Prank-tastic

Ever since elementary school I’ve loved this day. It’s like a sanctioned celebration of rampant immaturity.

From Kool-Aid powder in the shower head, to toothpaste on the white toilet seats at school, to exchanging the sugar and salt containers–I tried it all. I was that annoying kid you wanted to strangle, at least every 1st of April. So this year I decided to get back to my roots and cook up a good prank. The target? My awesome, forgiving boss, Jen Wily. Here’s a little back story and how it went down:

So at work we’ve all signed a strict non-compete that bars us from participating in any business that would compete with or undermine the efforts of Vizad Inc., the internet marketing/search engine optimization company we work for. Now it’s important to note that this is a particularly touchy subject with Jen, and she takes it very seriously. From her perspective, any breach of contract is, understandably, a serious breach of trust.

So my brain starts churning last night and pretty soon I’ve concocted a brilliant prank…one that would probably get me fired (at least temporarily) if it failed to deliver the punch line.

So I began by heading over to tommcconnon.com, a blog that I started back in July ’07 and had every intention of developing, but never got around to it. There I added a link on the sidebar that read “Freelance SEO services.” (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is what I’m paid to do for our clients at work.)

Then I created a new page on the domain that made it look like I was selling SEO services as a freelancer on the side. To Jen, this would be seen as a blatant, dishonest breach of contract and if true, would certainly be grounds for termination. I added a list of fake “current clients,” and even went so far as to include a former Vizad client (whom I’ve since removed for privacy’s-sake) as a current client of this freelance business.

The only live link on that page was a call to “see more” of my supposed clients. If clicked, it would take you to the all-important, “you got punked” April Fools message. Lots of attention to detail, lots and lots of fun.

So the process was designed to take Jen through the anticipated stages of disbelief, denial, anger, full-blown frothing hatred and then blam!…relief (mixed with some of that lingering hatred). All I needed was someone to tip her off to it, and luckily her husband Preston was game.

So I heard later that he got up first this morning and brought a laptop over to her as she was just waking up. He was all: “man, you’d better see this…look at what I just found” and handed her the computer. So Preston (that lucky duck) got to sit there and watch as she clicked through the link, read the freelance SEO page and saw the client list, with mounting confusion and rage at every step. She told me later that when she clicked the “see more” link and saw she’d been fooled Preston almost died laughing. Man, I wish I could have been there.