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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

oldvcr.blogspot.com

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Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#31

Post by lynx97 »

glimshe wrote: post #22

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 medi…

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...

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#32

Post by johnisgood »

jjbinx007 wrote: post #20
actionfromafar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody else but you sees the stars, but not you because you are logged in to your account. To me your message appears as: ******* edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me

That's why I always set my password as 8 asterisks - that way when my password gets leaked the hackers still think it's encrypted.

Makes sense! Thanks for the tip.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#36

Post by glenstein »

I think the real value in this writeup up of a clever little prank is the way the author/prankster could map out the social reactions and how the spirit in which the prank was received cascades through a whole entire organization in ways that hinge on little cues, little things about who knows who and whether you're physically present before a particular impression crystallizes in people's minds.

It's just such a great example of how people could react either with uproarious laughter or by feeling that some boundary has been violated and can think that either reaction was the most self-evidently obvious one in the world and the reasons for it were entirely contingent. It's something where you can only really witness the irrationality of it if you're in the author's position.

I once heard it speculated that philosophy might have emerged in Greece because the circumstances of being merchants engaging in interstate trade, you could see the way that certain things regarded as received knowledge were really customs, peculiar to certain cultures and locations. When you're the prankster and you can see different people reacting in different ways that seem to be tied to patterns of the circumstances of how they experienced it, you can kind of witness the contingency of those reactions playing out in real time.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#37

Post by causal »

glimshe wrote: post #22

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 medi…

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