Tomorrow is April Fools Day – a day widely recognized and celebrated as a day that tolerates practical jokes and general foolishness. In celebration of this day, I thought it would be a nice idea to share some practical joke ideas for you to play on the different generations.
Baby Boomers
Baby Boomers are prime targets for computer pranks, being a little less tech savvy than Gen X and Gen Y. Some ideas include:
Change the icons: Confuse your victim by changing all the icons on the computer desktop. Just rename all the icons to whatever you want. Then change the icon pictures: right click on each icon, choose “Properties” then the Shortcut tab, then “change icon.”
Incorrect: If the victim uses Microsoft Word, go into the victim’s computer and change the auto-correct feature so it misspells common words. Just open Word, choose “Auto Correct Options” from the Tools menu, and have it replace common words like “the” and “and” with wacky words like “eggplant” or “pink elephant.” Be creative.
The Crossed Wires prank below would also be a good one for Baby Boomers are probably the only generation who’ll be on their phone first thing in the morning, as apposed to Gen Y and Gen X who check emails first, BBM their colleagues and bosses, Mxit with their mates and Skype call their international colleagues before picking up the phone.
Crossed Wires: Either late on March 31st or very early on April 1st sneak into a shared office and unplug two phones and re-plug them in with the lines crossed. Both victims will go nuts trying to figure out why they’re getting each others’ calls.
Generation X
Show me one Gen X that doesn’t spend time on YouTube, and who wouldn’t be a little annoyed and perplexed with this idea!
TextP
Last year, YouTube released this announcement saying that although it’s great that there are 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, it also means that increasing bandwidth costs was cutting into their bottom line. In a drive to keep expenses under control, they decided to offer a new way to experience YouTube: text-only mode, or TEXTp.
Generation Y
We know how addicted Gen Y are to their cell phones – well, here was an Android app – ‘Translate for Animals‘ – bridging the gap between humans and animals.
Making the world’s information universally accessible is a key goal for Google. Language is one of our biggest challenges so we have targeted our efforts on removing language barriers between the species. We are excited to introduce Translate for Animals, an Android application which we hope will allow us to better understand our animal friends. We’ve always been a pet-friendly company at Google, and we hope that Translate for Animals encourages greater interaction and understanding between animal and human.
Translate for Animals is an application for Android phones that recognises and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example. To develop Translate for Animals, we worked closely with many of the world’s top language synthesis teams, and with leaders in the field of animal cognitive linguistics, including senior fellows at the Bodleian Library in Oxford
Enjoy the day tomorrow, and don’t say you haven’t been warned!
: )