When photos of “Jenny” the long-suffering broker’s assistant – who quit her job in style – appeared online, beleaguered workers around the world gave an inner cheer.
A series of photographs featuring Jenny and her dry-erase messages (that were supposedly emailed to her entire office), left no doubt in anyone’s mind about her true feelings towards her bad-tempered, sexist, bad-breathed boss. (See here.)
Jenny hadn’t just meekly handed in her resignation after overhearing him make comments about her, instead she gave him a piece of her mind – and the whole office a good laugh – before quitting.
…and not before outing him as a fervent Farmville player.
However, it turns out that the Angelina-Jolie-lookalike is not a wannabe broker named Jenny but an actress, Elyse Porterfield.
But Porterfield and her partners in crime at TheChive.com are just the latest in a long list of online hoaxers who have succeeded in suckering us gullible internet users.
We’ve put together another couple of our favourite here…
Kremvax: An oldie but a goodie
Kremvax – one of the first-ever internet hoaxes – fooled an audience that was a wee bit smaller than we would be used to today.
All the way back in 1984, the internet was in its infancy and the Cold War still going strong. The “internet” in those days went by the name Usenet - a precursor to the World Wide Web we know and love that finally allowed the general public to connect.
Piet Beertema, posting from a mathematical research centre, circulated a fake report one April Fool’s day telling everyone that the Russians had infiltrated Usenet and had established a site from the Kremlin; “Kremvax”. He thought this would be hilarious.
He was right.
Water on Mars
NASA got really people’s attention in 2005 when they announced that they had discovered water on Mars. We dared to wonder – might this mean there could be life on other planets?
Not quite.
NASA scientists had taken a break from their usual work of trying to piece together the secrets of existence, placed a glass of water on top of a Mars bar and taken a photo of it.
Who said scientists weren’t funny?
Microsoft Research Reclaims the Value of Pi
This was an update of a similar spoof set in1998, in which Alabama’s state legislature was reported to have had rounded the value of pi to the “Biblical value of 3.”
An executive with the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments, Lewis Shepherd, posted on his personal blog that Microsoft Research had determined the true-up value of pi to be a definitive 3.141999, or – as expressed in company literature – “Three easy payments of 1.047333.”
The Assassination of Bill Gates
Red faced journalists in South Korea were forced to eat their words in 2003 when they reported that Bill Gates had died after being shot by a gunman at a charity event in Los Angeles.
The information had been lifted form what appeared to be the CNN website – but which on closer inspection turned out to be a sophisticated spoof site, designed by the online gaming website CG-Rom.
