April Fool’s Day sparks student pranks
When April Fool’s Day rolled around last year, Sarah Lloyd knew she wanted to pull a prank on her roommates that wouldn’t be easily forgotten.
Lloyd, a junior majoring in psychology, said she and her friend took items out of her roommate’s room while she wasn’t home. They took around ten items including shoes, make up, and deodorant and wrapped them in Saran Wrap. They blow dried the Saran Wrap to create a plastic seal around each of the items and then replaced these items in her room, Lloyd said.
“The worst was the shoes,” said Alyssa Evans, the recipient of the prank. “They took out the laces and Saran wrapped them individually. And it was impossible to get off.”
It turned out Evans was not one to let a prank pass without reciprocating the action. She and her roommate Sarah Walker snuck into Lloyd’s room while she slept to retaliate, Lloyd said.
“When I woke up, our clocks were turned an hour forward, and our chairs were turned facing our beds, so it looked like someone had been watching us sleep,” Lloyd said.
Evans and Walker also tied the bedroom door shut from the outside, making it impossible for Lloyd to get out. They took all the drawers out of the dressers and cabinets and rearranged some and stacked others in the shower, Lloyd said.
The prank continued in the kitchen. Walker and Evans dyed all the milk in the apartment a variety of bright colors, Lloyd said.
“The best was that they took my habanero pepper shaker and switched it out with cinnamon,” Lloyd said. “Alyssa kept telling us that the guys across the hall were the ones who pranked us. And we believed it for almost the whole week, until I walked into their room and noticed there was the evidence all over their mirror (including) drawings of how to change the clock back and fix the alarm. It was the best prank I have had pulled on me.”
During his sophomore year at USU, Raul Pelagio, a junior majoring in law and constitutional studies, lived in the Honors House section of the Living Learning Center. For April Fool’s Day, he and his friends Brad Richardson and Hannah Thompson decided to prank two apartments on their floor, he said.
The morning of April 1, they woke up at 5 a.m., before anyone else in the building. Then, they filled several dozen plastic cups with water and placed them about an inch apart all across the hallway floor between apartments 101 and 102, making it impossible for the apartment’s inhabitants to exit their room that morning without knocking over cup and getting wet, Palagio said.
“We just sat back and watched people try to navigate them on their way to class,” he said.
John Terry, a junior majoring in theatre arts, said he remembers a prank that involved his entire building, Merrill Hall, during his freshman year.
“The night before April Fool’s Day, two of my friends who also lived in Merrill called me,” Terry said. “They said to meet them out by the car with the flashing headlights. They told me to just leave and not tell anyone where I was going. So naturally I did.”
When Terry arrived, his friends enlisted him for a prank they planned to play on all of Merrill Hall. They had been talking to one person in each room in Merrill, and were asking them to change their roommates’ alarm clocks to all go off at 3 a.m., Terry said. He agreed, and the group disbanded. Each of them went back to their rooms, changed all the phones and alarm clocks they could, and went to bed, he said.
“At 3 a.m., there was a massive awakening of Merrill on April Fool’s Day,” Terry said. “It was really fun hearing the stories of everyone afterwards.”
– m.van911@aggiemail.usu.edu