We have all been at the short end of an April fools prank or two, normally harmless fun that gets a chuckle at somebody’s expense. It does not always go to plan and sometimes it goes horribly wrong.
Google, notorious for their April fool pranks, produced the “Gmail Mic Drop”, a special version of the send button which appends a gif of a minion dressed as the queen dropping a microphone to the end of your email. Emails sent via this method will not receive any of the replies and this led to a lot of unhappy customers for Google. Some users claim to have offended their co-workers and friends, whilst others say they lost their job by using the alternate send button without realising.
“I am a writer and had a deadline to meet,” he wrote. “I sent my articles to my boss and never heard back from her. I inadvertently sent the e-mail using the ‘Mic Drop’ send button. There were corrections that needed to be made on my articles and I never received her replies. My boss took offence to the Mic Drop animation and assumed that I didn’t reply to her because I thought her input was petty (hence the Mic Drop). I just woke up to a very angry voicemail from her which is how I found out about this ‘hilarious’ prank.”
Lessons have been learned by Google – don’t play pranks on people through mission critical software used by millions.