April Fool's Day Stories!

April Fool's Day is a day for all of us to have some fun and play a few jokes on our friends or even on strangers. Newspapers, radio stations, and even large companies have their share of fun, as well. The below stories will illustrate what I mean. Thanks, and enjoy! -- Alex :-) April Fool's Day at Its Best ... Hold Up Your Credit Cards! Back in the days of the Mattel Cabbage Patch Kid craze it was usually very hard to get one for the kiddies. A radio station (I don't know where) announced that Mattel was going to get Cabbage Patch Kids out to the people of this particular city. The plan was that they had to go to the football field of the local university and wait. An airplane would fly overhead and the dolls would be dropped onto the field. People were supposed to hold their credit cards up so that a photographer with a telephoto lens in the airplane could get the credit card numbers and charge the price of the dolls to the recipients' accounts. People actually showed up, waving American Express cards in the breeze. Cleaning the Phone Lines! One radio station prank took place on April Fool's Day. They announced that the phone company would be cleaning the dirt out of the phone lines that afternoon. They do this, it seems, by blowing air into the wires in the switching station. The problem is that the dirt comes out of the earpiece and mouthpiece of the telephone and could dirty the rugs or furniture in your house. Consequently, the phone company asks that the good citizens please get plastic bags and put them over the handsets of the telephones to protect their belongings. Stores reported a run on plastic bags, and the phone company made the radio station retract the original claim. Draining a Beer Truck KFMB-AM, a San Diego radio station, announced that a beer truck had jack-knifed and could not be towed away until the beer had been removed from its tank. Over 100 people showed up at the site where the accident was supposed to have occurred to help drain it. and last but not least... Who are the biggest "Fools" of them all? Can you imagine working at this outfit. It has a little over 500 employees with the following statistics: 29 have been accused of spousal abuse 7 have been arrested for fraud 19 have been accused of writing bad checks 117 have bankrupted at least two businesses 3 have been arrested for assault 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges 8 have been arrested for shoplifting 21 are current defendants in lawsuits In 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving. Yes, you guessed it! It's the 535 members of the United States Congress. The same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws designed to keep the rest of us in line.