“Trayless April” Accidentally Solves Global Warming
By Anderson Cooper
ON MARCH 31, 2008, THE ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF of Leo J. O’Donovan Dining Hall at Georgetown University sat down to plan a calendar of events for the next month. Unbeknowst to them, they would forever change the history of the planet.
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Monthly events calendars were a running joke with the staff of Leo’s. Every day on the calendar would be a special day — “National Sysco Cracker Day” or maybe “ National Western Burger Day” — that they made up and which featured food that was in no way special, but was ironically the food they served every single day. The staff took glee in seeing students reading the calendars and eating the “special” foods on the “special” days.
To be sure, the calendars were only a small part of the pranking the staff did every day. Often, the administrators slipped bribes to a small Asian woman who brings food from windows in the kitchen out to the buffet line to not perform her job, allow the food in the buffet to run out, and thus infuriate students looking tantalizingly at the freshly cooked food in the window. The administrators devised methods to create bottlenecks at the bottom of stairs and long lines waiting for a single worker to swipe their dining hall meal plan cards, something students at a university can obviously do themselves. They did subtler things too, such as making the day of the Martin Luther King holiday “soul food day,” and posting signs at the beginning of the year saying “LOOSE WEIGHT IN ’08.”
But perhaps their greatest prank of all was the day-in, day-out poor service and bad food. The dining hall has a monopoly on campus that allows bad service and pranks like these.
April Fools’ Day presented a daunting challenge for the administrators, though. How could the dining hall top all of its previous pranks on the most important day of the year for pranksters? After an hour of brainstorming, someone came up with the solution.
“Trayless April” is what many pranksters call the “perfect prank.” It was perfectly plotted and would take effect the next day. First, the staff put up signs and calendars alerting students to the “special” month. Somebody came up with the idea that taking away all the trays would somehow be “environmental,” in that the staff would not have to spend water (and, importantly for their corporate bosses, money) on washing trays. Next, they took out the trays from where students usually took them. Finally, and this is key, they put the trays in the dishwashing turnstile. Students would enter the dining hall, perhaps hurried and trying to eat before a class, and would quickly realize that retrieving their meal would be more difficult and would take two to three times as long as it usually did. Upon putting their dishes in the turnstile, however, they would find trays on each section of the turnstile, going round and round. Perfectly available. Still being washed. It was even better than that time an administrator urinated in some mayonnaise, plopped the mixture on top of hamburger patties, and presented the prank food to hungry students as “Golden Burgers.”
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Dr. Gary LaRosa lived across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia. Before it became known that the prank had ended global warming and revealed how to reverse its effects, LaRosa was an environmental scientist studying global warming in the nation’s capital.
Now, a year later, he lives on its streets.
The story is well known. Researchers discovered just a few months after “Trayless April” 
that global warming had ceased. Funding for research was quickly withdrawn and thousands of scientists were out of jobs, with just a few remaining to study further just what had happened. What is less known, however, is the personal side.
that global warming had ceased. Funding for research was quickly withdrawn and thousands of scientists were out of jobs, with just a few remaining to study further just what had happened. What is less known, however, is the personal side.LaRosa can be found on U Street most days, asking for change or trying to sell socks with other homeless men. LaRosa was in part a victim of the housing crisis, owing a great deal of money on a subprime mortgage. When he lost his job, his wife left him. Four months later, LaRosa lost his house. He kept trying to find a job, eventually forced to compete with uneducated immigrants for jobs fast-food restaurants. The message from employers was always the same:
“You’re overqualified, so we don’t think you’ll stay long.”
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A year later, scientists still don’t know exactly how “Trayless April” at a single university dining hall brought an end to global warming. But we do know a couple of things. The staff at Leo’s, in attempting to spite students, accidentally saved the world. And scientists like Dr. LaRosa, who spent their lives trying in vain to alert the world of its biggest threat, have found their lives in decline as the threat was inexplicably solved.
