April fish

Two of my teammates played a pretty good prank on the rest of the team today. Last Friday, we were dominating the first half against the second-place team, but somehow found ourselves trailing 2-0 at halftime. We had a lot of injuries in the second half, which caused us to fall apart completely and we ended up losing 6-0.

Yesterday morning, one of the players sent out an email saying that he was personally acquainted with one of the players on the other team, which was how he knew the guy wasn’t registered with the league. Therefore we had not lost the game, but won it by forfeit according to the league rules. This led to numerous emails, including one from the president of the team, which assured us that he would take care of it but because he was in meetings it would have to wait until he was free. Then, this afternoon, he sent out an email explaining that while he had registered the complaint this morning, it was too late according to the league bylaws and therefore the results would stand. Unfortunately, had he only done it the day before, we would have claimed forfeit and the three points that went with it. He even quoted the relevant section of the rules to show that there was nothing we could do about it now.

Naturally, this inspired a storm of angry recriminations which got ever more heated, until finally the first player and the president sent out an email this afternoon with the subject line which translates literally as “April Fish”, but we would understand more accurately as “April Fool!”.