Take That, April Fool

Last week was home to one of my least favorite holidays: April Fool's Day. People seem to have decided that jokes about being in car accidents qualify as pranks, and the holiday has lost its elementary school appeal.

To me, it's basically just a chance for everyone to lie, and nothing makes me more mad than when businesses invent fake products in honor of the 'holiday.' ThinkGeek, one of my favorite companies, had a brilliant product included in their e-mail newsletter: the Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt. Imagine a shirt that could, with the press of a button, add background music as the soundtrack to your life! It sounded believable to me, seeing as they have shirts that display available Wi-Fi and that move in time to ambient sound.

After sending them an e-mail praising the shirt, I went off to Tennessee for a few days and thought little of it. When I went back to examine it more carefully, I discovered it was never real -- April Fool's Day had struck again.

But this story has a happy ending for all the prank-holiday haters like myself: the t-shirt received such an "overwhemling popular demand," according to the website, that they're working on turning it into a real product. Here's the blurb from their site:

"Looks like we're the fools here. The Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt was originally an April Fool's Prank... but due to overwhelming positive response and hundreds of e-mails screaming to "make the damn shirt already" we're putting this item in to production ASAP. Keep in mind our army of robotic factory monkeys are a bit slow, and it might take them some time to make the real version of this nifty product. Also although we'll try to keep the Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt as close as possible to what you see here, the final version might deviate slightly in appearance, features or price. Capiche?"

You may have fooled me, ThinkGeek, but I'll have the last laugh. Power to the [geek] people!