April Fool's Day pranksters trick HRS residents

Students planning to walk to Hutchinson Gymnasium carrying towels, soap and shampoo each morning might as well stay in their own rooms. There will not be a water shutdown in High Rise South this week -- despite a letter supposedly sent out by Residential Living Saturday. Various students in the building received a memo under their doors Saturday announcing the shutdown beginning today at 10 a.m. and continuing through Thursday at 5 p.m. But residents who continued reading quickly understood it was an April Fool's joke. "To minimize the effect of the shutdown, both Gimbel and Hutch gyms will be open 24 hours a day, Monday through Wednesday," the letter said. "We strongly encourage you to use the showers in the gyms or make arrangements with your friends." Two College sophomores, who live on the 19th floor of High Rise South and requested anonymity, took responsibility for the prank last night. "We decided we had to do something," one roommate said. "We were thinking about how people were having problems with water and shutdowns and decided everybody was going to get pissed off by this. "A lot of people kind of did," the student added. After determining which typeface Residential Living usually uses in its official notices and copying the fake document at Kinko's, the two students delivered it to 10 of their friends' rooms. The student said some were fooled by the notice. "To those who got it -- we got you good," the sophomore said. Engineering sophomore Deniz Cultu said he received the memo -- laser-printed on plain, white paper -- Saturday afternoon. Although Cultu said it was obviously a joke because of the reference to the campus gyms, he added that he knew something was off-kilter because of how the prankster had distributed the letter. "Residential Living never gives it to you under the door," Cultu said. "It's usually posted by the elevators -- and it wasn't." The letter said the shutdown applied to rooms on the 12th floor and above. Cultu lives on the 19th floor. Engineering and Wharton sophomore Peter Daley, a resident of the 15th floor, said he knew the memo was a joke because "letters from [Director of Residential Living] Gigi Simeone usually have her signature." Daley, like many residents who received the letter, said he laughed at the April Fool's joke and never thought it could possibly be true. "I could just imagine people traipsing down to Gimbel," he said. "It never got to the point where we took it seriously." But College junior Sagar Phatak said he began reading it and screamed, "What?" "The initial reaction was definitely not pleasant," he added. "They've been doing work on the pipes so it kind of made sense." Phatak, who lives on the 15th floor, said by the time he finished reading the note, he knew he had been fooled. "It was amusing," he said, adding that Residential Living should not take the incident seriously because "of how ridiculous the last part is." Simeone laughed when told about the letter last night, saying that she was "glad the students that received it knew it was an April Fool's joke."