April Fool’s Day jokes are one of those things that some companies really embrace, and others just tolerate. For the last 2.5 years, I’ve been working at a company that truly embraces them. Some departments/teams literally start thinking about NEXT year’s April Fool’s Day joke as soon as this year’s April Fool’s Day has passed.

Last year when I came back from maternity leave in May, I was sifting through all the work emails I had missed while I was out for 20 weeks. And I I was trying to flag all the “mandatory trainings” I had missed (I do work at an online learning company, after all, so we do have to eat our own ice cream, too). After my company went public in 2021, we had to do a lot of new required trainings as employees of a publicly traded company. It was a necessary evil we all had to do. So when I saw this email in my inbox from our legal team that said we had to do a 96-hour long training as a newly public company, I completely balked. WHAT – 96 hours, and I still have to catch up on all my ACTUAL day to day work?!! I even complained to Chris about it over text when I was reading the email. And then, minutes later, it suddenly dawned on me the date/time stamp of the email: It was April 1, 2022. I just got angry and made a big fuss about an April Fool’s joke that got me.

UGHHHHHHHHHHH. I blamed that on mommy brain.

This year, I knew I was not going to be taken so easily. April Fool’s Day fell on a Saturday this year, but as soon as I saw the email in my inbox, I KNEW it was going to be a prank. Once again, the email came from our head of legal, and the email was to convey the message that all employees’ feedback have been gathered. We want to be one company and operate on one time, so they proposed everyone, regardless of where you were in the world, had to be online for the exact same set of hours for each quarter of this calendar year. This quarter, we’d start with India time, so everyone had to be online for standard India-time work hours from 8-5pm.

Ummmmm. No. There was absolutely NO WAY I fell for that. I already thought it was a prank before I opened the email, and when I saw the idea of everyone being on “one time zone” regardless of what location you were in, I smirked to myself. I also thought about all the parents of young babies and toddlers gettting infuriated about this, not realizing it was a prank.

I did see a lot of the replies in Slack, though, and I laughed out loud at the number of people who actually fell for this and did believe this was real. 😀