Interlude: April Fool's Day

Sitting in class on the morning of April 1^st, I decided I needed to pull a good prank. I haven’t participated in April Fool’s festivities since my junior year of high school, when a prank of mine backfired severely. I decided now was the time to break that streak. But what to do... I pondered for a few minutes and then came up with an idea. After class, I sat down at a computer in the library and wrote the following email:

Subject: Nonreceipt of payment for student housing

Dear Mike Y-----:

The American University in Cairo Office of Student Accounts regrets to inform you that your eligibility for housing in ZAMALEK DORMITORY has been withdrawn due to nonreceipt of payment. You have been granted a three day grace period in which to remove your personal belongings from the residence, after which time you will not be permitted to return to the premises. Please respond acknowledging your receipt of this notice.

Regards,

Mahmoud Ahmed al-Mouqtar
AUC Student Accounts

I thought this would work well because Mike hadn’t paid his $1300 housing fee yet, and his musings about the possible consequences were a perennial topic of conversation in the room. I wanted it to look like this email was coming from the AUC Office of Student Accounts. I realized that I could change my display name in Gmail to anything I wanted, but my actual email address would remain the same, so it would be hard to pull the joke off. I sent a text message to Anthony, who’s something of a computer wiz, asking if he could spoof an email address. Anthony said he could, and I forwarded him the text of my email. But he never got back to me, so I forgot about the idea until that night.

I was sitting in my room at around 11:00 talking to Dan and Mike when the topic of April Fool’s came up in passing conversation. Remembering my idea, I decided to go ahead and send Mike the message just for kicks. I thought the fact that it came at eleven in the evening would be a pretty big tip off that it was fake, but why not try? He got the email right after I sent it and started laughing incredulously while reading it aloud. There was about a second or two at the beginning when he almost bought it, but he realized it was fake pretty quickly. He was amused though. So I thought I’d had my fun. But Dan wanted to know what the commotion was about, so I forwarded him the email. He was a big fan and advocated sending it to more people we knew. At his suggestion, I added an address and phone number to the signature section. This made the message look significantly more official. My cause also was helped substantially by that fact that Gmail only shows the display name when users initially open an email – they have to click on the “show details” button to see the actual email address. I started sending the email out to people I knew one by one. I’d been at work for three minutes when I got my first reply:

10:51 pm
From: Jane
i will go to the student accounts office and pay my housing bill tomorrow. thank you,
Jane

No way. Did she really fall for it? I read the email three times, looking for some subtle sign of understanding or complicity. Nothing. Wow. I was momentarily caught off guard. What should I do now? I didn’t want to freak anyone out too bad, and I hadn’t even considered how to deal with the situation if the emails were successful. But, less than five minutes after starting, I already had at least one person hook, line, and sinker. I couldn’t stop now.

I sent eight emails in total, seven to girls and one to Andy, whom readers may remember as the guy I inadvertently saw urinating on a mountain at the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. I fully expected him to see right through my nonsense (both because he’s sharp and because he doesn’t use Gmail), but I wanted to see what his reaction would be.

The next reply was from Mary. I realized moments after I sent her the email that she doesn’t actually live in the dorm; she lives in a university apartment near campus. Whoops. But that only added to the fun:

11:01 pm
From: Mary
To whom it may concern,
I am sorry for the confusion, but I do not live in Zamalek. I live in Garden City and my University, ---------------------- University, is responsible for my accounts here. Please let me know what I need to do to fix this situation.
Thank you,
Mary

Wow. Never mind the date, did it not strike anyone as strange that this email was coming from the office of student accounts at 11:00 pm? Let’s think about that for a second. The true irony lies in the fact that university offices are never open. I have shown up at 2:00 in the afternoon only to have someone sitting behind a window tell me the office is closed, come back tomorrow.

Although I was getting a huge kick out of this, I became progressively more concerned as I thought about the situation further. Visions of people having money wired from the US and making international phone calls to their parents floated through my head. I didn’t want to stop the show completely, so I decided to compromise by keeping close tabs on the situation. I had Dan intervene in Jane’s case. Via instant message, he broached the topic of strange emails from student accounts. I don’t know if that did it or if she’d already figured it out, but I received the following email moments later:

11:13 pm
From: Jane
hahahahahahaha good one. very good. bravo.

