real closet case.  He was also kind of dumb, in that retarded sort of way that you get when you've been drinking too much bourbon and now it's after 3:00 in the afternoon and you haven't had lunch yet.  Anyway, I wouldn't have trusted him with a broken lug wrench, let alone a loaded shotgun.  However...

When hunting season rolled around this Canuk wanted to go out with us in the worst way.  Well, we took him, and we've got eight hunters in a line on the prairie, all strung out, with the dog at one end and the Canuk at the other.  Guess who's walking next to the Canuk.

We don't see anything, and me being the nervous sort I'm making sure that I'm a bit behind the Canuk.  I was watching to see where the dog was when the gun goes off.  I hit the deck, and after a suitable length of time I poke my head up.  The rest of the guys are a bit worried that I've been shot, but I wasn't.  Then I asked the Canuk what he was shooting at.

"Pheasants!"

"Pheasants?  Where?"

"Down there!  See 'em?"

Across the plain, about ten miles away, a few pheasants are getting up and flying to the next cover.  Yeah, I do mean it - ten miles.  It's open prairie, and you can see for miles.

Okay... the next week we're talking about Canadian honkers.  Pierre, SD is in their migration path, so these honkers stop at Capital Lake, which has the state capital building on one side, and the governor's mansion on the other.  The geese are thicker than fleas on a Tennessee hound dog's back, and they're wing to wing in Capital Lake.

Someone, I don't remember just who, started a rumor about the special goose season they have.  Once a year the Fish and Game people set up a special shoot where hunters can go clean a few of these geese out, right on Capital Lake.  We don't know just when it is, but it's got to be pretty soon.  We all want to go.  We keep talking about it, until Canuk volunteers to call the Fish and Game office and see when the special goose shoot is being held this year.

One guy had to turn his back, then choked on his coffee.

This was rolling right along until one of the older fellows saw a potential disaster ahead, or maybe he just felt sorry for the Canuk, who was about to dial the phone.

"Now wait a minute.  Think.  You got the governor's mansion on one side, the capital building on the other side, and a full parking lot at the rear.  Do you really, seriously, think that they're going to hold a Canadian goose shoot out there?"

And that killed it.  But the story got around, and all the men and women had a good laugh over it.  One woman suggested he build a blind.

Keyboard Hell
Back in Detroit, I had my first real contract that actually paid some serious bread and was out of town.  It was a real learning and growth experience.

This one little piss-ant thought he was in charge and he could be a real dick at times.  He made a big deal of locking his computer up whenever he left his desk, and when he was gone we had to take messages from his wife, and his ex-wife.  His ex didn't seem to be all that bad, but then I guess you never know.

There was a little fun program that you could load that would make typing a real interesting experience.  At random intervals, it would introduce a typo.  The longer you worked, the more often the error would occur.  Do it long enough, and you'd type pure gibberish.

Someone, and we don't know who, waited until big important mister supervisor left his desk for a meeting, then pulled the hood and jumped the key lock.  The hood was restored, the system started, and the Happy Typist released into the wild.

About a week down the road mister perfection finally noticed that maybe something was wrong.  When he held down the 'g' key, the line of gees was periodically interrupted by other characters.  That led to an investigation of the autoexec file and a subsequent search for the guilty, followed by persecution of the innocent.  Finally, one of the directors had a talk with all of us with super-visor out of the room, and told us to quit picking on him.  Then he described how mister supervisor came storming into his office and described what was going on, and said he was being persecuted.

Everyone had a good laugh over that one... except mister SUPER-visor.

And that's it.  If you have any good ones, post 'em.  



 








3 comments:

CWMartin said...

Boy, nothing to top those... The best I did (and it's still legendary): Fridays every other week I picked up the kids, we would hang at Laurie's until late and come back to my spacious 1967 trailer. The time it fell on April 1st, Before I left for work, I set up a chair just at the edge of the hallway, turned on the hall light for backlighting, put my stand up vacuum in the chair, put a coat and hat on it, and away I went. That night, I let my son (around 10 years old at the time) unlock the door for the first time while I "talked to his little sister". He got the door open, took one step, and froze. Having let her in on the gag, we approached.

Me: What's wrong?

Him, quietly: There's a GUY in there...

Me: Well, what's he want?

Him, not so quietly: UUUUUUIIII DON'T KNOW!!

19 years later, it's still our go-to at the bar story.

Mad Jack said...

Ha!
Ha!Ha!
Ha!Ha!Ha!

I love it! What would you have done if he'd tackled the vacuum cleaner?

CWMartin said...

Gave him 2 minutes for roughing, I suppose...