April Fools is for amatuers.

Sal and had a busy day today and April Fools just sorta slipped past us without much fanfare. We had a funeral to attend this morning that I was a pallbearer at, not a sad one... the old girl was 94 and ready to move on, but still, not April Fools day fodder.

Want to know what TRUE April Fools day fodder is? I got divorced on April Fools day about 10 or 11 years ago. My lawyer, whom had taken thousands of dollars of my hard earned money getting ready for this April Fools day divorce.... refered to me as "Chase" in the courtroom, until my soon to be Ex corrected him while she was on the stand.

See? :-)

One of my very best endeavors into prankdom took place about 15 years ago and I worked at this one single act of prankedness for about 3 weeks. It was beautiful, truly beautiful.

I owned a gunshop for many many years and did a lot of law enforcement business with ammo, equipment, etc. All the things that a cop needs to be a cop. A company came along that made these truly incredible 3 dimensional, life size, self healing targets of bad guys and good guys. They looked exactly like a human being from the thighs up and you could shoot them over and over and the bullet holes sorta sealed back up. Pretty much cutting edge stuff for that time period. They were very expensive and that sorta killed the sales for them, but they sure were cool.

Anyway I had one in the shop for a sales sample and the one I had was a guy of middle eastern heritage, dressed in khaki and holding an Uzi submachine gun. We had him around the shop for quite awhile and he sorta got to be a mascot, dressed him up and crap like that.

I had an everyday pickup account with UPS, and the driver would usually take his break at my shop and have a candy bar and a Pepsi and shoot the breeze for a bit. So one day I got this wonderful idea....

I sat a chair by the door where everyone came in, and sat the terrorist on this chair. I put a Pith helmet on him (you get a lot of weird stuff accumulated in a gun shop over the years) and a big pair of mirrored aviator style sunglasses. Now when you walked in the door, this was the first thing you saw and I swear, for about 2 or 3 days the damned thing even startled me. But the guy that I was breaking in... just to get used to seeing old Bob the Terrorist... was Rich, my UPS driver.

For a solid week Rich would come in and kinda catch his breath when he saw Bob there on that chair in his pith helmet and shades holding that Uzi on him and then.... things got normal. Rich just became accustomed to seeing him there, it was normal. I left Bob the Terrorist there for a full 3 weeks.

Then, I sat up my video camera behind a counter display across the shop.

Then.... When we saw the Rich the UPS man come over the hill to the driveway, I took Bob off the chair... I put on the Pith helmet and the big mirrored sunglasses and an old busted, black gunstock.... and I got on the chair on my knees.... and waited.

Rich came thru the door carrying some stuff and I just leaned in a little bit and touched him with the end of the gunstock and said a very quiet "hey".

I swear on my grandma's grave that that man jumped straight backwards a good 8 feet. Flat footed. UPS packages just thrown. And then the most awful language began to flow from him... words that I didn't even know existed. I can't even remember them they were so awful, something like "YOU FLINGLE FLACKED SUNNY BEACH RASSIN FRASSIN FLINGLE FLACKER SUNNY BEACH!"

It was horrible. Took the paint right off the doorway of the shop with all that talk. :-)

Then Rob, the guy that worked for me, quietly popped the tape out of the camera and stuck it in the vcr/tv thing I had for hunting video stuff, and showed Rich his performance. He actually offered to buy the tape. He got up to $50 bucks and I turned him down 'cause I figured owning that tape was my only ace in the hole to protect me from retribution, and it was.