posted 5 months ago
It was around the mid 2010s. At the time, my twin brother lived in NYC while I lived in Oh Hah. One funny thing about him is the kinda flowery archaic pseudo-posh-British way he writes, as if he's constantly impersonating an Edwardian English novelist or something.
In that same flowery archaic manner, I wrote him a long letter pretending to be the head of a local amateur swim team in New York. I figured this premise alone was ridiculous enough to give a clue that it was a joke. I told him I'd randomly spotted him leaving his apartment on a rainy day, and the way he stepped through the rain told me he'd be a great swimmer, and would he like to join my organization. (Again, thinking for sure by that point in the letter he'd catch on.) I said we meet at such and such a natatorium at such and such a time each week (I looked up a swimming pool near where he lived) and I think he'd be a star on the team, just could he please bring $75 to help cover our lane rental. (That part I almost died laughing while I wrote it, thinking for sure it would tip him off that it was a prank). I explained that I'd found his name and address by coming back later and digging through his trash. I filled up two pages with this sort of gobbledygook, then put that letter inside a sealed stamped envelope with a return address that was in between two real addresses somewhere else in NYC (I looked that up too), then put that in an envelope and mailed it to a friend of mine who also lived in New York and was in on the joke. My friend put the letter to my brother in the mail so that he received it on April 1.
My brother ended up receiving this letter exactly on time (apparently not noticing the date he'd received it)---and then I heard nothing for a week or two. Until he posted the letter to Facebook along with a companion letter he'd sent to the local FBI office in NYC, making them aware of this apparent scam that he was being targeted for! His letter to the FBI was just as long, and read just like the fake letter I'd written him, which took my prank and escalated it to a whole new level of hilarity. I called him up and debriefed him, and we both had a good laugh.
He got me back the next year with a prank that was much more elaborate but not quite as funny. (He very realistically forged an overcharge on my cell phone bill and sent it to me, complete with a fake toll-free customer service number that rang to a friend of his who was in on it and who strung me along with increasingly ridiculous questions for maybe 20 minutes until I finally "got it".) Since then we've occasionally pranked each other on April 1st, and even established a sort of "rules of engagement" to ensure it doesn't end with anyone calling the cops, losing property/money, or having a heart attack, but the first AF prank I described above was the iconic timeless one that set the bar and cemented April 1 as an official family holiday, at least as far as my brother and I are concerned.
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