Encyclopedia of Humor

NEW Different color from previous design
ALL NEW Parts not interchangeable with previous design
EXCLUSIVE Imported product
UNMATCHED Almost as good as the competition
DESIGNED SIMPLICITY Manufacturer’s cost cut to the bone
FOOLPROOF OPERATION No provision for adjustments
ADVANCED DESIGN The advertising agency doesn’t understand it
IT’S HERE AT LAST! Rush job; Nobody knew it was coming
FIELD-TESTED Manufacturer lacks test equipment
HIGH ACCURACY Unit on which all parts fit
DIRECT SALES ONLY Factory had big argument with distributor
YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT We finally got one that works
REVOLUTIONARY It’s different from our competitors
BREAKTHROUGH We finally figured out a way to sell it
FUTURISTIC No other reason why it looks the way it does
DISTINCTIVE A different shape and color than the others
MAINTENANCE-FREE Impossible to fix
RE-DESIGNED Previous faults corrected, we hope…
HAND-CRAFTED Assembly machines operated without gloves
PERFORMANCE PROVEN Will operate through the warranty period
MEETS ALL STANDARDS Ours, not yours
ALL SOLID-STATE Heavy as Hell!
BROADCAST QUALITY Gives a picture and produces noise
HIGH RELIABILITY We made it work long enough to ship it
SMPTE BUS COMPATIBLE When completed, will be shipped by Greyhound
NEW GENERATION Old design failed, maybe this one will work
MIL-SPEC COMPONENTS We got a good deal at a government auction
CUSTOMER SERVICE ACROSS THE COUNTRY You can return it from most airports
UNPRECEDENTED PERFORMANCE Nothing we ever had before worked THIS way
BUILT TO PRECISION TOLERANCES We finally got it to fit together
SATISFACTION GUARANTEED Manufacturer’s, upon cashing your check
MICROPROCESSOR CONTROLLED Does things we can’t explain
AEROSPACE TECHNOLOGY One of our techs was laid off by Boeing

It’s wise to remember how easily email — this wonderful technology — can be misused, sometimes unintentionally, with serious consequences.

Consider the case of the Illinois man who left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email.

Unfortunately, when typing her address, he missed one letter, and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher’s wife whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her email, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint.

At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

“Dearest Wife, Just got checked in. Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow. P.S. Sure is hot down here.”

(Sung to the tune of ‘Help!’ by The Beatles)

When I was younger and quite desperate for pay, I worked the help desk for eight hours every day. End users called me up to tell me what was wrong, And now I find, it fried my mind, I worked “the desk” too long.

“Help me if you can, my system’s down! And a reboot didn’t bring it back ’round! Should it make that awful grinding sound? Help desk pleeeeeease, please help me!”

And now my work has changed in oh so many ways, I wrangle data; I’m an MCDBA. But now and then the help desk sneaks into my dreams, I’m taking calls, I’m up the walls, I wake up with a scream.

“Help me if you can my system’s down! I read virus-laden e-mails by the pound! All my data’s one big steaming mound! Help desk PLEEEEASE, PLEASE HELP ME!”

When I was younger and quite desperate for pay, I worked the help desk for eight hours every day. But now I wish that I could travel back in time, I wouldn’t cry, if only I could leave that desk behind.

“Help me if you can my system’s down! Spilled my coffee, now my hard drive’s full of grounds! Lost my pictures filled with women bound! HELP DESK PLEEEEEEASE, PLEASE HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME! Oooooooo….”

Reaching the end of a job interview, the Human Resources Person asked the young programmer, “And what starting salary were you looking for?”

The programmer said, “In the neighborhood of $75,000 a year, depending on the benefit’s package.”

The HR Person said, “Well, what would you say to a package of 5-weeks vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, company matching retirement fund to 50% of salary, and a company car leased every 2 years – say, a red Corvette?”

The programmer sat up straight and said, “Wow!!! Are you kidding?”

And the HR Person said, “Certainly, …but you started it.”

Once upon a time, in an absolute monarchy not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you think this is?”

One advisor, an electrical engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster.”

The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?”

The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Wait ’til next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don’t just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don’t look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.

“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.

“The ham-and-cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, ‘Cook yourself.’ The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.

“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don’t want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.

“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Would-be diners won’t buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting UNIX v.8.3′ appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.

“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80586 with 16MB of memory, a 1.2GB hard disk, and a SuperVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller).”

The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and the kingdom lived happily ever after.