what April fools means
Here on campus for April fools day a prank competition is being run, so I thought I would get in the spirit of things and pull a smallish prank on my German house mate Steffan. I thought I’d steal his keys while he was in the shower, lock him out of his room, and then get him to tropes across campus in search of his keys – funny stuff. In all fairness, I felt pretty confident, so I told him that I had him lined up for a prank and that he should be wary. But in reality it was I that should have been more aware. At three in the morning on the first of April I was woken by an alarm clock that had been hidden in my room, and I couldn’t find it because the lights didn’t work, curtesy of Steffen flicking the fuse. Then at seven o’clock when I was getting breakfast, I opened my food cupboard and mountains of packing foam tumbled out. But the real icing on the cake was when I saw that my car had been wrapped up in 400m of industrial cling wrap. Steffen three, Justin nil. Now the odd thing that I realised while I was slowly unwrapping my car, a process that took about twenty minutes, was that I really didn’t mind it at all, in fact I was quite proud that someone had spent such a great deal of time and effort in pulling a prank on me. The prank meant more to me as a show of friendship than a set back to my day. So I guess the point of this is that meaning can manifest itself in many different forms. Hopefully then, when Steffen opens his door tomorrow and faces a wall of packing foam he too will interpret this as a sign of friendship and not a sinister shot at revenge.
What Justin is thinking... 