For crying out loud, its a date. A date like any other, and one on which many things have to be taken seriously. The problem is, no single person defines where a joke should stop, and where the seriousness should start, and I feel sure its caused a large number of problems for many people.

What of the emergency services for example? I wonder how many calls they get in the cause of a joke while others die at the expense of a chuckle or two? Sounds OTT, but perhaps not when you think about the number of jokes played and the fact that on any other day they are things that would be taken with 100% seriousness. This fact alone leads me to believe that on April 1st, one of two things happen; a serious thing is taken lightly and there are undesirable consiquences or a joke is taken seriously and there are undesirable consiquences.

To me its all about the boy who cried wolf, if it wouldn’t be too serious on any other day, sure, joke about it. If not, then think twice, after all, what if you really did have a problem on April 1st and everyone ignored you because they thought you were having a laugh. At the very least its food for thought.

Matt Mullenweg (Author of WordPress) decided to play along with a joke that WordPress had been merged with another flavour of blogging software. Its a worrying trend from our developers, on whom we rely for up to date information on the reliablity, security and integrity of their software on which we all rely so heavily. Can someone who professes to have sold out (on any day of the year) be trusted on such up to date information? I guess we have no choice, but it will certainly make me scrutinise the code I download from these trusted sources a lot more in the future.