April Fools Day Brings Hilarious Pranks to FFS
By Ross A.
Life can sometimes become monotonous as people fall into their daily routine. The Family Foundation School is no exception. We wake up, go to chapel, go to school, do study hall, go to bed, and do it again. Add three meals a day and you have a typical weekday here. But on April 1, things deviated from the norm.
Although it is an internationally celebrated holiday, most people don’t take April Fools Day very seriously. The day is simply a chance to pull a small joke on somebody, or to say some surprising, or upsetting remark to a friend and yell, “APRIL FOOLS!!” in response to their reaction.
Some of the more “type A personalities” take it as an opportunity to execute huge stunts, having confidence that labeling their dubious actions with the April Fools “stamp” will provide validation, and even justification for them.
Companies even have a good time on the light-hearted holiday, like the search-engine giant Google, who announced that they were changing their company’s name to “Topeka” this year, and even went as far as to change some of the signs in front of their office buildings.
Here at FFS, April Fools Day prompted many pranks, some big, some small, and some questionable. Wilson House took the cake for the biggest and best jokes. They ranged from Jillian M. setting her sister Emily’s alarm clock forward, causing Emily to rush to get dressed for school at 2 o’clock in the morning, to some much bigger.
Some Wilson House girls hid the coffee machine and coffee beans, upsetting the House’s 18-year-old boys. “I made it a point to not show any emotion,” said Matt B. Instead of getting angry, the boys refused to react.
Of the many shenanigans that took place in Wilson House, there were two pranks that had students and staff alike rolling with laughter.
The first was the idea of Woody, the family leader, who had all of the June graduates sit in the corner when Christine Speicher, the other family leader, came into lunch. Chris B., one of the graduates, got up at the table and checked in about how he just didn’t want to do his part anymore. Speicher became very upset at seeing one of her best students “fall apart.” As her emotions climaxed, Woody gave the 3-2-1- countdown and the whole family yelled April Fools, to her shocked relief.
While all this was going on, the boys who had their coffee abducted were already exacting their revenge.
One of the boys brought a pot of Au Jus (a dark brown dip for roast beef sandwiches) to lunch to replace the usual pot of coffee. The other two boys were on the serving staff and served it to most of the faculty, including Speicher. To their surprise, after adding a little cream and sugar, she drank the whole cup! They then became afraid of what may happen when and if she found out.
After Chris’s phony topic, while Christine was laughing at her gullibility, one of the boys mustered up the courage to tell her that she was the victim of another prank, and that she wasn’t drinking coffee, but “beef juice.” During an uproar of laughter in the family, she responded by saying, “I thought this coffee tasted a little funny!,” and one of the nervous boys quickly got her a real cup. “I thought the jokes were hysterical, they really got me,” Speicher said.
As one can see, April 1 proved to be an out-of-the-ordinary day for many staff and students at FFS. Now they can only wait and see what happens next year, and remember to check their coffee before they drink it!
