Hans goes to Thailand on a business trip. When there he goes to a “gentleman’s” club seeking compliant female company.

The Mama sends a girl over. She drinks. He drinks. She sits on his lap. Hans whispers in her ear and makes a suggestion.
She screams. Slaps his face and runs off.

Mama sends another girl over. Once again after a while Hans makes a whispered suggestion. The girl screams. Jumps up horrified and runs off in tears.

The same with a third girl, a fourth girl. Whatever Hans is suggesting even her most seasoned girls balk at.

So Mama thinks that she’ll have a go with Hans. She has not done the bedroom work for some years but she is quite understanding of the demands men make.

What can Hans be suggesting that disgusts the girls so much they run screaming from the bar?

So the Mama sits on Hans’s lap. They drink. Hans gets bold and whispers in Mama’s ear the very same suggestion he has made to all the girls so far: “Can I pay in Euros?”

photo credit: alles-schlumpf

Young Paddy bought a donkey from a farmer for £100.

The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day.

However, the next day he drove up and said, ‘Sorry son, but I have some bad news. The donkey’s died.’

Paddy replied, ‘Well then just give me my money back.’

The farmer said, ‘Can’t do that. I’ve already spent it.’

Paddy said, ‘OK, then, just bring me the dead donkey.’

The farmer asked, ‘What are you going to do with him?’

Paddy said, ‘I’m going to raffle him off.’

The farmer said, ‘You can’t raffle a dead donkey!’

Paddy said, ‘Sure I can. Watch me.. I just won’t tell anybody he’s dead.’

A month later, the farmer met up with Paddy and asked, ‘What happened with that dead donkey?’

Paddy said, ‘I raffled him off.

I sold 500 tickets at two pounds apiece and made a profit of £898′

The farmer said, ‘Didn’t anyone complain?’

Paddy said, ‘Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two pounds back.’

Paddy now works for a major bank that will remain nameless …

I work as a systems administrator, and part of my job involves answering questions about computers. I generally like my job, but sometimes it gets on my nerves. When people ask me what I find so irritating, this is what I tell them:

Imagine that you are a salesperson for Ikea (substitute “furniture store” if you don’t know what “Ikea” is). You get a phone call that goes like this.

Customer: I’d like to buy a kitchen table.

You: That’s fine; we have many styles of kitchen tables, I’m sure you can find one you like.

C: I need one that’s 3 feet by 5 feet and has a butcher block top.

Y: Yes, we have a table like that. You can pick it up today.

C: OK, how can I get it back to my house?

Y: Well, it comes disassembled, so you can just put it on a roof rack. We can loan you a roof rack if you don’t have one.

C: But how do get there?

Y: We’re just off exit 25 of the Turnpike. Where are you coming from?

C: Wait, wait, you’re going way too fast for me. I have a Ford in my driveway, and the keys are in my hand. What do I do next?

And, whatever you say at this point, the response is always the same:

C: But all I want is a kitchen table! Why does it have to be so *COMPLICATED*!

Anyone?

photo credit: ehpien

We haven’t had a joke here for some time, so here’s one that some techies may be familiar with:

Tech: Computer Services Orange County this is so-and-so speaking. May I have your username please?

Female Customer: Yes I want to speak to the person in charge immediately!

Tech: Speaking. What can I do for you?

Female Customer: I want to complain about the pornographic bookmarks your company put in my web browser!

Tech: We didn’t put any pornographic bookmarks in your web browser.

Female Customer: Oh yes you did! I’m looking at them right now!

(Tech remembers the Netscape history list and grins to himself)

Tech: Where exactly are these “bookmarks” located?

Female Customer: In Netscape!

Tech: And where exactly in Netscape would that be?

Female: In that little list that comes down when you click the little down arrow!

Tech: The one right above the Net Search button?

Female Customer: Yes that one!

Tech: Miss, that’s the Netscape history list. Netscape keeps the past ten links you typed in that box. The only way to put an address in that box is for someone to physically sit at your computer and type in a web address.

Female Customer: Well I certainly didn’t type in those X rated web addresses!

