Reason #5: You Dislike Public Humiliation

The whole point of April Fool's Day is to lay traps for the gullible. Most people don't mind being privately reminded of their gullibility. They just laugh it off. But when someone has their credulity exposed in a highly visible, highly public way, it can be enough to turn them into a hater of the holiday.

Such was the fate, in 1982, of the chief engineer of British Telecom. Like many others, he read in the Daily Mail of a new brand of 'rogue bra' that was supposedly causing widespread television interference because it was made out of an unusual type of copper wire that emitted static electricity when combined with nylon and body heat. Unlike many others, the chief engineer took the proactive step of ordering all his female employees to disclose what type of bra they were wearing, which caused confusion among his female employees, and snickering amusement among the British public.

This overzealous chief engineer has not been the only one to face the sting of public laughter. In 1992 the British foreign office minister agreed to go on television to discuss the 'important' news that Belgium was going to divide in half, which was a nice gesture on his part, except that Belgium had no plans to divide.

And in 1998 the very proper Financial Times had egg on its face when it reported that the Guinness Brewery was going to become an official sponsor of the Greenwich Observatory, as a consequence of which Greenwich Mean Time would be renamed Guinness Mean Time and time would be officially measured in 'pint drips.' Apparently the staff at the Times had failed to read the date at the top of the Guinness press release, a mistake which all the other British papers lost no time in pointing out to them.

Finally, there are the reporters for CNN and Fox News who turned up on April 1, 2000 ready to record footage of the 15th Annual April Fool's Day Parade that would proceed from 59th street in New York City down to 5th Avenue. A press release had tipped them off that the parade would include a variety of outrageous floats, such as NASA's 'Where's Mars?' float portraying missed Mars missions, and the 'Atlanta Braves Baseball Tribute to Racism' float. Only gradually did it dawn on them, as they waited alone on the street, cameras at the ready, that they had been had. Their colleagues in the press made sure that they didn't soon live this down.


Next: Reason #6: You're Francophobic
Page: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8