No April Fools Day, Thank You Very Much

[bjarvis]

Yeah, I know it's an event some people live for and I know I'm going to be labelled a huge party-pooper --or worse-- but I can't stand April Fool's Day.

It's hard enough getting accurate information on anything. Deliberate misinformation is just annoying and wastes time & energy. I already have an extremely difficult time trusting other people; if I wanted to be regularly lied to, I'd tune into CSPAN. Throwing honesty, sincerity, accuracy and integrity out the window even one day per year diminishes their value, IMHO, and these are already too rare.


A few years ago, I was substituting in the corporate monitoring center for a guy who was on paternity leave. One of our major UNIX servers, the core of what was then a fairly fragile supply chain, died unexpected so I immediately paged the point-of-contact responsible.

I waited about 15 minutes. No response.

I paged him again, tried (and failed) to call his office number, then started asking around for his cell phone number to tell him to get on the issue immediately.

He answered the phone. "Yeah, I saw your page but I'm not falling for any April fool's stuff this time."

"Guy, your server is down. I don't do April Fool's: this isn't some prank."

"Yeah, right."

"The server is down. You need to do something."

"Forget it, you're not catching me with this one."

"DUDE, YOUR SERVER IS F***ING DEAD! GET YOUR ASS IN GEAR *NOW*!"

There was a few seconds pause. "Are you serious?"

*sigh*

Comments

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I've never known policy makers to mention April Fools at any job I've ever had: most have assumed --probably wrongly-- that their staff are sensible enough to know better than to joke about anything related to our core operations in the same way that one doesn't ever joke about bombs near TSA personnel.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

I have this vague memory that when I was in the military, they DID point this out to us. Which, if true, would be another scary example of how the military was the best managed environment I've ever worked in.