Tech: Well somebody did. Who else has access to your computer, and uses the Internet?

Female Customer: Just me and my husband!

(Several seconds of silence pass … Hey! I wasn’t going to say it!)

Female Customer: …….. oh …………. OOOH! … Thank you.

(She quickly hung up)

*chuckle* funny huh?

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the

computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating, “If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they painted new lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull ove r to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.

For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought “CarNT,” but then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive — but it would only run on five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “general protect ion fault” warning light.

8. The airbag system would ask, “Are you sure?” before deploying.

9. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the antenna.

10. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

11. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

12. You’d have to press the “start” button to turn the engine off.

1. Download a piece of Web authoring software – 20 minutes.

2. Think about what you want to write on your Web page – 6 weeks.

3. Download the same piece of Web authoring software, because they have released 3 new versions since the first time you downloaded it – 20 minutes.

4. Decide to just steal some images and awards to put on your site – 1 minute.

5. Visit sites to find images and awards, find 5 of them that you like – 4 days.

6. Run setup of your Web authoring software. After it fails, download it again – 25 minutes.

7. Run setup again, boot the software, click all toolbar buttons to see what they do – 15 minutes.

8. View the source of others’ pages, steal some, change a few words here and there – 4 hours.

9. Preview your Web page using the Web Authoring software – 1 minute.

10. Try to horizontally line up two related images – 6 hours.

11. Remove one of the images – 10 seconds.

12. Set the text’s font color to the same color as your background, wonder why all your text is gone – 4 hours.

13. Download a counter from your ISP – 4 minutes.

14. Try to figure out why your counter reads “You are visitor number -16.3 E10″ – 3 hours.

15. Put 4 blank lines between two lines of text – 8 hours.

16. Fine-tune the text, then prepare to load your Web page on your ISP – 40 minutes.

17. Accidentally delete your complete web page – 1 second.

18. Recreate your web page – 2 days.

19. Try to figure out how to load your Web page onto your ISP’s server – 3 weeks.

20. Call a patient friend to find out about FTP – 30 minutes.

21. Download FTP software – 10 minutes.

22. Call your friend again – 15 minutes.

23. Upload your web page to your ISP’s server – 10 minutes.

24. Connect to your site on the web – 1 minute.

25. Repeat any and all of the previous steps – eternity.

(sung to the tune of ‘Help!’ with apologies to Lennon/McCartney)

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….”

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.

Desperately seeking technical support!

I’m currently running the latest version of Girlfriend 5.0 and having some problems. I’ve been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 for years as my primary application, and all the Girlfriend releases have always conflicted with it. I hear that DrinkingBuddies won’t crash if you minimize Girlfriend with the sound off, but since I can’t find the switch to turn it off, I just run them separately and it works OK.

Girlfriend also seems to have a problem coexisting with Golfware, often trying to abort my Golf program with some sort of timing incompatibility. I probably should have stayed with Girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance with Girlfriend 2.0.

After months of conflicts, I consulted a friend who has experience with Girlfriend 2.0. He said I probably didn’t have enough cache to run Girlfriend 2.0 and eventually it would require a Token Ring upgrade to run properly. He was right. As soon as I purged my cache, Girlfriend 2.0 uninstalled itself.

Shortly after that, I installed a Girlfriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus. After a hard drive clean up and thorough virus scan I very cautiously upgraded to Girlfriend 4.0. This time using a SCSI probe and virus protection. It worked OK for a while until I discovered Girlfriend 1.0 wasn’t completely uninstalled!

I tried to run Girlfriend 1.0 again with Girlfriend 4.0 still installed, but Girlfriend 4.0 has an unadvertised feature that automatically senses the presence of Girlfriend 1.0 and communicates with it in some way, resulting in the immediate removal of both versions!

The version I have now works pretty well, but, like all versions, there are still some problems. The Girlfriend package is written in some obscure language that I can’t understand, much less reprogram. And I’ve never liked how Girlfriend is totally ‘object-oriented.’

