I’ve decided to skip April Fool’s Day this year, and I’ll tell you why: I’m April Fools’ed out. I’ve done a bunch of April Fools jokes in the past, and this year I’m just too tired to do it. Plus I’m worried that if I escalate the jokes much further, things will get out of control. There was the time that we converted our VP of Engineering’s office into a beach, complete with hundreds of pounds of sand. Do you know how hard it is to clean out 200 pounds of sand out of a carpet? Then one April Fool’s I switched Eric Schmidt’s picture on Google’s intranet to be the fictional billionaire from NewsRadio:

I’m still a little nervous that Eric will figure out it that I was the person that switched the photos.
Two years ago I pretended that I was switching jobs with Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo. Of course, a helpful co-worker emailed HR as if I were really leaving. It took me six weeks to undo my “resignation” and straighten out all the paperwork.
Last year was the final straw. I pretended that my blog got hacked:

Although the hack was a complete joke, a group of script kiddies actually did attack my blog soon afterwards. My blog got hacked for real twice in the following months. Luckily I keep good backups, so it didn’t cause very much harm.
So call me a party pooper if you want, but I’m sitting out this year. I haven’t decided whether I’ll do any posts tomorrow, but if I do they’ll be real. For example, this year I set a goal for myself to try to do something totally new and out of character for me each month. My new thing for March was to get a tattoo, which I got this past weekend. Maybe I’ll post pictures of the tattoo and people will think that it’s a joke.


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