Sometimes, especially in my role as an IT professional and former professor, I come across milk-squirting-out-of-your-nose funny situations. You know how bad Obama is at telling jokes, that he starts laughing at his own jokes as he's delivering them? There's an old saying: "It's not a bug: it's a feature". I first heard it in a book from Lynne Markus. I think she was at UCLA at the time but also had spent time at MIT when she heard it. They were testing out.this new computer compiler (basically which translates more human-friendly computer programs to 1's and 0's computers understand. One day they discovered there was an horrific side effect if you forgot something like a terminating card in the program deck--something obviously which could happen with college novice programmers: I think something like all the computer's memory and mounted tapes got wiped out.
The college reported the issue and when they got the next update, they found the problem hadn't been fixed. (I'm paraphrasing here: I don't remember the exact page number, but it doesn't affect the joke.) Looking for an explanation, they finally found a note on page 350: "Normally you would expect to pay extra money for a fine data wiping utility like this. We include this functionally FREE OF CHARGE! And it's very fast and efficient: it works with only a few cards in your program deck!"
This cracks me up just rewriting it. But my puzzled students were looking up at me like, "The professor has lost it."
I'll give another example. Part of the problem with tech jokes is that it requires a lengthy explanation to explain why it's funny. Actually you can find humor in some very dark moments. In this case, I was working as a production DBA contractor at Chicago Park District. The client had hired a consulting group from Unisys to do an ERP upgrade project in just half the typical time. (There's a lot more to this story that angers me to this day. I have ZERO respect for Unisys or the clients.) Part of the reason I was selected for my role was my experience on before and after ERP systems as well as upgrade experience, although technically the upgrade would be done by Unisys.
The bonehead project manager was allegedly another PhD, probably the worst PM I've ever met, next to this Navy lady at Navair. Somehow this guy managed to hire the most incompetent DBA's I've ever met on a project (and that's saying a lot). The first guy left after 2 weeks. Any familiar reader of my blog knows one of my favorite Arabic proverbs: "He left us and we rejoiced; then an even more unbearable person came." The second was off-the-charts [literally] crazy. (I've written about this guy before in snippets: e.g., he sometimes walked around wearing no socks or shoes, and he once started out a Monday morning staff meeting literally pointing at the underarm sweat stains of his shirt and repeatedly saying "Stinky! Stinky! Stinky!" until one of ladies on the team told him to knock it off.)
I knew this guy was a pathological liar from the first time I heard him on the phone over lunch. He told them the first he would do is do an adclone of our environment. I don't want to swamp you with technical details here. You simply need to know Oracle did not support adclone for our (pre-upgrade) version. [Totally unnecessary. I provided completely usable clones from scratch within 3.5 hours. This idiot spent 2 weeks arguing with Oracle to backport adclone and then another week or two trying to get the city to buy third-party software with a shrinking project window. After the call, I warned my boss and the PM this guy was an incompetent; they didn't want to hear it. My boss had a simple strategy: he wanted to make sure if and when this project failed, nobody would be pointing fingers at him; he was willing to give the PM all the rope he needed to hang himself. (He made sure I noticed a stack of DBA resumes on his desk.) The whole thing was insane: their DBAs were bitching it was too cold to work in a cold server room and they wanted the city to buy software so they could work from their cozy cubes; I'm in the meeting telling the city that they need to license a copy of MS C++ in order to run Vertex (i.e., payroll), and I can't get them to cut a requisition. Technically, the PM should have been telling them that, but he was incompetent, too. There are too many incidents I could recite, like the DBA ignores a big Oracle warning not to run RapidWiz on a Windows server with Oracle installed, and they couldn't figure out why the database wouldn't come up after they rebooted the server. At one point, I wrote a 7-page, single-spaced summary of screw-ups I personally saw this guy do (and I spent little time around this guy; it's like I was in the server room working on my production boxes, and I heard the DBA's trying to figure out why their database couldn't come up. (And I edit their registry so they can start up again, and the crazy guy says he doesn't trust it because editing the registry is a no-no. He remembers that, but he'll ignore boldface warnings in Oracle documentation not to install RapidWiz on that server.)), I asked the PM why he hired the guy. He said, "I have to. His resume says that he's worked 18 years for Oracle." "As WHAT? THEIR JANITOR?" I was only half-way joking.
So now I've set things up. The city is having a training class on my Vision Demo database that morning. I go into the server to make sure everything has been set up. I find the concurrent managers (application processes) down. Odd; then I can't bring them up the usual way. Nine times out of 10 when this happens is when an incompetent DBA brings down the database before bringing down processes. So Oracle will not bring up the CM's because it thinks they're already up. So I do the usual cleanup of sticky processes; I knew that it had to be the Crazy One, but I couldn't understand why he was messing with my server.
