April fools !!

                                                                

          The first day of April always comes with a lot of drama. It's as if all the pranksters were just let loose to unleash their best (or in some cases their worst) pranks on people. Practical jokes can be fun at times, unless you are at the receiving end, then there won't be anything fun about them.

  

          This years April fools day was no exception. The social media networks were going haywire with people flinging practical jokes about, waiting for poor suckers to be sucked in. The funny thing is that no matter how prepared you are for it, a good one will likely hook you in, depending on your mindset at that point in time. I've seen some funny ones, and equally some very strange ones. 

          

          A good one that almost threw me off was a message my friend sent to me all the way from Africa, saying that President Obama and his vice-president had resigned for one reason or the other and that the acting president senator Kerry had something to do with it. Under normal circumstances, that should have been a no brainier for me, but like i said, the mindset you are in that moment can make all the difference. The way he constructed the text as a breaking news story with a web page link for the full story really threw me off. i was in the process of opening the page when the light bulb went on in my head that this was an April fool's joke. Sure enough, when i opened the link, i found a funny logo calling me the biggest fool of the month.

 

         Other ones can look so genuine that you cant really be sure if it's an April fools joke or not. A friend of mine at school actually posted on Facebook that she had won a $5000 lottery. How do you dispute that? It's not so far fetched. I mean anybody could easily have won that amount. I must admit that i totally fell for that one. It wasn't until people started commenting and congratulating her and she only put up smileys that i suddenly smelled a rat. Something was fishy there. I happened to glance at the date and saw it was April first. Even at that i wasn't entirely sure. Others started getting suspicious as well. I called her out on it and she cheekily replied that i should go catch other fools. 

                                                              

  

           Some practical jokes can be very strange, even bizarre. A friend back home was telling about a young man whose girlfriend and his best-friend were both naked in bed, and when he walked in they both jumped up and shouted April fool!! I don't know how true the story is but that's stretching the April fools joke a little too wide don't you think so? Unless of-course i was the butt of the joke (which he denied was the case). How do you handle such a joke?

          

          I find the jokes amusing most of the time, but i also believe there should be a limit to that. Imagine being at the receiving end of that, what will your reactions be? I need answers folks.

Cheers.

Zukky.