April fooled fourth

This morning I fell for April fools' pranks. Not once but four times.

First, I visited a colleague on the other side of our floor. He had the local Canberra Times newspaper, which usually prints a serious article on the front page. None could be found. He then mentioned reports about bats in the local area and mentioned seeing some in the tree that could be seen through the window. He insisted there was one just hanging in a branch. I looked and looked and could not see any. Five minutes later...

The second time was when a colleague mentioned that a staff member whom she supervised would be leaving on promotion to another area. My colleague is also going on annual leave in a few weeks so her team would be down from three to one. While I was trying to work out how to fill the 'vacancy' as quickly as possible...

Meanwhile, I had received an email from another colleague who knew about my regular consumption of weißwurst. She mentioned media reporting about "another round of Gammelfleischskandal in Germany" and that Das "Bild is calling it the Schwarzwurst Skandal". So I looked...

Finally, the big boss' executive officer came around to tell me that he wanted to talk to me about something urgent and important. So I grabbed a notebook and a pen while trying to figure out what it could be. Upon arrival at his office, I peered in only to find the prankster sitting in his chair.

I must have had 'gullible' printed on my forehead this morning.

Meanwhile, some of the better pranks today were from
- Lonely Planet on non-human translations of its guides
- The Guardian on their new approach to the monarchy and new live blog
- Google's new Gmail Motion
- Richard Branson buying Pluto
- The Independent reporting about Cristiano Ronaldo being traded by Portugal to Spain
- BBC's 3D radio
- The Sun reporting about gorillas being given iPads
- The Telegraph reporting about ferrets being trained to lay cables for broadband
- Artline's new tweeter pen
- IKEA's Hundstol (see video below)



There is always the possibility that any one of those mentioned above could be serious.

James Creedon from France24 in his international press segment for today seemed to enjoy it a bit more