alt Hacker News> 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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Ah, but do you get to have fun at the cost of others?
That is the question.
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.
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.