We celebrated one of my favorite days of the year – April Fools Day – on Friday.
Sometimes I start thinking about April 1 in January or February. It’s harder to pull a good prank when your family and friends know how much you enjoy the day.
When I was a bus driver a few years ago for South Grove Intermediate School, Principal Tonya Reid helped me to fool a busload of students into thinking that there was not going to be school as we arrived at the building. They thought I was going to return them home or to the middle school to eat pizza and watch movies. April fools!
This year an idea came to me as I was watching all the crazy stuff on television pertaining to the primary elections. I thought about it for several days and did some research on the Internet. I was ready fairly quickly.
On Friday around 8 a.m. I posted the picture below and caption on my Facebook page:
“I have accepted a part-time position. For the next few weeks I am going to drive Donald Trump’s campaign bus. I guess he is going to make stops in Indiana before the May primary. I will meet his airplane and transport the entire staff to these engagements. I was told that Stuart, my therapy dog, can ride along on certain events. This should be a lot of fun.”
By afternoon I had received several telephone calls and lots of comments on Facebook. If the comments suggested anything about an April fools prank, I quickly deleted them. Then I made a quick call to those people and explained that their comments could spoil my fun with friends who might see my post later in the day. Everyone agreed that it was a great plan.
I continued checking the comments, and my wife, Lyn, and I got a big kick out of them.
Around 7 p.m. I posted the same picture again with April fools as a headline. The message read: “I’m sorry. This was too good to pass up. I had to delete about 25 comments from the original posting from friends who figured it out that it was my April fools offering. If they called me on it, I deleted it. I then sent them a short note to explain why they were deleted.
“Happy April Fools’ Day.”
This set off another round of comments. Some people said I had them totally confused. A few said they thought it might be a prank but chose to remain quiet. And of course, there were those who said, “I knew it.”
I’m sure that I set a personal record for the number of times I checked my Facebook page in a two-day period.
As soon as the 100th running of the Indy 500 is over, I will start planning my prank for next year.