It could be a crackhead….

On Tuesday, one of my clients thought it would be funny to play an April Fools joke on me by telling me that they accidentally deleted files off of their server.  Their joke fell short when I showed no signs of panic.  After all, their backups are foolproof and I have shadow copies enabled on the file server for even faster restores.

I wasn’t the only “victim” on April 1^st.  I put “victim” in quotes because nothing phases me; you could shoot a nerf dart in my eye and I wouldn’t flinch (GURU inside joke).  Around the web, there were other April Fools jokes to be found.  Google continued its annual pranking by announcing a new feature for their Gmail application called “Custom Time” where you can modify the timestamp on your emails to make them appear as if they were sent earlier.

This would have been helpful in college when I had English papers and computer science programs that needed to be submitted by midnight.

Even YouTube, the popular video sharing website, got in on the action, launching its first ever April Fools joke by linking all of their featured videos to the Rick Astley’s music video for “Never Gonna Give You Up,” causing all visitors to be rickrolled.  In case you haven’t heard of this new phenomenon, “rickrolling” is the act of intentionally misleading someone into watching a YouTube video of Rick Astley’s 80’s hit by disguising the link with something more appealing.  For example, I would be easily rickrolled if you sent me a link that looked like it was about The Rock.

So what can you do to get in on the fun next year? Two of my favorites that I’ve stumbled upon are:

1)      The Blue Screen of Death screensaver, which is actually a free download from Microsoft.

http://cache.lifehacker.com/assets/resources/2006/11/bsod-saver.jpg

2)      Making an office look like it’s filled with packing peanuts which would work very well at GURU because of the huge glass windows.

One thing that’s not a joke, though, is leprechauns in Alabama.