General Counsel's April Fool's joke gets serious response

They're supposed to walk a fine line between the obvious and the fantastic.

April Fool's posts, like this one, from Cosmos Magazine, "Archaeologists declare consensus," falter because they dive headlong into the impossible.

If the headline alone wasn't enough to tip off a reader, the sub-head ("We can be absolutely certain about the past, after all") should have been a dead giveaway.

But even the most credulous should have caught on by the time they reached this passage:

“Archaeologists are famous for putting forward different and conflicting theories about what their evidence suggests,” explains Dennis Ovan, director of the Johannesburg Old Knowledge Institute for Excellence in Skulls (JOKIES).

“But when we finally sat down and talked, we realised that almost all of these arguments stemmed from petty disputes on field trips.

“Limited and competitive funding, massive ideological differences, the publish-or-perish world of academia – all of that can be smoothed over by apologising for waking up a whole tent one time, even though you said you weren’t a snorer.”

Perhaps you saw the one last week from the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office, announcing that it was replacing its K-9 Division with a Feline Division (here's the original Facebook post). These pranks 'hit' if there is a moment or two of doubt (they can't be serious) before the inevitable realization (they aren't serious).

The 1957 BBC hoax about the spaghetti harvest (link to YouTube video) still holds a special place in April Fool's history. It was played so absolutely straight that many viewers were actually taken in. Wikipedia explains that, in Britain, in the late 1950s, spaghetti was relatively unknown.

According to Wikipedia, a number of viewers actually wrote in to the BBC asking for advice on how they could grow their own spaghetti trees.

Andrew Ting, general counsel at Koalafi, a "fintech firm," tried his hand at an April Fool's prank last Friday, according to Phillip Bantz's April 4 post on Law.com.

In a post on LinkedIn, Ting announced that he was leaving his position to become "Chief Impact Officer at Didgeridoo. Didgeridoo is an emerging crypto platform capitalizing on the underserved ESG/NFT monetization market. As Chief Impact Officer, my 100 day plan focuses on curating metaverse ecosystems for friends like you to shop and play!"

He probably thought that was obvious enough, but he continued on anyway:

“As my negotiated condition of employment, I will have absolutely zero role in managing Didgeridoo’s legal, compliance, or government affairs,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “My last 20 years of studying and practicing law were mostly awesome, but why not throw it all away and do something completely new?”

And then a funny thing happened. Or maybe not-so-funny.

Like the Brits who asked the BBC for tips on planting their own spaghetti trees, many of Ting's contacts saluted his courage and bravery in following his dream. Quoting now from Bantz's article:

“The surprising thing to me was that people really took it seriously,” Ting said Monday in an interview. “I actually got dozens of congratulatory messages, not just on LinkedIn but emails and texts. These are from accomplished GCs and senior lawyers. And I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I was just making a joke.’”

He added, “All these people were saying, ‘Andrew, you’re such an inspiration. You’re going off and doing something really cool. You’re taking a risk.’”

Ting had given the chief people officer at Koalafi a heads-up about his prank, but apparently a few of the HR staffers didn’t get the memo—they saw the post and contacted him, wanting to know if he was leaving the company.

The next morning, Ting decided to write a follow-up post to clear up any confusion about his job status and, perhaps more importantly, to offer tips to some of his followers who’d responded to his announcement with “emotional, kind of anguished messages” about feeling stuck in jobs they disliked.

There's a fine line between comedy and tragedy. There's a reason that tears come from both sadness and laughter. Mr. Ting's fake April Fool's announcement exposed real discontent among his brother and sister lawyers about their chosen careers.