Google's "Prank"

The Internet is a necessity in this day in age. We cannot go a day without it, lest our lives turn to turmoil. However, human beings currently have a natural proclivity to believe everything on the internet at the worst of times. And in this day in age, everyone takes things way to seriously.

So, of course, Martin Mibishi decided that he would say that the earth’s core is about to erupt because of global warming. Two very, extremely unrelated events that could not affect each other. And, of course, Mr Mibishi is no ordinary twitter user. Nope. He had to work at Google. And of course, the Google execs being in on the joke and seeing the obvious funny side to this scenario, decided “sure, why the hell not”. May God have mercy on their souls for this innocent prank.

Of course, the first people to catch this story were the people scrolling through Google’s search engine. Imagine their surprise when suddenly their screen went blank and a red warning sign with a short message appears in its place that read “WARNING: The Earth’s core is about to erupt. Please, spend all the time you have with your loved ones, as this will happen in 1 minute.”

Of course, everyone who saw this, which turned out to be a significant amount as the new would later report, doubted it for about a millisecond until a big red ticking timer in red appeared on their screens counting down to one minute. The world turned white with wide-open eyes and everyone online left their phones to do… very drastic things.

Lovers sent messages professing their love to others, even though they were in relationships. True feelings of kindness and compassion, of friendships, brotherhoods, sisterhoods, unity were expressed profusely in person or over a phone. That was the good stuff. But of course, the news outlets would only cover the bad stuff, as drama makes the world go round, seeing as it’s what makes the most money.

Feelings of anger and pent-up rage were released in sudden bursts that lasted beyond the given minute. Suicide rates exceeded the yearly average in that minute. Disgruntled wives suddenly stabbed their husbands or wives to death, and some went as far as taking their children out of the picture as well. Most say they did it to save their children from the burning urge of waiting. Some admitted they had been wanting a good reason to do this for years. Some men also killed their wives or husbands and even their children. The number of rapes that occurred that day around the world exceeded the rape Capital of the world that is South Africa. Co-incidently, closested pedophiles where discovered in drones across the world. Some of the reported cases were just young 20 year-olds whose sexual partners were a few months away from turning 18. Most were not. So of course, the news put everyone under one banner and branded them as they saw fit. And humanity would believe it until they died.

On another note, some people were brought back together because of this event, resulting is some happy reunions. These stories were covered as fluff pieces of course, just to add a cherry on top of the “brown swirly” that was this day. The most covered fluff pieces, however, had to do with teachers and their students. Of course, there were many pedophiles that were uncovered in the schools as well, mostly men, but also a surprising number of women as well. But what the news focused on solely with regards to fluff pieces was how some teachers kept the children positive in their “Final moments”. Truly, there were certainly many inspiring stories from that day, as many teachers had the children singing songs and playing games, even though they felt that they would all soon be dead. So many brave teachers held themselves together for the sake of the children. Of course, there would be much criticism later on when it was found that the teachers had the audacity to have children of different faiths sing songs about a different culture’s God. Many of them lost their jobs, and the new hosts that had given them so much praise turned their backs on them faster than the story was released. A true testament to the wrong-doings of humanity.

Furthermore, it was also found out that doctors in the middle of lifesaving operations stopped as they awaited death for all of them. Some didn’t, as there are doctors whose life is work, but other were saddened that their final moments would be spent with soon-to-be corpses and not with family and friends at home. Of course, many patients died due to this event, and the doctors had to be fired because a prank is not a good reason to let someone die. And so it was that many medical professionals were without jobs and at risk of having their licenses taken away from them. And Google was getting off almost Scott-free. Some of those suicides I spoke about earlier came a little later by the way.

Google, of course, put an apology out and used Mibishi as the Scapegoat, as he would describe himself as in his future suicide note, even though it was his idea and then his choice to bring it up to his bosses. Google took a financial loss for about a month before everything returned to normal, because what are humans if not creatures of newly adopted habits that cannot be broken, especially when the alternatives to Google are “Internet explorer” and “Bing”.

The unfortunate reality of this story is that there really isn’t a moral to this story, because at the end of the day, what’s the point in warding people off from bad ideas when ideas in general lead to bad ideas being acted on anyway. I guess if I were to ascribe a moral that maybe fits within the criteria of this story, it’s that we as humans actually have to control ourselves and make the world not end any time soon, lest we unleash humanity’s truest evils upon ourselves once again.

“Taken from a self-proclaimed writer describing the scariest moment in recent human history in the most generalised way before setting out to do God knows what with his life.”