Jane proceeded to use the fake name trick to mess with her parents and some friends back home [note: she told me the next day that this backfired pretty horribly; she ended up sending flowers to her parents to make up for some hurt feelings]. Louis, who was also in the room, wanted me to forward him my email so he could prank people he knew. I happily obliged. This was awesome! I was having the time of my life. Then this rolled in:

11:29 pm
From: Mary
Again, I apologize for this mistake. After reviewing my payment records with my home university I realize that my housing was, indeed, not paid for. My parents are having a very difficult time making ends meet and they were unable to pay this. If there is anything I can do to pay back this debt I would be more than willing to do it - wash dishes, clean the dorms, or work in one of the bathrooms on campus.
Please do not kick me out of housing. I will have to live on the streets next to the little boy that sits and cries near campus. I hope we can come to some sort of conclusion to rectify this matter in a way that satisfies all parties.
Thank you for understanding and I assume you maintain a strict confidentiality policy in your office. i would not want anyone to find out about this. I hang out with these students from Georgetown, who I would never want to know about this embarrassing situation - they are kind of stuck up and I already have to get over the "wait-list-school" stereotype.
Thank you again and I am so sorry for this mix up.
Sincerely,
Mary

I have to admit, she really had me going around the end of the first paragraph. I thought she was very upset, probably crying, and I felt like a terrible, despicable human being for a good ten seconds or so. Touche.

This was also about the time when Jane’s roommate Sarah got back to the dorm. Now, I don’t know Sarah very well. Moreover, this particular prank didn’t strike me as something that would appeal to her sense of humor. So I was reluctant to send her the email. The only reason I did was because Dan insisted. What happened, according to Jane, is the following: Sarah comes into the room. Sarah checks her email. Sarah doesn’t freak out. Sarah is ecstatic. Sarah doesn’t want to be in the dorm anyway – she’d rather move out and get an apartment. She gets ready to call her dad on Skype and discuss arrangements.

At some point, either Dan or Jane broke the news to Sarah that this was a joke. I received the following email a few minutes later:

11:44 pm
From: Sarah
good job brian

happy april fools

I heard from Andy next. I’d been waiting for this one.

11:47 pm
From: Andy
Deal with it. I need my falouse [money] to spend on Stellas [local beer]

Nothing gets past this guy. Things were quiet for a while after that, until Dan got an instant message from Tiffany asking if I was around. Upon his affirmative reply, she politely informed him that she wanted to strangle me.

12:16 am
GAHHH you gave me a heart attack!!! I will admit it was sort of the most genius April Fools Day prank ever ...

She had freaked out a lot. After reading the email three times, she was getting ready to call her dad in the US on her cellphone when her roommate Anna (who also received the email, but was apparently less gullible) was unable to contain her laughter any longer.

I stayed up for a while, but that was it for the night. There were only two people left unaccounted for, Emily and Megan. These characters have fairly level heads (and I’d dropped hints about my prank to Emily earlier in the day), so I decided it would be safe to go to bed without hearing from them. I nevertheless decided to wake up early and check my email to avert any catastrophes that might be brewing. That turned out to be unnecessary. Emily didn’t check her email until I told her about it later in the day, which was a bit of a disappointment. I didn’t see Megan until around 5 in the afternoon. She’d gotten the email late the night before and flipped out a fair bit before her roommate figured it out. She had worked all day on coming up with a sob story to feed me about the email wreaking havoc in her life, but she couldn’t keep a straight face. That’s too bad, because it would’ve worked like a charm. Megan’s mother and sister were visiting Cairo and I’d already been worried that she would get the email in the morning and go down to the student accounts office instead of taking them out around the city (hence my decision to rise early). If she were a bit more ruthless, Megan could’ve gotten me back pretty good. I guess I might be a little too softhearted to be a truly masterful practical joker.