So I see CB in some sort of desperate state. I said, "CB, did you bring down my database?" "Yes." "Why?" "Because Oracle Support told me to." Now the mystery deepened; why the hell did Oracle tell him that? I soon figure out the breakdown. CB said that he had added a system04.dbf to the system tablespace (very important Oracle set of files). He then has second thoughts; instead of adding a fourth datafile, he could have simply extended his third. I'm thinking I know what's coming, but I don't want to go there. Not even he is stupid enough to--"So I deleted the fourth datafile, and the database crashed. And it can't get back up." It turns out he's not running in archivelog mode (against my advice, and none of his backups were usable (he had forgotten or didn't know about Oracle services on Windows). It basically meant after 6 weeks they're back at ground zero.
But let's get to the tragic funny. Why the hell had he brought down my Vision Demo database? "The Oracle Support guy said to find another database with a system04.dbf file and copy it over, and your Vision Demo database had one." He paused as I listened with disbelief, not sure whether to laugh or cry at two-way gross incompetence. He then looks up at me, sincerely, and says in astonishment, "Would you believe it didn't work, Ron?"
That's when it took every fiber of self-control for me not to laugh in his face. You can't mix and match datafiles from different databases. Basically Oracle stores information in every datafile which has to be in sync with the database. If you tell this story to any other DBA, he won't believe that any DBA would do such a thing. I'm sure I knew that my first on the job 10 years earlier.
I'm sure by now 90% of my audience is thinking, "Why the heck is he bringing up an old war story about DBA's? What does that have to do with Trump?" Well, part of it has to do with shared experiences. I'm single, no dependents, no pets. I have work experience as an academic, but very few people know the issues of publish or perish, university politics.
Humor is often a very creative process, and it's difficult to describe. Ir may not even be conscious activity. Let me start with this example:
To which I posted the following ad lib: "And replaced them with his own label; tries to sell them at twice the price."
Okay, so the pop conservative portal Patriot Post is basically mocking how progressives are scrutinizing Trump's behavior while ignoring much bigger issues. In particular, mattress tags are notoriously symbols of bureaucratic/regulatory overreach.
So why does my joke work? First of all, I count on people knowing Trump owns hotels. He's always talking about negotiating purchasing orders for his hotels, how he can't find domestic suppliers, etc. Second, why cut off a tag? To replace it--with one of your own. Trump puts his name on everything--steaks, vodka, ice, men's wear, etc. He licenses his name, with minimal risk (except maybe brand dilution and/or damage to the brand, e.g., the failure of Trump University). I honestly believe most people could easily see him pitching Trump Mattresses on late night TV: "What's the next best thing to sleeping in one of my luxury hotels? What about the next best thing? Sleeping in your own bed on the only mattress good enough to meet Trump Luxury Hotel's world-class standards?" You get my drift: the cheesy hype almost writes itself.
Another recent tweet:
Ronald Guillemette @raguillem 21hTrump pays his mistresses a bonus if they tell everyone he has the biggest one they've ever seen and he has the most stamina #StartYourOwnRumor
I almost never tell "dirty jokes". So why does this work? Part of this rests on the hope that people are aware of Trump's lawyer paying hush money to ex-mistress Stormy Daniels. Trump notoriously bragged about the size of his package when Rubio went after his "small hands". Trump has also openly bragged about his extramarital affairs in his book. He additionally takes pride in his ability to make deals. So I do a little thought experiment here: if his indiscretions went public, what would he want them to say about him as a lover? And then you fit in his negotiations with the women.
Here's another tweet mocking Trump:
Ronald Guillemette @raguillem May 3North Korea is reportedly considering the release of 3 political prisoners. It looks like the "genius" of Trump's strategy of Dennis Rodman diplomacy is finally paying off.
Trump is basking of the glow of the South Korean president suggesting Trump is worthy of a Nobel Peace prize. There's the bizarre idea that Trump's "tough talk" of the nuclear destruction of North Korea has brought the recent thaw. So here, among other things, I'm belittling Trump's "achievement", noting Rodman, a former celebrity apprentice candidate, is hardly a diplomat, also suggesting Trump is taking credit for Rodman's own hardwork.
I also thought of going a different way with the tweet, making reference to Rodman's NBA background and blurring the NBA draft with military conscription, e.g., Trump announced the swap of Rodman and two future draftees to be named later for the 3 political prisoners.
I think these are far funnier than anything I've heard from the mainstream media. It helps if you're widely informed and Trump is a little too full of himself.
