I have a confession to make about that April Fool’s Day prank tanster pulled over at OfficeTally the other day: I fell for it hook, line and sinker.

I didn’t acknowledge as much when I posted about it, but an early draft of that post was written from the gullible perspective of the April fooled. Luckily for me, I realized the possibility of Halpert-esque shenanigans at work and made some changes—not as many as you’d think, actually—before I hit that “Publish” button.

Mea culpas out of the way, I’m excited to present the following Q&A with tanster herself about the prank, which I for one thought demonstrated as well as anything how passionate and just plain humongous her following is. (The “announcement” garnered nearly 800 comments in the first 12 hours!)

So without further adieu, Ms. OfficeTally herself, tanster…

How did you come up with “Acquired by NBC” as your prank?

I had been tinkering with the idea for about a month. I wasn’t sure that I would go through with it, as OfficeTally has never pulled an April Fool’s Day prank before, and I didn’t know if I could pull it off. I’m not Jim Halpert, you know? But the deciding factor came around midnight on Monday, when NBC.com replaced their regular Office home page with a prank page done by the DMI Racine folks. On their page was a little fake announcement that OfficeTally had been acquired by NBC. That gave me my “in,” and I started to put together my post right then. I was up until past 2 a.m. working on it.
As far as that particular idea, being acquired by NBC, it seems like something that COULD happen, right? I was really careful to write the announcement in such a way that it wasn’t too over the top. Of course, there were two particular items in there that just cracked me up, and I thought for sure would expose the prank for what is was:

• “I have been in discussions with NBC about this ever since going down to Los Angeles to picket with some of The Office writers.” Why on earth would I picket with the writers on one hand, and at the same time make a deal with NBC?


• ”… comments about deleted scenes will be geo-filtered so that only U.S. Tallyheads can read them.” Yes, not only will NBC videos not be viewable outside the U.S., but comments ABOUT those videos won’t be viewable either! How ridiculous does THAT sound?

What kind of response did you expect?

I really had no idea. But I can tell you that the minute the post went live, the first few comments were all “Haha good April Fool’s joke!” and I thought, darn, this isn’t going to work! Then I realized that, because all comments are initially held in moderation, I didn’t have to let any of those comments go through. At least not right away. In fact, that became an essential part of the prank going as well as it did, because for the rest of the day, I only let through comments from people that believed the announcement was real. After a while, there were hundreds of negative comments, and chaos ensued. I was glued to my computer all day watching it happen.

A trio of pranksters: tanster, Jenna Fischer and John Krasinski.

What did you make of the responses you got, both the anger/disappointment by some and the sheer number of responses?

I was absolutely flabbergasted. By the end, this post generated more comments than the Season 4 ‘Fun Run’ premiere, and that was big. [Ed. note: 581 comments in 24 hours.] I was amazed by the emotion and passion and rage people were expressing. I had no idea how attached people were to the site, just the way it is. This is going to sound really corny, but even with all the negative comments pouring in, I felt a lot of love!

Even though you have so many connections with the show’s cast and crew, what do you think about the fact that what your readers seem to value is your independence?

I’m not sure if it’s independence they value most so much as it’s censorship they hate the most, you know? And a lot of things that were listed in my post were things that NBC would be taking away from OfficeTally.

Did you think the prank would work or was the Earl/30 Rock crossover supposed to be a dead giveaway?

LOL, as I mentioned before, no I didn’t think it would work. The MNIE/30 Rock item was originally not going to have anything to do with the OfficeTally Chat Room. It was going to say that NBC wanted me to oversee creation of a mynameisearltally.com and 30rocktally.com! Now THAT would have been a giveaway.

What was the most egregious of the changes you told people were coming?

Well, I can tell you that one of the most visited pages at OfficeTally is the spoilers page. And I knew that people would flip out to be told that there wouldn’t be any more spoilers! That was probably the biggest one. The second biggest was that the calendar would no longer be listing non-NBC cast appearances. The reaction to that surprised me, because I didn’t think many people looked at the calendar!

Was anyone from NBC or The Office in on the joke?

No one from The Office staff knew about the joke. I had asked my contacts at NBC.com to review my post and they made a few suggestions to improve the believability of the announcement.

Any feedback from cast or crew?

I received personal emails from several members of the staff, with kudos. No phone calls. I can tell you that two cast members thought for sure that the announcement was real, and were arguing with a third cast member who was convinced it was a prank. They actually argued on set over this Tuesday afternoon, while filming!

One thing—I did hear from Jenna (yesterday), she said “I wanted to let you know that you really fooled all of us with your fake announcement on April Fool’s Day. The set was abuzz with your news!”

Do you have any scoop for the remainder of the season? [Ed. note: I had to ask!]

Unfortunately, no. The Office staff is really good about keeping secrets secret.