For much of the world, April 1st is “celebrated” as April Fool’s Day. A day of hoaxes and pranks. Most people either love it or loathe it.
My wife and I have a truce on pulling pranks on each other during the day. It is just a way for us to have some solace and not worry about questioning every little thing the other says.
But life still happens on April 1. Good and bad things occur just like every other day of the year. That makes it potentially challenging for journalists covering press releases and events to verify whether something is true or an April Fools’ hoax.
In the Information Technology realm, April 1, 2004, marked one such instance. At that point in the Internet, most web-based email providers offered members a free 4-megabyte storage (at most). However, the pranksters at Google jumped to the national limelight by announcing their email service, Google Mail (later rebranded as GMail), was launching and giving users 1GB of storage space.
That difference in storage space was unheard of, so most people took it as an elaborate hoax. They were wrong.
Decades earlier, on April 1, 1984, singer Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father in Los Angeles, California, shortly after noon. (He would have celebrated his 45th birthday the next day.) As the news came to light, fellow musicians refused to believe it, claiming it a tasteless hoax.
So, if you are a person who enjoys pulling pranks on your friends and colleagues, remember to do so carefully. Not everyone will appreciate the joke like you would.
