Hoax ‘Canadian PM’ rants at billg over Windows

Bill Gates was tricked into believing a mimic on the phone to him was in fact Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, according to a Globe & Mail report. That isn't exactly unusual, as a string of famous people have been conned on-air by Marc-Antoine Audette, but it seems Bill isn't particularly keen to take calls from the Prime Minister of Canada anyway.

Audette said that it'd taken him a month to get through to Gates as an April Fool stunt for radio station CKMF-FM, and it was one of the hardest of his gags to set up. Gates apparently wasn't showing much interest in showing up to the fake economic summit "Chrétien" was trying to get him to come to. Audette's co-host Sebastian Trudel shows some mild irritation over this: "It would make sense if it took a month for a reporter to get an interview with Mr. Gates ... but this is the Prime Minister of Canada," he said.

The reporter bit is not however strictly true; it depends on which reporter. Some years ago a gaggle of British journalists was flown over to Redmond to interview the Great Man, but unfortunately his plans changed while they were airborne. This resulted in an unsatisfactory cruise around the Microsoft campus in a bus for them (and no, they weren't allowed out), and then it was straight back to the UK, un-Gatesed. Note that this may not be entirely true, as we weren't there ourselves - but it ought to be.

The intended gag of the "Chrétien" phone call, incidentally, was that the PM's Win95 machine would freeze as he was speaking to Gates, and "Chrétien" could then swear about whoever it was that invented it. But Gates no doubt gets prime ministers complaining about Windows to him all the time. And anyway, it was Steve Jobs who invented Windows, right? ®