My morning was really busy and because of that I did not even realize that there was a global April Fool’s joke being played on me. My day started out super early as today is Non-Farm Payroll Friday and I have to be physically at the office by around seven in the morning. That meant that I was up around six which is way, way too early for me especially with how busy we have been recently. I just am not getting any sleep.
We’ve also been struggling with Liesl a lot recently. She has decided that she no longer wants to sleep in her own bed but wants to sleep with us instead. She traditionally has always been really good about sleeping by herself and would only come sleep with us once in a while – usually when she was not feeling well. This is extra tough because Dominica is determined to not have her sleep with us except on special occasions which results in us going through a fight to get her to sleep and then dealing with her screaming a few hours later. So we go to bed later, then get woken up and eventually she ends up sleeping with us anyway. So the process is not working out and in a few weeks she is going to go through so much disruption that nothing we do now will matter anyway.
So the big April Fools joke. Apparently this was thought up by Grey some months ago and he has been plotting this one and getting everyone ready to go long ahead of time. He came up with it while working with Souder in Dallas around January. There is this well known picture of me, one that I took of myself leaning on my one hand and in black and white. I took it in the Newark apartment and liked it so I have been using it as my head shot ever since and it appears on SpiceWorks and in my online publications.
So what Grey did was have people – lots of people – from all over SpiceWorks, Twitter, FaceBook, FourSquare and other social media sites change their avatars to be headshots of themselves in the same position, in black and white. A very subtle joke that I did not catch on to right away. Had I not been so swamped with work this morning I might have noticed. I did notice that Andy in London and Bob in Kansas City had changed their avatars but just two people was not enough for me to put two and two together (technically you need at least four cases for that to happen.)
I managed to have breakfast with Souder today at Panera and he finally pointed out what was going on because I hda no idea what he was laughing about. Once I realized that it was going on I found thread after thread of people talking about it and as I started to look at people avatars I realized how many there were. Very funny stuff.
There were even some collages put together by the end of the day of all of the people in the SpiceWorks community that had made the change and posted in certain threads. Surprisingly, Souder never posted in that thread and so never made it in to the collage even though he had changed his avatar the night before.
It was a very cool “prank” and definitely feels good to see so many people taking the time out to pull this one over on me. It is really impressive how well it ended up working out. That was a lot of people to coordinate.
This was, in a way, a continuation of the multiple Scott Alan Millers joke that was played on me at SpiceCorps Houston a couple of years ago.