Not my holiday

I confess: I don't like April Fools' Day much.

Oh, I can enjoy the fake news stories that some sites put up. Or general silliness (National Trust promoting silly walks). But I don't like pranks. I don't like seeing people GET pranked, and I don't like being pranked myself.

Part of the problem is that I'm the kind of person who tends to focus her entire mental CPU usage on the tasks at hand - so I'll be walking down the hall, running the processes, "Need to remember to check the muffle furnace to be sure it's heating properly" "Need to e-mail librarian to see if we have any book budget left" "need to check student papers for plagiarism" etc., etc., and nowhere is there a process directing me to "watch out for trolls in the hall."

So, it's comparatively easy for someone to waylay me and if they make the issue seem just plausible enough - especially if they catch me while I am in the middle of thinking about something else- they can usually hook me.

Add in my desire to please people, and if it's a colleague or a student asking me to, I don't know, do the equivalent of carry coals to Newcastle, I may agree to something without really thinking, "Wait, does this even make sense?"

And part of my annoyance is that I really resent having my time wasted. You want to make me angry? Ask me to do something that's pointless and you don't need done. Or tell me something must be done NOW when it turns out the real deadline is a month in the future - so I scramble to reshuffle my daily schedule to accommodate you. Or call a meeting, and then show up 45 minutes late, knowing the rest of us are sitting there.

(Someone on Ravelry jokes that she "knits so I don't kill people." Well, I wouldn't put it that violently, but one of the reasons I do carry knitting is so that I'm not totally in wet-hen mode when the latecomer walks into the meeting)

I also don't like having my dignity taken from me. I probably have an over-inflated sense of my own dignity, but, like most cats I've known, I don't like appearing inadvertently undignified. (It's OK if I do it to myself, like if I wave my arms around to approximate the movement of a ciliate organism. But I don't like other people doing it to me). It's sort of: No one gets to insult me, belittle me, or make me look undignified BUT ME.

And that's actually a big point of April Fool's Day for some people - and I don't like it. I suppose part of it is that I saw too much "mean" teasing (of me, and of people I cared about) as a kid. (In my family, we didn't really "tease" that way. I know some people came from families who did. I know some people also came from families who yelled at each other all the time. I don't like yelling either because I'm not used to it). And so, when I see someone being pranked, I feel bad for them. I don't find the prank as funny as I might because I'm too fixed on the "victim."

So I'm going to have to remember to be on my alert for today, just so no one trips me up. (And no, I'm not going to play any pranks. I briefly considered doing a for-real pop quiz in the class that has Mascara Girl in it today, but, meh.)