'One click and I lost the job. Not funny, Google'

Perhaps Google should have run its April Fool’s Day plan past AlphaGo, the firm’s artificial intelligence system that employed sophisticated predictive functions to beat the world’s best player in the world’s most complicated board game.

AlphaGo, tweaked slightly from its Go-playing focus to address a proposal to put a prank button next to Gmail’s “reply” button, would likely have run through possible outcomes and recommended a next move: “DON’T DO IT!”

For Google’s Gmail joke was not funny to a number of people onto whose professional lives the April foolishness fell, reports suggest (unless the claims, too, were pranks).

The joke concept was fairly simple: a “mic drop” button next to the “reply” button would send the email message, with a short clip of an animated character dropping a mic, and any replies to the sender would not go through. The two buttons, however, were close together, and some people said they intended to send serious messages but hit the wrong button.

“Thanks to Mic Drop I just lost my job,” a poster identifying as Allan Pashby claimed on an official Gmail help forum. “I am a writer and had a deadline to meet. I sent my articles to my boss and never heard back from her. There were corrections that needed to be made on my articles and I never received her replies. My boss took offense 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.”

Another person, identifying as Justin Boxill, posted on Google’s product forum that he’d just sent an email to the first person who had wanted to interview him in months. “I clicked the wrong button and sent it with the mic drop,” the post said. “Well, I guess I’m not getting that job. Words cannot describe how pissed off I am right now.  I’m actually shaking.  One click, ONE CLICK and I lost the job. Goddamnit.  Not funny, google.  I’m going to go cry now.”

Google had hyped the prank on Twitter, saying, “Get the last word with Gmail Mic Drop.” But the company later shut down the prank function and had to add some last words of its own: “Well, it looks like we pranked ourselves this year,” said a company blog post. “Due to a bug, the Mic Drop feature inadvertently caused more headaches than laughs. We’re truly sorry.”

 Photo: The Google logo (KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)

 

Tags:April Fool's Day, GIF, Gmail, Google, joke, mic drop, prank

http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/04/01/104703/