BLOCKED BY GOOGLE!! (Best Prank Ever Played On Me)
The best prank anyone's ever pulled on me was masterminded by Scott Harris back in my WebProNews days. We worked, six of us packed in an office that was about half the size of our boss's.

The Prankster:
Scott was our lead designer. When we collaborated ideas flowed and we made strong contributions to our company's look and feel online.

Scott spent his drive time listening to Rush Limbaugh, from whom he picked up tactics for baiting me. He had a Mark Twain brilliance at architecting pranks that I've only ever seen in country boys.

The Prankee:
Then, as now, I stayed plugged in to search industry news and drank lots of coffee and wrote excitedly about new developments in search and search marketing. I got regular emails from readers who made more money online because of reading the WebProNews email newsletter.

In the interest of open rates (then I paid more attention to open-rate bait than link bait) I tended to take an adversarial approach to covering Google... By regularly interviewing folks like Daniel Brandt and publishing webmaster reactions to major ecommerce events like the Florida update.

The Delivery:
So imagine my SHOCKED DELIGHT one day when I found myself
BLOCKED
FROM
GOOGLE.

Every time I went to Google.com I got an access denied page. No one else in our little room did. I was being singled out, singly blocked by Google. It was one of my most exciting moments ever.

I started writing the story, vaguely aware of some... strain amongst my colleagues. They played it straight though, and shared my awe that I, Garrett French, had struck some journalistic blow against Google that had won me a vindictive counter strike by someone on the inside.

"Which story do you think they blocked you for?" someone asked.

Recognition:
Finally I had to clarify some networking point with Jay Beans, our admin. I ran back to his office - when I'm excited about a story I run. I stood over his desk nodding my head, scribbling, wondering why he kept trying not to smile.

He sniggered, and, before I spent any more of my morning on the article, gently explained to me that network admins can make your Google page show up with whatever they want. My morning's grossly inflated sense of self importance crashed over me and I discovered the true meaning of Poisson d'Avril!!!

May your day be filled with an increase in self knowledge, painful though it may be :)

little-known side note:
It was my post-prank hyper incredulity that caused me to doubt news of gmail later that day... a GIG of space? Yeah right. APRIL FOOLS!! :)

Here's some coverage of search engine april fools day celebration:
Ask's RhymeRank
Zawodny's difficult decision
Google Romance
Google Room Search
I'm still known to bite the April Fool's hook ;)
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |