April Fool's Day

I suppose I like a good joke as much as the next guy, unless the next guy is one of those hyper-cheery, totally off-the-wall types who appears to be on uppers even when attending a funeral under heavy sedation. Those of you who have stuck with me through all of these posts already know that I write humor whenever possible, and perhaps a bit more often than that besides. But I must say that upon reading through some of the "Top 100 April Fool’s Hoaxes" list from the Museum of Hoaxes I found myself wondering: "Just what sort of an idiot plays April Fools jokes on paying customers?"

I'm not referring to the completely harmless here, like the "Left-Handed Whopper" joke in 1998, or the "Taco Liberty Bell" hoax in 1996 that may have inspired the Whopper joke. Anybody who can't figure out that the Liberty Bell is part of a National Historical Park and could not be sold to a private company without several Acts of Congress and the attendant media coverage is probably also dumb enough to fail to grasp that a hamburger like the Whopper is ROUND (and therefore inherently symmetrical), and can't have its components "rotated" 180 degrees in either direction (or indeed, at all). I have to believe that anyone who could actually believe in the existence of a special "Left-handed Whopper" probably spends a lot of their time being fooled by various things, and is unlikely to be seriously inconvenienced by one more occasion.

Some of these "jokes" have real consequences, however. For example, the 1972 stunt by the London Times claiming that a well-known travel agency was selling a trip around the world package for only 210 pounds (about $575 US at the time) because that's how much the trip cost in the book "Around the World in 80 Days" and 1972 was the 100th anniversary of the publication resulted in legal action by the travel agency, thousands of angry customers who waited in line for the limited tickets, and the firing of the reporter who wrote the story. Trouble also came when a San Diego (CA) radio station reported that the Space Shuttle was going to be diverted to (and land at) a small local general aviation airport. Despite the fact that there wasn't even a shuttle in orbit at the time, thousands of people drove out to have a look, and the resulting traffic jam tied up half of the local police force and much of the available Highway Patrol as well. The station was fined heavily and the DJ who read the announcement was fired.

I've got to ask why nobody realizes that these stunts are almost always going to constitute massive violations of the Second Law, annoying your customers and possibly many other people taken in by the hoax -- or just inconvenienced by the hoards of people who have been! Then there's the case of Esquire magazine, which in 2000 inadvertently published an April Fools story (about a company giving away free automobiles that functioned as mobile billboards) which almost exactly duplicated the actual business models of not one, but several companies then in the development or launch phases. It was all a joke, of course, but the company that owns the magazine was lucky to avoid ruining any number of investors, throwing dozens of people out of work, and worst of all, being sued down to their undershorts.

I've actually seen even stupider things done at a local level, including some stunts that have cost anything from a day's worth of receipts to several years of lawsuits. What continues to confound me is not that people do these things (people are inherent practical jokers and will do incredibly stupid things for a laugh), but that they fail to grasp that the potential consequences may go right on being fun long after April Fool's Day has slid beneath the horizon for another year. Which leads me to urge any readers who are still reading this post to think very carefully before they decide to stage that wonderful prank which will hazard their job, their company, their livelihood, or their lives.

Because we've still got nine more months filled with life-threatening holiday traditions left in this year alone...