Google Promises Free High-Speed Wireless Via the Toilet - April Fool!

By Susan J. Campbell

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

For those of you who missed it, yesterday was your chance to play the best of the practical jokes of friends and loved ones and they aren’t allowed to get mad – only even. A select group of Silicon Valley executives thought enough of their customers to take a prank worldwide.

 

Senior executives at Google (News - Alert) Inc., a company with a market value of $143 billion, launched an April Fools’ Day prank on Sunday that included posting a link on the company’s home page that connected the visitor to a site that offered consumers free high-speed wireless Internet via their home plumbing systems.

With its eloquent code name, “Dark Porcelain,” Google claimed that its “Toilet Internet Service Provider” (TiSP) was compatible with Microsoft’s (News - Alert) new Windows Vista operating system. The company also apologized that septic tanks were incompatible with the requirements of the system.

To make the gag complete, the site included a mock press release quoting Google co-founder and president Larry Page, a step-by-step online installation manual, and a scatological selection of Frequently Asked Questions. Certain Google sites featured the company’s official logo, a multicolored “Google” that changes according to the season as well as holidays, which substituted a commode for the second “g.”

 

In a facetious and fictitious statement, Page said, "There's actually a thriving little underground community that's been studying this exact solution for a long time. And today our Toilet ISP team is pleased to be leading the way through the sewers, up out of your toilet and -- splat -- right onto your PC."

Google Vice President Marissa Mayer called TiSP a “breakthrough product, particularly for those users who, like Larry himself, do much of their best thinking in the bathroom." TiSP will be offered in three speeds: Trick, The No. 2 and Royal Flush.

 

According to Google employees, such pranks are commonplace at the Mountain View, CA-based company. Stories include employees joking about the recent injection of green dye into milk in the cafeteria and subordinate pranksters filling the vice president of engineering’s office with sand.

Eric Raymond, software developer and author of the New Hacker’s Dictionary, told the Associated Press that TiSP nailed several important tenets of hacker humor. "The leitmotif of hacker humor is precise reasoning from utterly bizarre premises, and once you're in that groove, you're absolutely fearless about going deeper," Raymond said. "We also have a tendency to deliberately zigzag between highly intellectual humor and utter slapstick. The more zigzags you can manage in a single spoof, the funnier it is."