 

AITA for pulling a prank on my friends?

So myself and 7 coworkers are all friends. We hang out a lot after work and on the weekends, etc. A few of us are new this year, I’ve been working here for less than a year. The way our workplace runs, our manager changes every April. Our new manager is very nice and we get along great. Last year’s manager was the same way. However, apparently in the past there have been run-ins with managers and two of my coworkers, let’s call them Tom and Steve. Tom and Steve have been at the company for 3 and 4 years, respectively. They also happened to be taking PTO for a week while the transition occurred, and we decided to pull an April Fools prank on them while they were out.

We have a group chat that we use all the time, and on April 1st none of us were particularly busy, so we decided to pull a prank on Tom and Steve. One of my coworkers sent a message in the group chat saying that we had a meeting with our new manager and it went horribly. We all jumped in and backed him up, and said that the new manager was pissed that Tom and Steve weren’t present for his first day and this new meeting. Tom replied to our messages explaining that he had requested this time off months ago and there was nothing he could do about it. He seemed pretty upset but not that worried about it. The conversation kinda stopped there for about an hour since Steve hadn’t read the messages yet. TBH, based on the reaction we were getting from Tom, I thought this was kinda a lame prank. Tom didn’t seem worried and didn’t really react. Then Steve jumped in finally, and it heated up. He used some rather spicy words to describe his feelings towards this, and after about 5 minutes of going back and forth, we got the reaction we wanted, so we told them it was an April Fools joke. Those of us in the office that day thought it turned out pretty well. Turns out, though, that Tom and Steve were pretty pissed. They messaged back saying that they were upset with us for bothering them with this while they’re trying to relax on their time off.

I guess I understand where they’re coming from, but is this really that big an issue? It’s not like our prank was something that required them to drop everything they were doing and put out a fire, we just told them the new boss was mad at them, and after a few messages we told them it was in fact a prank. I know that they’ve had bad encounters with previous managers that weren’t very nice, but I mean, it’s April Fools and I thought this was a pretty harmless prank. On top of that, the new boss is awesome, so we’re in for a good year under his leadership. Tom and Steve haven’t messaged the GC since Monday, which is unusual for them. They’re back at work now and one of my coworkers saw them this morning and said hi but they gave him the silent treatment. Reddit, AITA?