Music

Although no one is really safe from a well thought out or well planned prank, the prankster must be smart enough to know how far to carry the prank. For a couple of reasons...
* The person at the receiving end might be offended, if carried on for too long...some matters do become personal.
* Unless, EVERY aspect of the plan has been thought of carefully and accounted for ( which is rarely the case in pranks ), it becomes difficult to carry on lying...especially when one slips up and provides incorrect factual information - information which can be verified without too much effort, or worse, on google !

To avoid such pitfalls, here're the choices :
* Plan/think through every possible detail
* Discuss with someone else - you can wrinkle out many problematic areas, and catch some flaws which would not have been obvious otherwise.
* If you're creating a character, then research the specilisations and backgrounds of the character well enough...and pick a background similar to yours, so that you can adequately answer questions, especially probing questions.
* Provide ONLY factually accurate information, or information that cannot be verified.
* NEVER hesitate/smile/etc...do not give away clues...even dumb people can pick up that some things are not correct.

For eg., a recent attempt at a prank on me seems doomed for failure., for the following reasons:
* Too much hesitation for questions regarding technical aspects of what the person claims to be the background ( in fact the very love of their life !!! ).
* Avoiding probing and technical questions at times.
* Too much enthusiasm shown for certain aspects - for eg. : claiming that they will provide support to my nomination for posts ( having chatted with me just once before ) !
* Unecessary praise based on not completely accurate facts : I'm dynamic, 'cos I am the most active member on a mailing list...problem : I am not the most active member on the mailing list!
* The person, or rather the email id in question, is not a part of the mailing list !
* The mail id has "2004" in it...it was created this year...yet, the person claims that being invisible on ymsn, is 'cos of the LONG list of people to be avoided...improbable !
* oh yeah...the most important factual error of all : There is NO graduate program in Music at NC State !!!

Well I have a short list of possibilities for people who can try such methods...let's see if they contact me again, so that I can get some more info to nail it down !