My April Dove

It was January 2007. We were in the final semester of Engineering. One day one of our classmates was teasing one of my friends. I was somehow irritated by that and decided to teach her a lesson. I decided to fool her on the fool's day itself.

She was selected to a famous company in campus interviews (I am replacing the company name with ABC).

I sent out an email with carefully drafted content:

Hi there,

We are happy to inform you that we are conducting a workshop on C and Embedded Systems. For this, we have planned to include some selected freshers who will be joining the company in 2007. We are happy to inform you that you are one of those selected members. We are offering this to make you ready for the job by the time you join us. There will be a test based on C and Embedded Systems as a part of the workshop. The test will be online. The test has been designed so that we will be able to test your proficiency in the field and gives you a hint about improving yourself in these fields. If you are keen on taking the test, please follow the procedure given at the end. If your performance is good, you will get certificates, and you will be put on a fast track into R&D. I Hope your response will be positive.

Procedure: The test will be held on Sunday, 25th of March, 2007 at 10:00 AM. So you are requested to log on to http://ABCworkshop.awardspace.com at the specified time.

With regards,

Manager

ABC

Using a free server that supported sending direct emails, I had spoofed that email to come from manager@abctech.com to make them believe it. I had also set up a dummy page with the company logo and a countdown timer for the test. Probably the web page I created was convincing enough because no one doubted about the page is in the "award space" domain. I sent this email to most of my friends who had got selected for that company.

This became quite news at the college. Each one of those who got the email started asking others, whether they had got the email too. Since most of them had got it, they believed it to be true and started studying.

On 23rd March, just two days before the scheduled date, I sent another spoofed email which read:

Hi there,

We have got an overwhelming response for the test we are conducting as part of the workshop. We have also got some feedback about the test, and many have complained that the time is not sufficient for the preparation. So, we have decided to postpone the test by one week. The test will be held on Sunday, 1st of April, 2007 at 10:00 AM instead of Sunday, 25th of March, 2007 as it was announced earlier. We hope this new schedule will provide you with sufficient time for preparation.

With regards,

Manager

ABC

With this, the stage was all set to fool her on the Fool's day.

The next challenge for me was to set up the website for them to "take the test". Out of my laziness, I procrastinated it till the last day. On the night of March 31st, I created a fake login page, where they had to enter their name, email id, and college name. I set an internal timer so that the login page would be visible only after 10 AM the next day. Till then, it showed the good old count-down timer and asked them to login after 10 AM. Using the information entered in the login screen, I had set up an automated email to be sent to them. After sufficient testing to make sure everything was perfect, I dozed off.

So, here is what happened next:

Out of sheer excitement of taking the test from "her company" before even she joined, she was all set to take the test. Exactly at 10 AM, the login screen popped up as designed. She logged in, hoping for the online test to appear. But instead, a big "APRIL FOOL" message popped up. Just to assist her to get the answers correct, she had taken her friend also with her, which proved quite disastrous. She was humiliated to the core in front of her friend, to whom she had boasted enough about their company. Some other friends also had tried to take the test and got fooled. Each of them had got a mail with me copied, so they couldn't deny it the next day:

Hi user, You have been made APRIL FOOL

Congratulations !!

Your ABC Manager,

M G Harish

So, I had achieved what I wanted, by fooling her on Fool's day. In the meantime, I had helped them in disguise, by forcing them to study.

.You spend a lot of time with your coworkers. If you’re lucky, some of them may even become friends. But even if work comes to feel like a second home, it’s not a good idea to get too comfy. Some things are just not a good fit for the workplace. Among them: many office April Fools’ Day pranks.

Think we’re being party poopers? Consider this: humor is highly subjective. One person’s laugh riot is someone else’s shrug emoji. Pranks are especially fraught, since they depend on, well, fooling people — and many people just don’t like to be fooled.

If your April Fools’ Day prank lands the wrong way, you could have hurt feelings instead of team-building hilarity. You might even get fired, as these unfortunate employees discovered. Sometimes, you don’t even have to be a prankster to lose your job. An April Fools’ Day prank gone wrong can wind up costing an innocent bystander their employment.

In 2016, Google’s annual April Fools’ Day prank was Mic Drop, which a yellow Minion dropping a microphone. By enabling the feature, users muted their email conversation and inserted a GIF of a mic-dropping minion.

Unfortunately, thanks to a bug, not every user realized they’d enabled the feature … and not every recipient enjoyed the snarky reply.