It was two years ago that we first started doing an "April Fool" story for the T-G. In 2006, I wrote a story about a Tennessee Walking Gerbil show, and then last year I wrote about celebrities protesting to change the name of Wartrace to "Peacetrace."

Everyone seems to have enjoyed the stories. Last year, in particular, I heard from people who read part of the "Peacetrace" story, then threw down the newspaper in disgust, never getting to the bottom of the story where the April Fool joke was revealed. But even the people who were fooled had a great sense of humor about it.

We take what we do here seriously, but that doesn't preclude having a small bit of carefully-controlled fun on occasion. Even national news outlets like National Public Radio have done April Fool's Day stories.

This year, I tried to think of something timely and topical and came up with a proposal to turn North Main Street into a one-way thoroughfare. I checked with the publisher to make sure it was still OK to have a little fun with the holiday, and he gave his permission.

Then, on Monday, Brian Mosely told me he had a pair of stories for the front page about Shelbyville's growth plan. I worried about this. Because one of Brian's stories mentioned the traffic on North Main Street, I was a little concerned that perhaps I shouldn't have a fake story about North Main Street sitting on the same page with a real story including that same topic.

But the North Main reference in the growth plan story was small and far down, and David Melson told me he would lay the page out so that the real story was separated from the fake one. So I decided we were safe.

I set up the web page so that the April Fool's story was easily visible, thinking that our web readers might be particularly attuned to such tomfoolery given that many web sites have April Fool's jokes of one sort or another. Google, for example, announced a new feature to its GMail service which would allow users to "back-date" their e-mails in hopes of covering their tracks.

Then, as it so often does, news happened. Just after press time, we found out that Wartrace had issued a water advisory and was urging its residents to boil their water. Brian wrote a story, which I immediately posted to the web site as "breaking news," knocking the April Fool's story down to the number two slot.

Then, I started to worry again: would people think that the Wartrace story was some kind of joke? I certainly hoped not. But it was out of my control.

It's probably a good thing that April Fool's comes only once a year.

John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. His home page is lakeneuron.com.