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 media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN.
Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.
There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.
The university-wide email was probably too much but displaying INSERT 5 CENTS on an HP LaserJet 4 for a day is great.
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
It's not fun when the corporate marketing team meets in September to start planning their April Fools jokes.
You can't even make the (quite bad) defense that people should have known better and it's their own fault for falling for it. The message was 100% plausible.
Imagine being one of the people who had to field all of those phone calls. Probably quite a few of those callers were quite angry. Imagine being subject to that anger because some moron in IT you never met thought it would be funny to play a prank that lands on your head.
Hell don't even prank your friends, most of them don't appreciate it either.
Nobody says “you know boss, that two hour meeting today was a total waste of time, please deduct two hours worth of my salary from my paycheck”. So the company quite literally pays for everyone’s time who was at the meeting. And that is a function of who is present and how long the meeting goes. It is very much not a function of productivity/value.
And the point of having a, more often rethorical than real, taximeter showing the cost of the meeting puts this into perspective. The more people you invite the more the meeting costs. The longer it goes the more it costs. The goal is not to abolish all meetings, but to make people think if the bang to buck ratio of the meeting is right. To instill a culture where people prepare for meetings, they have concrete questions or decision outcomes they are looking for, and to criticaly think about the length of the meeting and right-size the invite list.
My employer gets about 40 hours/week of "work" from me, whatever that might consist of. I cost them $X every two weeks in pay and benefits. It's pretty reasonable to say my attendance in a one-hour meeting has a $X/80 cost to my employer.
You don't need to overcomplicate this. The employment relationship is pretty simple at its foundation: the employer buys the time of its employees.
The reality of professional standards is we can't control what people feel or happens to them but we sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as neutral as possible. This April fools prank breached that standard in an unpleasant way. I hope there wasn't a student tired and on edge trying to meet a deadline. It'd feel awful to think the print system was out, spend a morning running around and then learn that some IT bloke was abusing his power out of a misplaced sense fun. It isn't a serious offence but it is bad behaviour.
You should use some Microsoft or Google products. They "sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as" crappy and masochistic as possible, while siphoning all your data.
And yes, avoid people without humor, especially the serious types.
Yes, think about it. Captcha, (Windows) updates, crappy UIs updated every couple of months, new features instead of bug fixing. _That_ is wasted time and money.
We tried to speak with management about it. They wouldn't listen.
Well, if they knew where the CPU is, and still drilled a hole through it, they deserved it.