Encyclopedia of Humor

If architects had to work like programmers . . .

Dear Mr. Architect,

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion.

My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of thses options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has.

I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor’s house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularily the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can’t happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I’ve given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can’t handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

Last year, my friend upgraded his GirlFriend 3.1 to GirlFriendPlus1.0 (marketing name: Fiancee1.0).

Recently he upgraded Fiancee1.0 to Wife1.0, and it’s a memory hogger! It has taken all his space; and Wife1.0 must be running before he can do anything. Although he didn’t ask for them, Wife1.0 came with Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw and BrotherInLaw. These too slow down the system and cause a slow drain on the resources and well-being of the computer.

Some features I’d like to see in the upcoming GirlFriend4.0:

1. A “Don’t remind me again” button.

2. Minimize button.

3. Shutdown feature – An install shield feature so that Girlfriend4.0 can be completely uninstalled if so desired (so you don’t lose cache and other objects).

I tried running Girlfriend 2.0 with Girlfriend 1.0 still installed; they tried using the same I/O port and conflicted. Then I tried to uninstall Girlfriend 1.0, but it didn’t have an uninstall program. I tried to uninstall it by hand, but it put files in my system directory.

Another thing that sucks–in all versions of Girlfriend that I’ve used is that it is totally “object orientated” and only supports hardware with gold plated contacts.

Bug warning
Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

At AST, another customer dutifully complied with a technician’s request that she send in a copy of a defective floppy disk. A letter from the customer arrived a few days later, along with a Xerox copy of the floppy. And at Dell, a technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and “close the door.” Asking the technician to “hold on,” the customer put the phone down and was heard walking over to shut the door to his room. The technician meant the door to his floppy drive.

The software inside the computer can be equally befuddling. A Dell customer called to say he couldn’t get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the “send” key.

Another Dell customer needed help setting up a new program, so Dell technician Gary Rock referred him to the local Egghead. “Yeah, I got me a couple friends,” the customer replied. When told Egghead was software store, the man said, “Oh! I thought you meant for me to find couple of geeks.

Not realizing how fragile computers can be, some people end up damaging parts beyond repair. A Dell customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned it, he said, filling up his tub with soap and water and soaking his keyboard for a day, and the removing all the keys and washing them individually.

Computers make some people paranoid. A Dell technician, Morgan Vergaran says he once calmed a man who became enraged because, “his computer has told him he was bad and an invalid.” Mr. Vergara patiently explained that the computer’s “bad command” and “invalid” responses shouldn’t be taken personally.

These days PC-help technicians increasingly find themselves taking on the role of amateur psychologists. Mr. Shuler, the dell technician who once worked as a psychiatric nurse, says he defused a potential domestic fight by soothingly talking a man through a computer problem after the man had screamed threats at his wife and children in the background

There are also the lonely hearts who seek out human contact, even if it happens to be a computer techie. One man from New Hampshire calls Dell every time he experiences a life crisis. He gets a technician to walk him through some contrived problem with his computer, apparently feeling uplifted by the process.

“A lot of people want reassurance,” says Mr. Shuler

Indeed, it seems that these buyers rarely refer to a manual when a phone is at hand. “If there is a book and a phone and they’re side-by-side, the phone wins time after time,” says Craig McQuilkin manager of service marketing for AST Research, Inc. in Irvine, Calif. “It’s a phenomenon of people wanting to talk to people.

And do they ever. Compaq’s help center in Houston, Texas, is inundated by some 8,000 consumer calls a day, with inquiries like this one related by technician John Wolf: “A frustrated customer called, who said her brand new Contura would not work. She said she had unpacked the unit, plugged it in, opened it up and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked, “What power switch?

Seemingly simple computer features baffle some users. So many people have called to ask where the “any” key is when “Press Any Key” flashes on the screen that Compaq is considering changing the command to “Press Return Key.

Some people can’t figure out the mouse. Tamra Eagle, and AST technical support supervisor, says one customer complained that her mouse was hard to control with the “dust cover” on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in. Dell technician Wayne Zieschan says one of his customers held the mouse and pointed it at the screen, all the while clicking madly. The customer got no response because the mouse works only if it’s moved over a flat surface.

Disk drives are another bugaboo. Compaq technician Brent Sullivan says a customer was having trouble reading word-processing files from his old diskettes. After troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the problem, Mr. Sullivan asked what else was being done with the diskette. The customer’s response: “I put a label on the diskette and rolled it into the typewriter.”

1. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.

2. Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.

3. Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs.

4. Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new bugs.

5. Repeat three times steps 3 and 4.

6. Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.

7. Users find 137 new bugs.

8. Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.

9. Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.

10. Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.

11. Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.

12. New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires a programmer to redo program from scratch.

13. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.