AOL employees, apparently, have not lost their gallows humor in the face of what most in the industry now believe are impending layoffs. For one thing, some have taken to referring to CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant as "Smithers and Burns," the curiously close assistant-and-boss couple from "The Simpsons." But also, according to one tipster, they're volunteering to tell people, falsely, that they've been laid off — a prank so successful that it may have generated the rumors of layoffs that reached our ears late last night. How the prank supposedly went down, after the jump.

I heard that some people that work there decided to play a joke and see how far it could go. So they told a few people that a few middle managers that would be fairly well known within AOL were let go and those people were also in on it, so when they were asked if it was true yesterday, they said yep. This morning they apologized to at least one person for playing the joke. No one else I know has heard of anyone getting laid off today.. so I am thinking that the rumor stemmed from this joke.

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