A few times within an hour, a week ago last Tuesday, I read notes on Twitter about a young woman who quit her job in grand fashion. Before I took the time to click on one of the links, I noticed common keywords: “Girl.” “Quits.” “Whiteboard.” And, significantly I thought, “Farmville.”

And there they were, a series of 33 photographs showing a woman named Jenny, who supposedly had used the shots to make a very public resignation from her job … all the while outing a lout at the company who spent much of his working hours goofing off.

‘Girl quits job …’

tinyurl.com/whiteboardquitter

“It’s a hoax,” I told one of my colleagues, who was inclined to go along with it. I wasn’t. For starters, the pictures looked too good: each one was crisp, clear and — especially — well lit. Amateur photographs, even those on good cameras, don’t have that consistency.

I also noticed, on a repeat scan, that the facial expressions on “Jenny,” as we were told to call her, were precise: a little exaggerated here and there, but each one hitting an emotional marker.

Finally, as Jenny listed off the transgressions of “Spencer,” the office skeet, she took delight in spelling out just how much time he spent online at particular things: four hours a week at the e-trading company Scottrade, 5.3 hours on TechCrunch and a whopping 19.7 hours on Farmville, the evidently addictive game that most people play on Facebook.

A-ha! I thought. Suddenly, it made sense. The ploy was a ruse to stir up some social media dust for Farmville. Or Scottrade … or even TechCrunch.

Well, a day later, I was — largely but not completely — vindicated. Jenny didn’t exist. She was an actress, hired by the two guys who run The Chive, the satire-friendly site that posted the pictures in the first place.

Letting the fun play out for a full 24 hours, they all came clean a day later, and wiped the proverbial dry-erase board clear.

I turned out to have been wrong about one thing. The hoax really was just for fun, and not a way to pimp a particular company (although Scottrade, for one, got a kick out of the unexpected publicity).

So, there’s one lesson from the whole dry-erase-board exercise: don’t believe everything you read online.

Another: be skeptical.

For me, a third: sometimes things are done just for fun (or to punk the media), and not as a subversive shill for a company.