Hope you weren’t fooled, and if you were, hope the joke didn’t send you into a panic. Fools’ Day is meant to crack us up but too often, those at the receiving end of the joke/s are left distressed. Seems like each year, pranksters set out to pull the sickest and most distasteful jokes on their unsuspecting victims and the reason many of us fall for it is that the pranks are often orchestrated by people we know and trust, our friends and loved ones. If your better half came home and said you guys are finally getting your dream home, you’d be forgiven for believing them, especially if that’s a goal the two of you are working towards. Sceptics like myself would probably ask a thousand questions. How? When? Where? Really? But I know many people who’d celebrate the milestone and ask questions later. If you were promised a car over the course of the last few years and then your spouse tossed you the keys probably Wednesday or Thursday morning, your first thought wouldn’t be ‘Oh it’s an April Fools’ prank’, rather, ‘Thank God.’ Same for fake salary raises and job offers because this pandemic has seen many applying for any and every opportunity. It’s just cruel to raise someone’s hopes knowing you have no intention of following through or hiring them. The other extreme is of course pranking someone that they’re fired. Not funny! As for commitment phobes who arranged elaborate fake proposals only to follow up with a ‘gotcha’ moments later, I hope you’re banished to the couch for the rest of the month. I’ve also heard of people who pretend they’re breaking up. Well they better hope their partners hadn’t had enough already and were looking for a way out! And you know how banks sometimes erroneously credit clients’ accounts and people get excited only to check again later and their minimum balance is back to zero!

Any tellers who did that on purpose are just mean. Was also thinking how great it is that most medics are not only professional but busy too because imagine if they had too much time on their hands and started playing with test results, telling some people that they had tested positive for Covid-19 even for a few minutes! The distress that would cause! I remember a cousin who got me good one time when he told me that both my mum and his own mother had been involved in a serious accident. Didn’t speak to him for several weeks. Some things are just too sensitive to joke about and you don’t want to be the reason someone suffers a heart attack or worse, jumps to their death because not everybody can handle bad news, fake or otherwise.

For those going, ‘Come on, lighten up’ or if something’s too good to be true, then it probably is so believe it at your own peril.’ Well, you probably haven’t been desperate or hopeful lately. People are out here praying for all kinds of miracles in these trying Covid times and will believe anything.