If there is a day for religious observance for me, it’s this one – April the First. It’s a chance to shake people awake, to pull them from their monotonous lives, to puzzle and puzzle them until their puzzlers are sore. Every year, I try to come up with something fun.

This time, I concocted an email posted to all the process leads (those who monitor process at our corporation, rather like the political officer on a Russian submarine (and about as liked, I suppose)) and to my team. I related in the most officious terms possible concerning a new tool we’d be using (its acronym spelled out F.O.O.L.), which would be used to combine two already frustrating tools we use into one massive crosslinked gridlock. I noted that if you did anything wrong, it would close out ALL assoiciated cases. I mentioned you’d need managing director and test lead signatures on everything. And then I posted it.

A couple on the team just moaned at this new tool, perhaps while updating their resumes. Of the leads, pretty much all of them fell for it. The best was the one who forwarded it to her manager (while the manager was in a manager/managing directory meeting). And so that manager forwarded it to all the other managers there, who nearly stampeded in a blind panic. In the end, someone finally figured out it was a joke (perhaps the line at the end, about if you had any questions, consult your calendar). The alarms faded, the missiles lowered back into their dark silos, the virgins were released from their alters, everything went back to normal.

But for all you who fell for it, for a minute or two, you were really alive. Yes, you were.