He who laughs last...

Rachel Wise. Communities editor at Hawke's Bay Today. Staff. 31 March 2016 Hawke's Bay Today Photograph by Paul Taylor HBG 25Feb17 - HBG 04Mar17 - HBG 18Mar17 - HBG 25Mar17 -

I have been sucked in by a few April Fools' Day jokes.

There was once when the radio station reported a brewery tanker had crashed nearby and people could take containers and help empty it. Not liking beer, I didn't go, nor did I cotton on to the date until they yelled "April Fool" over the airways.

Another time, as a junior reporter, my editor announced he had seen Billy Connolly in a cafe down the street. This wasn't altogether impossible, as the Big Yin was in the area, on tour.

I snatched the camera and charged up and down the main street popping in and out of cafes like a cuckoo on a noon-striking clock. Not finding the comedian I asked a few passers-by and they started looking too.

It wasn't until I returned, bereft, to the office that I found the comedian. Or at least an editor, laughing.

That office had a tradition that the staff would photocopy the crossword puzzle in the paper every morning and we'd have a race at morning tea time to see who could solve it first.

Of course the editor always won.

I'd been working there for a year before I realised he was sneaking off with the paper before we got there in the morning and pre-solving the crossword, so all he did was regurgitate the answers come smoko time.

So I started giving him his own special photocopy. With a few extra squares blacked out. It slowed him down for a bit.

Some years after the brewery tanker joke, a truck tipped over outside our house, spilling its cargo into the ditch across the road. Our phone rang. It was our neighbour.

"You won't believe what's on that truck," he said.

"Beer!"

Aha, I thought, I have heard this one before.
So I laughed heartily, said "have one for me" and hung up.

He rang back.

"No, really, beer!" He said.

I knew he was waiting for me to go and look, so he could yell "fooled ya!" and laugh. So I didn't. Instead I said "hahaha yeah right" and hung up on him again.

Minutes later an unmistakable malty yeasty scent wafted through the house.

Yes, beer. The truck had been packed with pallets of beer. By the time I'd gone out with the idea of maybe stocking up for Christmas, all that was left was broken glass and bottletops and a smirking neighbour.

"Told you", he said.
He wasn't entirely mean. For months afterwards he was only too happy to invite us over. For a beer.

There's nothing wrong with a laugh. "Remember when" is a favourite phrase in our family, usually followed by laughter. I well "remember when" my Gran, having prepared a sumptuous afternoon tea for special guests, sent my then seven-year-old self to fetch the pikelets (her specialty) and bring them into the "sitting room".

Gran sat back, waiting for the grand entrance of grand-daughter, bearing the best china bedecked with only the most perfect of the morning's fresh-baked pikelets, adorned with home-made raspberry jam and topped with lashings of whipped cream.

Enter grand-daughter.

Proudly bearing Gran's well-worn, battered and bent cooling racks piled high with the rejected, wonky and non-circular pikelets from the morning's baking. Jamless, unadorned and destined solely for family consumption - having been deemed unfit for polite company.

Hilarity ensued, all the stilted politeness dissolved and eventually, with tears rolling down her face, Gran gasped "it's all right dear, we're laughing with you, not at you."

Through tears of my own I wailed... "but I'm not laughing!"

Lesson learned - laugh at yourself before someone else does!

So to all of you who have been caught out - or are about to be - by April Fools jokes today...the joke's on you, enjoy it!