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Don’t Fool Your Associates

By Jeanne E. Murphy posted 08-01-2016 10:52

  

When an April Fools' Day joke works, it’s great—everyone at least smiles. The joke has to be subtle but also contain an element that makes your head tweak to the left if you are paying attention. Some of the best pranks this year include self-driving bicycles in the Netherlands, umbrellas for dogs, and the announcement of a merger of the University of Florida and Florida State University. 

But when you get the tone of your joke wrong, it can be demoralizing. According to Above the Law, Weil Gotshal, an international law firm based in New York City, pranked its associates by sending out a new e-mail policy on April 1, which announced that e-mail would not be transmitted between 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. during the work week and between 11:00 p.m. Friday and 6:00 a.m. Monday. The policy also stated that all e-mail would be held when employees were on vacation until 6:00 a.m. the morning of their return. The last sentence of the e-mail policy read, “We are proud to be taking a leadership role in caring about our colleagues’ quality of life.” 

Unsurprisingly, associates who were working 12 to 16 hours a day to make their billables and who would have desperately loved some work-life balance were not amused when they found out the new policy was meant to be a joke. Perhaps an appropriate response to the prank e-mail policy is one of the new words added to Oxford Dictionaries on April 1: LOYO – "abbreviation laughing on your own (used online in reply to a joke that others have not found amusing)."

 

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