Comment by glimshe
9 months ago
Hot take: workplace and social media April Fools jokes aren't funny and are often inappropriate and disrespectful to people's time.
It's cool to do these to your friends in High school, but I once wasted a good amount of time at work because of an April's fool joke. I already didn't want to do the work so I got really upset to have wasted time doing something boring and useless.
Additionally, the scale of social media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN.
Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.
All jobs I have ever worked have collectively wasted more man hours through incompetence and the usual corporate BS than I could ever hope to with any conceivable April fools joke.
The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the article are causing people stress for no reason and with no compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of misbehaviour.
There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.
> There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad
Bollocks, and bollocks to the parent hot take. Any moral framework that forbids fun, whether it's because it offends God or "causes people (a tiny bit of) stress", is repugnant to me
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That doesn't mean you go and deliberately make it worse for a laugh.
It's just disingenuous to pretend it's about corporate efficiency when it's more about personal feelings/vibes.
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Haha, the times they are a changing. I still remember c't april fools joke from the 90s where they published a scencil (template) to indicate where you have to drill a hole into your pentium CPU to be able to overclock it. I still chuckle about the whole thing almost 30 years after the fact, still wondering how many morons actually destroyed their perfectly working CPU back then. At times, active thinking of your peers just needs to be challenged so they don't get too confident...
This reminds me of the joke videos where you could drill a hole into the iPhone to access the headphone jack or microwave it for wireless charging. I don't recall seeing any pictures of people actually doing those things though, just "angry" comments which were also probably jokes.
Someone actually did it (for real): https://youtu.be/utfbE3_uAMA
Meanwhile the Xbox 360 kamikaze hack actually involved drilling a chip...
> wondering how many morons actually destroyed their perfectly working CPU back then.
Well, if they knew where the CPU is, and still drilled a hole through it, they deserved it.
Nah. I like the small things that remind us we're still humans, and a little inconvenience is a small price
Small things are fine.
It's not fun when the corporate marketing team meets in September to start planning their April Fools jokes.
I probably wouldn't make it so absolute. But when I was doing some writing for CNET, there was invariably a warning leading up to April 1 that if you are considering an April Fool's joke in print, just don't.
Y’know, I’m inclined to agree here, but I don’t think it was always this way. Over the last few years I’ve been feeling really fatigued, I suppose, by April Fool’s Day, and I think feeling this way has coincided with the rise of fake everything on the web. Rather than one day a year where we get to be amused by pranks in good faith, we’re mentally on-guard every day trying to identify whether a story or (increasingly) an image is real or not. Rather than one day a year where you’ve got people sending you stuff like “ALIEN LABORATORY DISCOVERED UNDERNEATH PYRAMIDS” accompanied by obvious-to-you GenAI images, now it’s every day, and still not everyone is in on the joke (and a joke is the best-case scenario behind creator’s intent).
I feel the opposite. Work pranks are the best pranks because they only waste time that I was already selling anyway.
HP LaserJet 4s squarely date TFA’s prank in the early-mid 90s. I can agree with you that lame corporate April Fool’s Day jokes on the Internet are overdone; but 1990s-era campus sysadmin’ing ruled. Sysadmins kept a close eye on things to ensure no one (especially the servers) got hurt, but computer geeks were far from mainstream and a spirit of playful tolerance and taking-care-of-our-own prevailed. Well do I remember telneting to sendmail on port 25 and sending spoofed email to classmates…
The university-wide email was probably too much but displaying INSERT 5 CENTS on an HP LaserJet 4 for a day is great.
My take is that April fools jokes cross the line when they affect people you do not know. Put in other terms: if you can't deliver a direct and sincere apology, you're being a jerk.
"Don't bring it to work" I could agree with, not the whole Internet, however.
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April 1st always falls on a weekend though
My brother in Christ it's Tuesday
Woosh
>Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.
Hell don't even prank your friends, most of them don't appreciate it either.
haha, very funny!
I'm surprised this is being downvoted. Don't waste hours of other people's time for your fun.
Imagine being one of the people who had to field all of those phone calls. Probably quite a few of those callers were quite angry. Imagine being subject to that anger because some moron in IT you never met thought it would be funny to play a prank that lands on your head.
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