Goes to show that jokes are 50% about the material and 50% about the audience.
And 90% about the delivery ;)
The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
71–80 of 268 posts
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#72I 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 gre…
Great comment! That's it.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#73I won't read this as by rule I am against everything related to pranks, and especially today of all days. I will take this space however to say that we should really do away with this nonsense.
As a senior leader, I welcome the free boost to camaraderie and team spirit and I recognize the creativity that goes into some of these pranks.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#74At my very first real job, back in 1997-98, I worked in tech support for an insurance company. We used Lotus Notes for email (initially just internally, with no Internet email). I had programmer access to Notes because I built some forms for user requests (Notes was more than email, it also had forms, a whole programming language, workflows, etc.). Some Fridays (once a month?) were casual dress days where you could w…
> We used Lotus Notes for email
My condolences.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#75Hot 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…
I feel the opposite. Work pranks are the best pranks because they only waste time that I was already selling anyway.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#76Hot 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…
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.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#77TLDR: Just skip to the 7th paragraph where the story starts. For reference, see the HN thread from a few days ago: "How to write blog posts that developers read": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503872 Edit: A few section headers might help. For example, paragraphs 2-6 could be under "Background," then add a header "The Joke" before paragraph 7. "Aftermath" might be good towards the end, too. --- BTW, taking a…
The entire point of an AFJ is that they don't know it's a joke. As the name says, the goal is to "fool" them. They don't know it's a "silly April Fool's email".
Designing an AFJ is tricky, and the larger your audience the trickier it gets. Your friends know you're a jokester; they figure it out almost immediately. When you send it out to a bunch of people you don't know, somebody is going to forget the date and assume you're serious -- because it's supposed to look serious.
Further, if it looks like something that might be a problem they have to solve, somebody is going to start solving that problem immediately. You don't know what's going on in their day -- if they've already got six crises going, they're not going to "take a joke" well.
The wider your audience, the more obvious you have to be. Knowing how to deliver a joke is also an important life skill -- as is learning not to blame your failure on the target.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#78I 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 gre…
Sounds like part of the problem was that they actually were considering introducing fees for printing, and this wasn’t their preferred method of communicating that.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#79The funniest part
"...and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were"
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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