A year ago, a friend upgraded his version to GirlfriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate-and-Stay resident version. He discovered GirlfriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don’t upgrade to Fiance9e 1.0. So he did. But soon after that, you have to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a ‘huge resource hog.’ It has taken up all his space, so he can’t load anything else. One of the primary reasons that he upgraded to Wife is because it came bundled with FreeSex 1.0. Well, it turns out that the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSex (particularly the new Plug and Play items he wanted to try). On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything. And, although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw 1.0, which has an automatic popup feature he can’t turn off.

I told him to install Mistress 1.0, but he said that he heard that if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife, that Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before uninstalling itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won’t install anyway, due to insufficient resources. If anybody out there is able to offer technical advice…

WARNING, CAUTION, DANGER, AND BEWARE! Gullibility Virus Spreading over the Internet!

WASHINGTON, D.C.–The Institute for the Investigation of Irregular Internet Phenomena announced today that many Internet users are becoming infected by a new virus that causes them to believe without question, every groundless story, legend, and dire warning that shows up in their inbox or on their browser. The Gullibility Virus, as it is called, apparently makes people believe and forward copies of silly hoaxes relating to cookie recipes, email viruses, taxes on modems, and get-rich-quick schemes.

“These are not just readers of tabloids or people who buy lottery tickets based on fortune cookie numbers,” a spokesman said. “Most are otherwise normal people, who would laugh at the same stories if told to them by a stranger on a street corner.” However, once these same people become infected with the Gullibility Virus, they believe anything they read on the Internet.

“My immunity to tall tales and bizarre claims is all gone,” reported one weeping victim. “I believe every warning message and sick child story my friends forward to me, even though most of the messages are anonymous.”

Another victim, now in remission, added, “When I first heard about Good Times, I just accepted it without question. After all, there were dozens of other recipients on the mail header, so I thought the virus must be true.” It was a long time, the victim said, before she could stand up at a Hoaxes Anonymous meeting and state, “My name is Jane, and I’ve been hoaxed.” Now, however, she is spreading the word. “Challenge and check whatever you read,” she says.

Internet users are urged to examine themselves for symptoms of the virus, which include the following:

~ The willingness to believe improbable stories without thinking.

~ The urge to forward multiple copies of such stories to others.

~ A lack of desire to take three minutes to check to see if a story is true.

T. C. is an example of someone recently infected. He told one reporter, “I read on the Net that the major ingredient in almost all shampoos makes your hair fall out, so I’ve stopped using shampoo.” When told about the Gullibility Virus, T. C. said he would stop reading email, so that he would not become infected. Anyone with symptoms like these is urged to seek help immediately. Experts recommend that at the first feelings of gullibility, Internet users rush to their favorite search engine and look up the item tempting them to thoughtless credence. Most hoaxes, legends, and tall tales have been widely discussed and exposed by the Internet community.

Courses in critical thinking are also widely available, and there is online help from many sources, including:

Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability Symantec Anti Virus Research Center McAfee Associates Virus Hoax List Dr. Solomon’s Hoax Page The Urban Legends Web Site Urban Legends Reference Pages Datafellows Hoax Warnings

Those people who are still symptom free can help inoculate themselves against the Gullibility Virus by reading some good material on evaluating sources, such as:

Evaluating Internet Research Sources Evaluation of Information Sources Bibliography on Evaluating Internet Resources

Lastly, as a public service, Internet users can help stamp out the Gullibility Virus by sending copies of this message to anyone who forwards them a hoax.

This message is so important, we’re sending it anonymously! Forward it to all your friends right away! Don’t think about it! This is not a chain letter! This story is true! Don’t check it out! This story is so timely, there is no date on it! This story is so important, we’re using lots of exclamation points! Lots!!

For every message you forward to some unsuspecting person, the Home for the Hopelessly Gullible will donate ten cents to itself. (If you wonder how the Home will know you are forwarding these messages all over creation, you’re obviously thinking too much.)

ACT NOW! DON’T DELAY! LIMITED TIME ONLY! NOT SOLD IN ANY STORE!