April Fools Day in Review: The 5 Funniest Pranks

April Fools Day has become an unofficial one-day “holiday” from the seriousness of the workplace. The best April Fools pranks walk a fine line between alarming and funny (although, they’re usually a little closer to “funny” so as not to cause undue stress). As April fades out we choose the funniest pranks for you to enjoy.

While you were busy removing the keys from your boss’s keyboard and replacing them to spell “U MAD BRO?” the rest of the world was also busy getting their April Fool on. Here are 5 of the funniest pranks from around the web, in no particular order.

1. Turning their Online World Upside Down

“On the bright side, my ankles are less swollen when I work in this position.”

Code sharing site GitHub.com conveniently provided code that could be placed into a co-worker’s Custom.css file. These CSS definitions would automatically be applied to every website visited as well as their developer tools, turning the screen images upside down and blurring them briefly every 30 seconds.

2. Making Texting a Full Body Experience

Does your company have a BYOD policy? If so, your workforce may have favorite apps that help them get things done faster. SwiftKey is a popular app for texting that uses predictive text to cut down on typing time and effort. For April Fools Day, SwiftKey introduced SwiftKey Tilt, “a revolutionary new input method which transforms the everyday activity of typing into a whole-body, immersive experience.” Rather than typing the old fashioned way, with fingers, you could “rock, wiggle or shimmy your smartphone to insert words in a truly innovative way.” They even provided a helpful (and hilarious) video demo.

3. Neustar: Improving Websites One Meow at a Time

Everyone knows all the old SEO tropes like “keywords,” “alt tags,” and “quality content.” But what really gets people to visit your website is cats. And since cat pictures are so rare and hard to find online, communications and business consultants at Neustaroffered to add cats to your website so that you could take advantage of amazing “statistics” like these:

• In product videos, including a kitten playing with a ping pong ball will increase viewership 93%. And two kittens? 560%.
• Cats in banner ads lift response 3,000%.
• Customers will spend an average of $275 more on an online clothing purchase if a cat is wearing it.
• Simply mentioning the word “cats” somewhere on your site guarantees you the top position in Google search results.

Don’t you feel silly wasting all that time on content development?

4. “Wheel of Fortune” Made This One Inevitable

“Without vowels, every word looks like profanity.”

Buying a vowel has long been a time-tested method for “Wheel” players to make sense of the puzzles they were trying to solve. In that vein, Twitter announced on April 1 that including vowels in Tweets qualified as a premium service, and that they were going to start charging for them:

“Starting today, we are shifting to a two-tiered service: Everyone can use our basic service, Twttr, but you only get consonants. For five dollars a month, you can use our premium “Twitter” service which also includes vowels.”

It only makes sense in a world where you have to pay a “convenience fee” for the “convenience” of printing out tickets you bought online using paper and ink from your own printer.

5. When the Aliens Arrive, You’ll Be Ready

Sure, you can video chat with your niece in Portland, or talk to your Canadian grandparent for free, but is that really enough? Skype doesn’t think so. That’s why on April 1 they announced Skype into Space, a service that allows earth-to-outer-space calls plus amazing features like “extreme gravitational resilience” for when pesky black holes threaten to interfere with your important conversation about “Harlem Shake” videos. They even have “experimental linguists” on standby to decipher communications from alien life forms, making “universal” communication live up to its name.

From announcing that the company network will be “closed for cleaning” to replacing beloved co-workers’ screen savers with the Blue Screen of Death, technologically-savvy workers are the fuel that keeps the world’s April Fools prank engine running smoothly, year after year. Got any great April Fools stories of your own? We’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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Photo Credits: sixninepixels / freedigitalphotos.net, sixninepixels / freedigitalphotos.net