Just Kidding! Happy April Fools’ Day!

Happy April Fools’ Day everyone!  I hope that your day is filled with shenanigans that everyone can laugh about when you get to the part when someone says, “just kidding!”

When I was working on my blog schedule and I saw today was April 1, I immediately thought that I would come up with some sort of practical joke for today’s post.  The more that I thought about it, I began to get this icky feeling.  What about X? No, what if someone actually tries it.  What about Y? That just seems mean.  What if I claimed that some big, hairy, audacious goal of mine had come true, and then at the end said, just kidding?  It seems counterproductive to turn a goal into a joke.  And so on.

Maybe I’m superstitious. I just couldn’t come up with something that I didn’t feel uncomfortable about putting out there into the universe.  And we all know how things can take on a life of their own on the internet.

So, I chickened out.

I’d rather use my energy to give the universe stories about kittens.  I don’t mind sharing my failed attempts at gardening or achieving a flat stomach.  And I have no compunction about giving lackluster productions a less-than-stellar review. Having fun and joking around is wonderful, but I just felt uncomfortable about trying to play a practical joke here.

Then, I decided to google “April Fools’ Day.”  The first thing that came up was an article about how Microsoft has banned pranks. In an article on The Verge, they report that a memo has gone out stating that, “the data tells us that these stunts have limited positive impact and can actually result in unwanted news cycles.”

Apparently, it’s not just me. Massive tech companies are trying to avoid pranks that could be taken the wrong way as well.  Why is it so hard to try to joke around these days?  Does no one have a sense of humor anymore?  Is it political correctness?  Or the culture of busy-ness?  People are likely to react first and think later, potentially blowing anything into a massive issue.

Once, many years ago, I instigated a harmless practical joke on my beloved boss.  We asked the receptionist to warn us when she was arriving, then left a ransom note on her desk and the entire staff absconded to the break room. Since she would arrive most days to a lively and productive workplace, the ghost town environment was unexpected to say the least.  Shortly, she arrived at the breakroom to find us all with bagels or doughnuts or something.

I don’t remember if this was before or after the time that she returned to work after knee replacement surgery to find that we had replaced her desk chair with a wheel chair, but she certainly seemed to take that joke in better humor than us pretending to have kidnapped her whole staff.  Probably because we were all diligently at our desks when she arrived to the wheelchair surprise.

I guess that the moral of this story is that if you want to play a practical joke on someone, know your audience and do it in a controlled environment, like in person as opposed to on the internet.