Yesterday was April 1st and with the success of last year’s April’s fool joke I decided to pull one yesterday as well. I sent this e-mail to all the people at work:

From: Vegard Skjefstad

Sent: 1. april 2008 09:01

To: All Employees

Subject: Important information regarding your e-mails.

Importance: High

All,

As of the 1st of February this year the new Norwegian Cyber Terrorism Preparedness Act of 2008 became active. The CTPA has been pushed through by the US via the EU and the result is as follows:

All employees who do not hold a Norwegian citizenship will have to send all e-mails they have sent to recipients outside of the Norway since the 1st of February this year to [address removed], and CC that address on all future e-mail they send to recipients outside of Norway. The e-mails will then be automatically forwarded to the right authorities who will check your e-mails for anything suspicious. Any e-mail you might receive that contains suspicious information should also be sent to the above e-mail address.

Since we’re already lagging behind, it’s important that you start sending your e-mails to [address removed] today or the authorities might seize your computer, or, in a worst-case scenario, the mail server.

Best regards, Vegard Skjefstad

We’re quite international when it comes to employee citizenship, so it was a good chance that at least one of the people at the office would fall in the trap.

And what do you know, our Indian account manager/sales rep wanted to know if he could post-pone it for a couple of days because he really had sent out a lot of e-mails since the 1st of February. Of course we all laughed at him.

So he decided to get back at me.

He teamed up with the CEO and got him to send out a confidential e-mail to middle management and me saying that our Indian friend would leave us this summer and start to work for a competitor, making it essential that we did not share any confidential information with him from now on.

I totally fell for it. The best jokes are the plausible ones.