Leadership

Pranks for the Memories: Biz is Best at April Fool's Gags

By Joanna Higgins

Updated on: March 31, 2009 / 3:57 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Playing at work's generally considered a valuable stress-buster, commonsense notwithstanding, and has even been linked to better team-working and creativity.

But this year's tough economic climate (not to mention the po-faced presence of world leaders at the G20 summit in London) may make merry pranksters wary of going too far on April 1^st.

Thanks to the financial meltdown, there's a possibility you'll be believed if you tell employees you're shaving one-fifth of a second off their lunchbreak in order to claw back cost savings.

On the other hand, there's never been a better time to lighten the mood.

Businesses are some of the most prolific jokers -- the BBC's Panorama report on spaghetti trees set the trend in 1957 and has carried on ever since (see the Flying Penguins take to the air in a migratory flight to the the tropics).

Google's PigeonRank Search Technology Whereby low-cost pigeon clusters, or PCs, are used to rank pages. "PigeonRank's success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon", which is far superior to "traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings." (Dan Frommer's compiled eight years of Google gags here.)
ESP-mail Red Herring magazine published an article in 1999 extolling new technology that allowed users to compose an email telepathically or through "visualisation".
The Left-Handed Whopper Burger King's 1998 spoof advertisement promised southpaws a burger with all the same ingredients - and the condiments rotated 180 degrees.There are loads more on "the Museum of Hoaxes" -- Tesco's "genetically modified" whistling carrots, brewer Guinness's appropriation of Greenwich mean-time as "Guinness Mean Time", the story that the Channel Tunnel's two halves wouldn't meet in the middle because the French engineers were using metric. (Got me thinking -- what if the site itself were a gag?)

So you may not have time to move the partitions or grow grass on your co-worker's keyboard -- but you can try out some of the more benign suggestions out there -- change the caller ID on a co-worker's phone to Mr Kitten, or variations on the ever-decreasing labcoat (the ever-lowering chair).

Just let common sense prevail. Steer clear of 'hoax' viruses, anything that cuts into your boss's holiday time, or a stunt that has the effect of moving a company's share price. That's the kind of gag you could choke on.

(Photo: tomobothetominator, CC2.0)