April 1st has come and gone. The concept of “April Fools” goes back many years. In some circles, the first April Fools’ Joke is said to have been played on November 13 in the year 1959 by Duchess Gloriana XII of Grand Fenwick. Others pin the first joke several centuries earlier.
Conventional thinking is that the jokes played on that day can be humorous, annoying, disruptive or downright dangerous. It’s the disruptive and dangerous jokes that have caused the formation of a movement to ban all jokes on April 1st. Despite that, history has shown that the levity of the day can have positive effects as well. That being the case, here are my top five reasons April Fools’ Day can be good for you:
- It can be good for your peace of mind. If your coworker plays a joke on you by secretly changing the calibration on your scope so the ranges will be off, you can have a day of feeling good about your OP Amp circuit, thinking the noise level is down to just where you want it.
- April Fools’ jokes can lower your blood pressure. For example, say a coworker replaces your pepper with a bunch of 1 x 1.3mm 6-bump chip scale BGAs. You then put generous helpings of salt and “pepper” on your chicken sandwich. While probably not at all healthy, the little chips probably aren’t fatally bad to consume but would taste so bad you’d spit out the first bite and not eat the rest of your sandwich, thus not consuming all of that blood-pressure-raising salt.
- It can make solder selection easier. As it is, your lead-free vs. leaded decision (for stuff not going to Europe) has to be made based on the BGA. Mixing leaded solder with lead-free BGAs and vice versa is not a good thing. If someone in materials plays an April Fools’ joke by scraping all the solder balls off your BGA, you may at first feel despair. But then you realize that without the pesky solder balls, you can use it like an LGA and pick whatever kind of solder you want.
- It can help with recreation. When you arrive to your cubicle loaded with 20,000 ping pong balls, you may be dismayed at first. But, take heart in the fact that you now have a lifetime supply of ping pong balls. You can now learn the sport without fear of losing your supply of ping pong balls due to explosion or crushing. And, be glad that they didn’t used golf balls.
- You can get a promotion and a big raise. This is your opportunity to shine. Play a humiliating and very public prank on your boss, or perhaps your boss’s boss. By bringing humor into his or her life, you’ll not only be noticed, but will also be greatly appreciated for raising moral though public humiliation of management. They always appreciate that.
Duane Benson
Ever get that sinking feeling – you had a very tiny part out so you could use the part number in a humor blog post referring to consuming that part and when you’re about halfway through the snack you’ve been eating while writing the post, you discover that the tiny little part is gone? At least it’s a lead-free part.