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April First., I hate it

38 points by rebootthesystem ↗ HN
This the one day in the year when otherwise perfectly sensible people think it OK to interrupt your day and waste your time with sophomoric jokes. If you happen to have a large family as I do it is almost guaranteed to get calls, emails and experience various creative ways to play this game throughout the day. From your mother is pregnant to my cat got run over by a car to we won the lottery. Un-friggin-believable.

It isn't that I have no sense of humor. I love a good joke as much as anyone. I simply object to a workday filled with unnecessary interruptions that dislocate your train of thought and get in the way of getting your work done. When your father in law decides to call you because he is going to get you with a good one you can't just blow him off. So there goes a half hour on the phone. Because, you know, I just sit in front of a computer all day.

That said, I've learned it is virtually impossible to control others. No calls. Don't click on any links. This too shall pass.

21 comments

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mcbutterbunz
Turn your phone off, close your email, get off IM and dont check hacker news.

Remember, like you said, its only one day in the year.

partisan
Agreed. A good excuse for a news and internet fast.
MichaelCrawford
I was looking forward to it at first, but now my gripe is that it's hard to distinguish the jokes from the legitimate news articles.

Yeah the jokes were funny at first but now I wish they'd stop.

_jomo
> it's hard to distinguish the jokes from the legitimate news articles

that's the point?

sidcool
I think one should take it in good spirit. After all you get to work without interruptions for the rest of the year.
loopbit
As an expat living in the anglosphere, I get to have two days like this, April fool's day and the holy innocents day.
davidy123
Sometimes they're pretty funny (like the google maps pac-man) And I suppose they serve to tune people's credulousness. But hasn't spam taken over that function?

It'd be nice if people could put this kind of energy into something fun and useful. World openly connect things day?

Mimu
Main issue is people making the same jokes over and over again thinking somehow they are the first one to do this one. I'm talking about centuries old jokes.
kleer001
Am I getting old? I used to think they were funny. The quirky ironic nostalgic news, the impossibilities, the 'creative' lies. Then, somehow, in the last ten years or so it kind of soured for me.

I think it might be the relative length of a year to my life lived so far. When I was 22 I thought they were a blast. 1/22 = 4.5% of my life. Now that I'm near 40, 1/40 = 2.5% of my life. That's every April fools happening almost twice as much "perceptivly", as in the relative size of a year is becoming smaller and they're flying by 'faster'.

Sure, a year is still 365 days, but we're talking about like/dislike, and aging, totally subjective things. I'm sure a quick quiz could put this easily to rest. How old are you? On a scale of 1 to 10 how funny do you think April Fools day is?

Then again it could be a temperament thing. I'm not saying OP is old, it's more of a personal jab at myself.

alashley
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of it either. I got on the bus today and my bus pass didn't work. The bus driver said "April 1st." I sort of chuckled and thought to myself, "Oh, its an April fools thing." So then I swiped my bus pass again and the driver said "It's April 1st, your pass is expired." Slightly embarassed, I said, "I'll have to get a new one!"

tl;dr: I hate having to think twice about whether I'm being pranked in the most mundane of situations.

needusername
I generally enjoy it. However some joker decided it would be super funny to exchange the red and green icons on the build server.

Me: It's not funny could you please revert it?

He: Nope

Me: ಠ_ಠ

I could have hacked into the build server but decided blowing my backdoor for this was not worth it. Instead I added him to my black list.

manidoraisamy
why so serious, son? ;)
rebootthesystem
'cause I am not 15 years old?
marvy
I think the problem is that the people around you are too annoying about it. They need to learn how to prank more lightly.
rebootthesystem
Probably true to some extent. Most of the issues have to do with phone calls. As an example, when your father in law calls you to prank you that invariably turns into a 30 minute conversation. At that point you are completely out of flow and it takes you another hour to get back to the same mental state.
marvy
New policy: "Hello, you have reached my voicemail. Since today is April 1st, why don't you just leave a message and I'll call you back when I have time for pranks, and then we can both enjoy it? Until then, stop breaking my concentration, it takes an hour to rebuild." There are so many things wrong with that idea, but still.