Serious endeavors

April 2, 2008

Yes, I know it's April 2, but bear with me. I feel like I'm like most people when I say I was never a huge fan of April Fool's Day. I lacked the creative—and dastardly—instincts to inflict embarrassment on my fellow sufferers. I wholeheartedly believe my energies are better spent elsewhere. Such as trying to not to be the butt of a joke. Again.

So that's what makes corporate shenanigans that much more interesting. When a company plays a joke, it represents the effort of a whole team of people working hard to inflict embarrassment on fellow sufferers. So it should be a doozy, right?

Well, see, playing a joke requires a certain carefree wackiness that most corporate entities-focused as they are on productivity, strategy, and steadfast organization-have difficulty embracing. Usually the results are mild, but occasionally there's a spicy zinger or two. One classic I do remember: in 1996 Taco Bell said it bought the Liberty Bell and named it the Taco Liberty Bell. I like to think most people picked up on that right away. Right. In what could be the top joke of all time, a good portion of England's populace was taken in by a 1957 BBC news report claiming that Swiss farmers had enjoyed a bumper crop of spaghetti that year. Nicely done.

In yesterday's R&D Daily you may have seen the link to "Google launches Virgle," and soon (I hope) deduced that what you saw was a somewhat elaborate April Fool's Day hoax. As such pranks go, "Virgle" was less of a joke than a farcical appetizer for the mind. Some lucky Google employees were charged with cooking up "factoids" mixed with half-serious colonization strategies to serve up a vision of our future on Mars. Some liked it. Some didn't. And some were duped entirely. In what had to be the most entertaining scene at this year's CTIA Wireless 2008 Show, which happened to coincide with April 1, an audience took Richard Branson's speech about Virgle perfectly seriously. By the end of his talk, Branson had 30 people up on stage ready to become Martian guinea pigs. And there it was, Virgle officially became a quality April Fool's hoax.

The thing is, it's not really a hoax. It might not be called Virgle, and we might suffer a few setbacks to get there, but we're going to Mars someday. If you got hooked at all by the prank, I'm sure you saw the error page, which admits to the joke, finishing up: "Virgle isn't real. Yet."

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