Nobody's Fool

So...

First off, happy April Fool's Day. If you've been pranked today, all I have to say is, "What the hell!?" Come on people! It's April 1st. It comes around every year. You shouldn't be surprised. Anything someone tries to tell you, sell you, or do to you today should be taken with skepticism and disbelief. Every "I'm pregnant", $100,000 scratch ticket, and "I'm having a heart attack" should be ignored. Make your woman cry (you're bound to sometime today anyway). Disregard the money (you were broke when you woke). Let your father-in-law die (he secretly hates you and you know it). At least you won't look like a fool on a day intended to make everyone look like a fool. Instead, spend your time trying to think of new ways to screw with people today. Because today, you get a free pass as long as you invoke the "It's April Fool's Day!"

Which leads me to my own thoughts about screwing with people. I would bet that where ever you are, at least if you're in the United States, you have a store that has its own loyalty card. For those of you who don't, loyalty cards are designed to keep you shopping at that particular store or chain of stores. They offer sales, double coupons, points for crap you don't need or want. Whatever they can think of. The grocery store chain in my neck of the woods has its own gas stations. For every $100 you spend on groceries, you get ten cents off each gallon of gas on your next fill up with your loyalty card. You can rack up your points and earn up to a buck off each gallon on one fill up. If you don't happen to have your card with you at the pump, you can punch in your phone number and it will give you the discount based on your points.

A colleague of mine mentioned that she was buying gas and knew that she did not have enough points to get the ten cent discount, so she entered her parents' phone number and scored a thirty cent per gallon discount off of their points. She said that they don't use that brand of gas so their points are usually wasted. Made sense to me and it got me thinking. I would bet that almost anyone in town would have a loyalty card...

Which brings me back to screwing with people. I wonder how many random phone numbers I could pull from the phone book would yield some cool discounts for me at the pump? Now with that said, I could really only do it today and invoke the "April Fool's Day" rule. If I continued it throughout the year, it would become my own ethically challenged curiosity experiment. Besides, I only have two cars and I just filled both of them up. To make this into a cool April Fool's prank, I would need to enlist thousands of people to try this today and report back on their results. Seeing as this blog only has one follower at this moment, it doesn't look as if this will be the year.

Maybe next year...