help desk humor

By Todd Stadler · Saturday, May 17, 2003 6:14pm

It's well-known that working in the IT department has its advantages beyond simply being able to read everyone's e-mail.

Oh sure, there's the fame, the women, the fast living, the bread crumbs in the keyboards.

But there's more than that. Like supporting an operating system whose name references a year almost a decade in the past.

One of the best-kept secrets, however, is the humor that is so abundant in the IT world.

Accordingly, these are the things at work this past week that made me laugh. Or cry. Whatever.

• Nobody seems to know what to call that big box that you plug the monitor into.

  One person worried about having her CPU up on a shelf like that, while another informed me that she had put the C: drive by my desk. Had I taken them literally, I might have worried about why everyone was taking apart their equipment.

  Why not just call it a computer?

• In talking to an elder horticulturist about perhaps printing a revised edition one of our books, one of our editors received a question from him about the paperwork we had sent him. He wanted to know what "disks" were.

  "That means computer disks," said the editor. The horticulturist said he wouldn't be needing those. "Why not?" asked the editor. Because, said the horticulturist, he'd be typing the whole book on his typewriter.

  Ha ha. It's people like him that put IT folks like me out of work, so of course I'm plotting to destroy him.

• I got an e-mail from someone at work asking if I could open a zipped file for her. She couldn't open it, she explained, because she didn't have a Zip drive.

  This is the sort of stuff that makes IT folks guffaw mightily, but I imagine quite a few of you reading it will say, "What? I don't get it."

  Frankly, you people keep less-knowledgeable IT people like me employed, so keep it up. Good work.

• A different author, apparently also old and none too comfortable with handling manuscripts on a computer (where have all the young flower-growers gone?), had sent in a newspaper clipping in which somebody claimed that "a big secret in the publishing business is that most publishers do not use the original disks from writers who type on computers. They tried, but it was a conversion nightmare," and so hired people to retype the manuscripts into a computer.

  In response, one editor wrote back that "perhaps at one time, at the advent of word processing, an inexperienced publisher or two may have found it more economical to retype a manuscript than to handle an author's files on diskette (or floppies, as it was then)," but nowadays, word processing is rather indispensible.

  The only problem with the response was that it attempted to contrast floppies with diskettes, when they are the same thing.

  True, the old 5.25" floppy disks were floppier than the slightly-less-old 3.5" floppy disks. But this is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.

• Finally, can I just say how spam is changing the way I do business?

  Not so much because I am making ton$$$ of ca$$$h w*o*r*k*i*n*g from h*o*m*e, no.

  I'm thinking more about the fact that while on a professional phone call with a somewhat frank representative of an anti-spam service, the word "penis" was used without anybody caring very much.

  And isn't that just liberating? Maybe it'll just start turning up in everyday conversation now that we've read it several hundred times over in spam subject lines.

Oh, the heady, heady life of an IT person.

Maybe the Association of Information Technology Professionals can use this entry as part of their recruitment campaign materials.