Most companies just do something harmless for April Fools’ Day. And yes, 99.999% of the time they’re lame, but that’s better than THIS alternative. Google messed up big time on April Fools’ Day, and may’ve even cost some people their jobs.
For their April Fools stunt this year, they added a button to the bottom of Gmail that said “Send and Mic Drop.” If you pressed it, it automatically added a GIF of one of the Minions dropping a mic into your email. It would also permanently end the email chain.
There were SO many problems with that. First of all, messing with people’s email without their permission and no way to undo it is a pretty big deal.
Plus, they put it RIGHT next to the real “Send” button, so people were hitting it by accident. AND there was a bug that inserted it into some people’s emails without them hitting that button.
So the horror stories started pouring in immediately. One guy said he sent it to a company he’d been interviewing with and it cost him the job. Another person said it flat-out got them fired. And a woman accidentally sent it to 50 people with a serious prayer request for a sick relative.
Google shut it down quickly and apologized.
(Here’s a screenshot of the Minion GIF.)
