UPDATE: Boss fires employee as an April Fools joke, boss gets fired for real when entire team walks out: ‘It’s April fools! It was a joke! Get back in here!’ – FAIL Blog

This employee shared his story following April Fool’s Day, telling of how a mean-spirited prank his boss pulled, telling him that he was fired when he arrived to work, backfired and escalated. It wasn’t as if the boss just let him stew on it for a couple of seconds either; he actually watched as it took several hours for the employee to collect all of his personal belongings and destroy documents they didn’t need any longer, even letting him head home before finally phoning him to tell him that it had been a “prank.” I don’t know whether the boss thought that he was Ashton Kutcher in MTV’s 00s reality show “Punk’d” and was just going to pop out of the shrubbery somewhere to declare that the employee had been the target of a prank and that the employee was going to laugh, and everyone was just going to move on from it. Or maybe he just idolized The Office’s Michael Scott and was trying to play out that famous episode of the series; if so, he should remember how that played out in the actual episode. 

While fake firings might play well on a TV show, the real reality is that most people fear that they will come into work to find that they no longer have a job, lose their health insurance, and are unable to pay for things as a result. So tricking people into thinking that the rug has been pulled out from underneath their life just does not make for good workplace humor.