The Colorado State Open Thread is published most Mondays around 7PM. If you’d like to contribute, please let me know either in the comments or through direct Kosmail.
Have you ever played an April Fools prank on someone that involved multiple people cooperating together to pull it off? Were the consequences good or bad for you? I’m not going to go into all the details of the one I pulled off 31 years ago, but it wound up drastically affecting the course of my life, caused me to lose my career and truly spoiled one of the things that I really loved — my enjoyment of the National Park Service. Let’s just say that I involved my co-workers, friends from outside of the NPS (I was a ranger at the time) and since it was being played on my supervisor so I had his manager, their manager and the Superintendent of the whole park involved, each with their own part to play.
The target had stated that I wasn’t showing that I had a very good sense of humor when I was speaking to the public, and when I heard that I didn’t agree. I found out shortly afterwards that this supervisor’s birthday was on April 1st and he was known for boasting that nobody had ever gotten him with a prank on his birthday. I took that as a challenge, to show him I did indeed have a sense of humor.
To go into all the details, which would show the careful planning, scheduling and creativity of this all, well, I’ll need some lubrication and I’d want to tell it in person rather than on a public blog. Invite me out to dinner or for drinks and I’ll give you a story. All six of you who will read this diary.
To put it plainly, everything came off perfectly as planned. Everyone managed to keep straight faces during the act and my supervisor admitted he’d been had. The only hitch was the video camera we’d tried to use to film the action didn’t work, so I have nothing to memorialize it by.
Well, my supervisor would never admit it, but from that time on, he treated me poorly and would always assume the worst. I started failing appraisals, always on subjective issues because I always met any objectively measured tasks. He had me shadow “fully successful” rangers, and then criticized them when they took my side on the subjective. I finally decided there was no way I was going to be able to remain in the NPS with a black mark over my head and a supervisor who wanted me terminated, not just transferred, and I walked away from the NPS and have had a very hard time visiting national parks ever since. There’s just an ache in my side that just can’t go away. I wound up receiving an award for my interpretive skills and promise a few years after that and was able to accept the award back in the area where the fiasco happened, so I’m hoping maybe he might have seen notice of it, but nothing can heal that wound.
So, even though I’m living right on the boundary of Rocky Mountain National Park, there is no way I’m ever going to be giving a structured program there for visitors. Maybe volunteer in some other fashion, but not giving programs.
Have you ever had an April Fools prank go right? Go wrong? or change your life?
As always, the floor is yours, for whatever is on your mind.