{"id":733,"date":"2010-04-01T07:04:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T07:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/blogs\/paul\/post\/April-Fools-Day-joke-from-my-years-at-Microsoft.aspx"},"modified":"2010-04-01T07:04:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T07:04:00","slug":"april-fools-day-joke-from-my-years-at-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlskills.com\/blogs\/paul\/april-fools-day-joke-from-my-years-at-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"April Fools Day joke from my years at Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nI couldn't think of a really good April Fools Day joke to play, so I thought I'd share with you one that I played on the entire 1000-person SQL Server team back when I was a manager in 2007, and one of the things in my portfolio was fostering closer relationships between team members and customers. I managed to fool several hundred people with this, and had a few managers fuming that they weren't involved in the messaging :-)<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

\nHere's the text of the email, with actual people's names changed.<\/font>\n<\/p>\n

\n

\n\tTo: All SQL Server Full-Time Employees in Redmond<\/font>\n\t<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\n\tSince the start of the year, the SQL Engine team has been conducting a trial of the new Adopt-A-customer initiative that I'm driving. Now that the approach has proven successful, and after the go ahead from the Senior Leadership Team, we're rolling this program out to the whole SQL division. Read on to find out how you will be involved… <\/font>\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWe recognized that the team wasn't involved closely enough with the day-to-day operations of customers and so we didn't have a good enough idea of how customers are using SQL Server. Getting more involved has a number of benefits for us including better pre-release feedback, savings in support costs, and increased customer satisfaction.<\/font>\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\tStarting immediately, you have been assigned a customer to adopt through a random drawing. See below for details of how to find your assignment. If you don't like the customer you've been assigned, or there's a customer someone else has who you'd rather be assigned to, you can trade with someone, or you can ask me nicely to make a switch.<\/font>\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\tHere are some of the rules of engagement (the full description of how to go about this has been uploaded to the Engineering website): <\/font>\n\t<\/p>\n