Friday, April 01, 2005

I'm an April fool

I vowed not to blog this morning because I've got so much to do before leaving this afternoon, but I had to do one quick post.

Let me say this: I hate April Fools' Day. That's probably because I'm never clever enough to come up with good pranks, but I also don't like the karma of the whole thing--if I play a prank on someone, it's pretty much guaranteed that it will come back around to haunt me. (Thankfully, Gretchen generally shares this view, so our house is a prank-free zone come April 1.)

So this morning, a co-worker received an email--which he promptly forwarded to the rest of our team--with a link to a post on our intranet site that indicated that all employees within certain pay bands would be issued diplomatic license plates for their cars. (This would be a huge deal, as only the big kahunas get such plates.) The site indicated that plates would be distributed in one of the lower-level offices this morning. Despite the professional look of both the email and the web site (which was an identical replica of our intranet), warning bells should have gone off immediately--given the hoops you have to jump through to get license plates here, why would they just hand them out with no paperwork on short notice? But of course I didn't stop to think about that, so when my colleague asked if I wanted to go down with him to check it out, I willingly agreed.

So down we went to the basement level, but no matter how hard we looked, we couldn't find the room. (Why were alarm bells not going off yet? Because I'm an idiot, that's why.) We finally stopped at the security desk on that level, and the officer got out a floor plan and finally found the office in question, which turned out to be...a bathroom. It still didn't hit us immediately, but just as my colleague was starting to ask more questions of the security guard, I said "wait a minute...what day is today?" Bastards! Evidently the woman in HR who handles car questions has been inundated with calls this morning, but I'm not sure how many people were as dumb as us and actually went looking for the office. Stupid April 1.