Comment by fkyoureadthedoc
9 months ago
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.
9 months ago
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
There is an irony that you're adjudicating away other people's stress while holding up your own opinions and feelings of repugnance as evidence of a problem.
The reality of professional standards is we can't control what people feel or happens to them but we sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as neutral as possible. This April fools prank breached that standard in an unpleasant way. I hope there wasn't a student tired and on edge trying to meet a deadline. It'd feel awful to think the print system was out, spend a morning running around and then learn that some IT bloke was abusing his power out of a misplaced sense fun. It isn't a serious offence but it is bad behaviour.
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Ah, but do you get to have fun at the cost of others?
That is the question.
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It's not the offense, it's the wasted time and money. Think of one of those meeting timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes. Now apply that to all the time spent by random people calling the main office, and by the main office fielding all those calls. It's one thing to cost your employer thousands of dollars because you made a mistake (I'm sure we've all been there), and quite another to cost your employer thousands of dollars with a prank.
You can't even make the (quite bad) defense that people should have known better and it's their own fault for falling for it. The message was 100% plausible.
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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.
“Corporate efficiency” is vague and largely meaningless. “Don’t waste a bunch of your coworkers’ time” is a lot more concrete. Especially don’t set up the people who answer the phones to get angry calls due to your prank.