Everyone has stories about an insane place of employment. My former employer is a cool guy, but straight-up batshit crazy when it comes to home improvement projects. A few years ago, he started a quest to redo his garage and back yard. I’m talking MASSIVE here, like a $200k project to renovate some generic suburban yard. We were running some of our operations out of his home office at the time, so the employees got to witness all the crazy bullshit going down firsthand.
My boss didn’t want to find a legitimate construction company for his renovation project as he was afraid that he’d get hit with a higher tax bill, so he hired an armada of goons from Craigslist to work under the table. The labor pool was basically a revolving door of incompetent masons, electricians and handymen, including Richard Heene, that jackass Balloon Boy hoax guy. Remember him? Dude was a prick. With literally close to a hundred different people getting hired, “sort of working” and then getting fired, bad times were bound to happen.
The worst case involved an electrician I’ll call “Steve.” Steve was pretty much king of the moron pile and my boss told him not to come back because he was fucking up so badly – primarily from getting high/drunk and forgetting to shut down the electricity while he worked on it. My boss gave Steve the ol’ heave ho after he nearly electrocuted another one of the other Craiglist rejects. Steve, being the butthurt loser that he is, alerted the city authorities to halt construction. Needless to say there was no love lost.
Fast forward about six months. My boss decides that our business is going to apply to become a member of the local chamber of commerce. My coworker and I figure it’s going to be a hell of a prank to forge a letter from the city stating that our application to the chamber of commerce has been denied due to a claim from Steve’s Electric against our boss. As an added kicker, we threw in a paragraph about illegal construction that the building inspector will be investigating and that any projects that aren’t up to code have to be removed. We used eFax to send the forged letter to ourselves and left it sitting on the fax machine.
Better call Saul!
About halfway through the day, my boss found the fax and flipped his shit. The boss immediately got on the phone with his attorney and started screaming at the guy about how he’s going to sue Steve’s Electric for defamation of character, etc. The whole time everyone in the office is laughing to the point of tears and telling our boss to get off the phone, but he isn’t listening. The poor sucker probably ran up a $500 lawyer bill on the phone, hung up and then immediately called the city and started yelling at some secretary. I finally went over and unplugged his phone before he could do any more damage, and we all shouted “April fools!” in between tears of laughter. In conclusion: Best April Fool’s prank ever.
Read next: How To Survive Black Friday
