I've never been the victim of an April Fools prank before, but today I was...
I'm processing payroll this week - my company has the kind of time sheets that break peoples time down into different tasks (to be billed to different clients of course). So several of my co-workers replaced the task descriptions with things like "doodling at meetings" and "googling" and so forth... silly, and amusing if not terribly complex.
I almost didn't notice, which was kind of embarrassing... in fact I wouldn't have noticed at all, but one of the participants accidentally put in the wrong name as well.
The thing is, it almost didn't come off.
See, payroll is time sensitive, and this week I was really behind. So, when I first noticed the name change, I was amused... and I went (or tried to go) to the guy who did it, so we could laugh about it and I could get the corrected time sheet from him... but he was busy... every time I tried to catch him, he was on to something else - in a meeting, on the phone, etc. So instead of being amused, I ended up quite annoyed... although when I eventually did catch his attention, and caught on to the rest of it, it was pretty amusing again.
And I was wondering what you thought of that, especially in light of #3. How do you classify a prank that might cause negative feelings? Is it a good prank or a bad one? Or does that depend on the actual result of the implementation (i.e. it's a good prank if I'm amused, and a bad one if I'm annoyed)? If some level of risk to people's feelings is acceptable, how much?
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Date: 2008-04-02 12:20 am (UTC)I'm processing payroll this week - my company has the kind of time sheets that break peoples time down into different tasks (to be billed to different clients of course). So several of my co-workers replaced the task descriptions with things like "doodling at meetings" and "googling" and so forth... silly, and amusing if not terribly complex.
I almost didn't notice, which was kind of embarrassing... in fact I wouldn't have noticed at all, but one of the participants accidentally put in the wrong name as well.
The thing is, it almost didn't come off.
See, payroll is time sensitive, and this week I was really behind. So, when I first noticed the name change, I was amused... and I went (or tried to go) to the guy who did it, so we could laugh about it and I could get the corrected time sheet from him... but he was busy... every time I tried to catch him, he was on to something else - in a meeting, on the phone, etc. So instead of being amused, I ended up quite annoyed... although when I eventually did catch his attention, and caught on to the rest of it, it was pretty amusing again.
And I was wondering what you thought of that, especially in light of #3. How do you classify a prank that might cause negative feelings? Is it a good prank or a bad one? Or does that depend on the actual result of the implementation (i.e. it's a good prank if I'm amused, and a bad one if I'm annoyed)? If some level of risk to people's feelings is acceptable, how much?
Kiralee