An April Fools' Day prank by Google has returned to bite them in the arse.
On the strike of midnight in Australia, the company introduced 'Gmail Mic Drop', a unique spin on the send button which adds a Minion mic-dropping gif to the end of your email. If you're lucky enough to not know what a Minion is, they're the little yellow things from Despicable Me.
Cool. Moving on. "Everyone will get your message, but that's the last you'll ever hear about it," Google announced in a blogpost. "Yes, even if folks try to respond, you won't see it."
I can't believe how short-sighted Gmail's "Drop Mic" April 1 joke is. It replaces the "Send+Archive" button, and attaches GIFs to sent mail.— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) April 1, 2016
WHAT A HARMLESS APRIL FOOL'S JOKE, WHAT COULD GO WRONG pic.twitter.com/Maw8a6VUSA— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) April 1, 2016
Unlike most companies, who announce something on April Fools' without following up on it, Google actually went ahead and implemented the product.
They placed the mic-drop option on every user's compose window, making it very easy to be clicked accidentally.
One man posted his experience on the company's Gmail help forum:
"Thanks to Mic Drop I just lost my job. I am a writer and had a deadline to meet. I sent my articles to my boss and never heard back from her. I inadvertently sent the email using the 'Mic Drop' send button.There were corrections that needed to be made on my articles and I never received her replies. My boss took offence to the Mic Drop animation and assumed that I didn't reply to her because I thought her input was petty (hence the Mic Drop). I just woke up to a very angry voicemail from her which is how I found out about this 'hilarious' prank."
And that wasn't the only one. Another user wrote: "I sent out an important email to 30 recipients and I inadvertently clicked the 'Mic Drop' Send. I completely did not mean to, and I realised what had happened after the fact. I tried to resend it without that, but it was too late. Is there any way I can undo my mic drop feature?"
A third user wrote: "Unfortunately some of my very intelligent friends are senior engineers in Google. I almost picked up the phone and shouted at them because of this stupid creation made me sound so rude to one important customer when I made a mistake to click this stupid button."
Google has since pulled the feature.
This whole story is probably an April Fools' joke in itself. A cruel double-bluff, enacted by one of the biggest tech companies in the world, to make us forget what's real.
Is this real? Are the lost jobs real? Am I real?
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