Messing around with
The Georgia Tech Home Page
April Fool's Day 2000

In the year 2000, April 1st was on a Saturday, so that led to a more "subtle" prank...

Early on, we decided to go with a fake press release; it would be easy to do (especially compared to 1999's joke) and there was no need to expend a lot of time for a page that so few people would see.

We had several ideas that didn't make the cut:

  • Replacing our mascot Buzz with a newer, hipper flying insect: "Zzzzz" a fighting fly. Bonus: that would allow us to name our junior varsity players "the maggots"

  • Going to 24/7 classes in order to fit a semesters worth of teaching into a quarter's worth of time (to please everyone). Most freshmen are still up at 2am, why not make 'em take calculus then?

  • An announcement that Georgia Tech physicists have discovered a strange new force they are calling "anti-anti-gravity" that mysteriously acts to counter the effects of anti-gravity. When placing two very massive objects in close proximity, instead of observing the expected repulsion due to anti-gravity, the large objects actually were pulled towards each other.

  • Georgia Tech to officially rename itself to "Georgia Tech University". Why fight'em when you can join 'em.

  • Georgia Tech will be "going private" in order to gather investment capital to avoid an expected hostile take-over attempt by the newly formed University of Georgia, Inc.

  • Georgia Tech will be spearheading a committee to get the Olympic Games back to Atlanta in 2004 with the goal of securing funding to finish all the 1996 Olympic-related construction that never got finished...

In the end, we went with the "Athens one". *I* thought it was funny. The public, however, were absolutely silent on the issue. We only received one piece of email about it and there were a few posts on git.general (mostly saying how boring it was). I'll agree, it wasn't subtle enough to be "believable"; it wasn't designed to be so. It was meant to be funny, which I hope it was. Besides, any chance to make fun of UGA is worth taking, eh?

You can click on the thumbnail above to view an archived copy of the page.


-aa