As anyone (and that's almost everyone) who uses Facebook or Twitter knows, yesterday both services went temporarily offline due to a hacker attack. Not coincidentally, I was unusually productive during the eclipse of service, causing me to remember those halcyon days in the pre-timesuck era, when Facebook and Twitter were known as "personal business" not to be conducted at work.
Anyway, my non-Facebook (and taciturn Twitterer) friend Steve the New Guy (writer and editor for the award-winning publication Heath Plan Week) responded to my productivity with the following (not so tongue-in-cheek) press release:
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BOSTON — Aug. 7, 2009: Work productivity spiked dramatically yesterday within the Communications and Outreach division of the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program office, according to an internal departmental review conducted by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. Also on August 6, social networking sites Twitter and Facebook were offline most of the day.
Bruce Mendelsohn, Director of the Communications and Outreach office, denied there was a link between the increased output within his department and the downed Internet sites. The productivity increase was not seen in any other MIT departments, according to the study.
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It's true: The most amusing jokes contain a grain of truth.
