alt Hacker NewsHot 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.
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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...
Nah. I like the small things that remind us we're still humans, and a little inconvenience is a small price
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.
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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>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.
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.
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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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.