April Fool's story catches some readers?
If indeed there had ever been such a recommendation, it no doubt would have followed the response to the story that a hack a Mac challenge had been beaten. The controversy continues to rage on that one!
And as promised, here is last year's April Fool's newsletter copy, followed by the text from the page those who clicked on the link received.
It's in the Can
Well, I guess it had to happen -- even the largest of companies can only fight the inevitable for so long. I'm speaking, of course, of today's decision by the Hormel Food Company to change the name of its popular spiced ham product to "E-mail".
"We were fighting a losing battle," said Diada Mentira, Hormel's international marketing director. "We couldn't do anything to stop products from coming out with names like SpamAssassin and Spamkiller. And having your food product's name associated with death is something we try to avoid."
"I suppose we could have changed the name to anything, really," continued Mentira. "But since hardly anyone refers to the electronic communications they receive these days as anything but 'spam' -- or perhaps 'crap' -- we thought appropriating the name "E-mail" was perfect. It's already well-known, it has a modern, positive ring to it, and there's no existing copyright to deal with."
Hormel had originally commissioned a survey of some 3000 customers around the world regarding the proposed name change, but Mentira said the results were inconclusive. "In hindsight, I suppose we should have done the survey via the post or telephone. Using the Internet saved us quite a bit of money, but when we were collating the answers we found that the only response that held any statistical significance was 'Out of the office'."
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I'm not sure that anyone actually has the name Diada Mentira ("Lie's Day", or April Fool's Day in Portuguese), but even so, the absurdity of the premise -- wait a minute, we still seem to believe that the ACCC has some sort of power over Telstra ... maybe it's not so bizarre after all.
So if you've come to this page, don't worry: no one will know. But it will be interesting to look at the traffic figures and see how this article comes out in the rankings for next week's top stories.