The April Blogging Challenge is Back! (Also: I played a prank on my coworkers)

This year, we’re bringing the April Blogging Challenge back.

The April Blogging Challenge is an annual event where me, mom, and whatever other sisters we can rope in blog for most of the days in April.

Every year the rules are a little different depending on what we feel we can handle.

This year, I’ll be posting on Tuesdays and Fridays, Mom will be posting on Mondays and Thursdays, and my sister-in-law Phoebe will be posting on Wednesdays.

Jenny and Amy may jump in with a post or two if they find something they desperately want to say, but I wouldn’t count on it.

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Today is April 1, aka April Fools Day.

I have to say, I do love a good April Fools prank. Probably the two best ones I ever pulled were this one and this one.

This year I decided to prank my coworkers.

For the past three months I’ve been working virtually for a company called LifeX Marketing, doing copywriting. There are about ten employees and we all work remotely, but we do a lot of zoom calls so we know each other fairly well.

Everyone has a daily to-do list in a shared google sheets doc. We go over it every morning. We also edit the doc from the same google account.

And this year, I decided to add some spice to everyone’s April 1 to-do list.

Now, my coworkers never gave me permission to write about them so I’m going to use some randomly generated pseudonyms from here on out.

“Maggie” had fairly recently returned from SMBI, so I added “DM the cute by from SMBI” to her to-do list.

“Jeremiah” always has a drum set in the background in his zoom calls, so I wrote “Perform an epic drum solo.”

“Larry” requires a bit of back story:

Once I took off work to go to a funeral, and when I came back I posted on Facebook: The weird thing about being Mennonite is that people don’t just disappear from your life once their story arc is over. You’ll never see your college crush again but you’ll bump into your Bible School crush at funerals for the rest of eternity.

Several of my coworkers read this and commented on it the next time I showed up in a zoom meeting. Larry noted that he and his wife sometimes joke that they should host a dinner party and invite everyone they’ve ever had crushes on.

I thought this was hilarious, and sounded like the premise of a short story. So I added “host a dinner party for my past crushes” to Larry’s to-do list.

I made my additions last night, and in our zoom call this morning everyone was talking about it. “Hector” was convinced that “Craig” had done the prank. “I can tell because you wrote that Jeremiah should perform an epic drum solo,” said Hector. “You’re the only one who would use the word ‘epic.'”

“I promise it wasn’t me,” said Craig. “It had to be Neil. The additions were made really late. Only Neil stays up that late.”

Neil just had a mysterious smile on his face.

“Okay, if it wasn’t you, raise your hand,” said Hector.

Everyone raised their hands except me and Neil. I guess Neil was still trying to be mysterious.

“Emily!!” Said everyone else.

Somehow I’d never been on the suspect list, which is funny because I assumed people would immediately figure out it was me. But I guess I haven’t been there long enough for people to fully discern my nature.

“Well I don’t know about you, but I’m still gonna dance to a Blippi song today,” said Hector.

Jeremiah told us that he had already performed an epic drum solo earlier that day.

“When I take my bubble bath, what do I track time under?” asked Neil. (Months ago, Neil posted a picture of himself taking a bubble bath. I know that sounds scandalous but there were mountains of bubbles and you could only see his forehead and a bit of his nose.)

“I’m not buying a vintage dress for my wife,” Bryce declared. (Bryce has adamantly made known his disdain for vintage clothing. It came up in conversation once because I was wearing a vintage dress, and Bryce didn’t believe it was actually vintage because it wasn’t ugly, lol.)

“Well, I had a crush on my wife before I married her, so I guess I’ll have dinner with a past crush,” said Larry.

Anyway. Maybe it wasn’t the most epic prank I’ve done, but it was a lot of fun. I’d highly recommend adding to other people’s to-do lists for some laughs.

Jenny told me last night that I shouldn’t prank her. At least not anything major. “I don’t think I could handle anything as epic as the green sock prank,” she said.

“You should prank me!” I told her.

When I went into the kitchen this morning, Jenny started acting very mysterious. It took me forever to figure out what was going on, and then I saw her “prank.”

Anyway. That’s all for today…you can find a new post Monday on Mom’s Blog, and Phoebe will start posting Wednesday on her blog.

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