As the World’s workaholic, demanding and occasionally po-faced boss takes a rare day off work to eat an extra Christmas dinner and do some Thanksgiving, put-upon nations and organisations have united to set up some pranks for when the USA returns from vacation on Friday.
Even office creep Britain has stopped bragging about its ‘special’ relationship for the day and has set a crack software team to work on Webster’s online dictionary, which will now display an apology for some of the simplified spellings it helped to introduce over a century ago. This will state that the change of all ‘-our’ endings to ‘-or’ was an administrative error and that it should actually have applied to words ending in ‘-ous’ such as callous and cautious, requiring millions of books and contracts to be rewritten.
In another move, the HQ of Major League Baseball has been occupied, in return for a small bribe, by FIFA officials, who will inform shocked Americans that the World Series will henceforth involve the rest of the world, with next year’s tournament taking place in Qatar.
Church Bibles throughout the Bible Belt will be given a revised ending to the Flood story, with God saying to Noah, ‘Within a mere 5,000 years, thine offspring shall evolve into many distinct racial types around the world and shall number seven billion, which believe me is some going for one family; and yea, Creationists shall fail to get their heads around it.’
China, tired of being harangued about currency imbalances, has secretly changed the plates on the Federal Reserve’s printing press, so that in the next orgy of quantitative easing the USA will be flooded with yuan banknotes. Economists haven’t a clue what effect this will have on the world’s finances but agree it will be worth it just to see the look on the boss’s face.
But there will be some routine pranks among the elaborate stuff. President Obama will return to find the Oval Office full of balloons. When he finally gets to his desk, the sensor on his mouse will have been painted over and the hotlines to his PA and the Kremlin will have been switched over, a prank which almost led to a nuclear standoff when used as an April fool during the Clinton era.
