1. Log on, wait a sec, then get a frightened look on your face and scream “Oh my God! They’ve found me!” and bolt.

2. Laugh uncontrollably for about 3 minutes & then suddenly stop and look suspiciously at everyone who looks at you.

3. When your computer is turned off, complain to the monitor on duty that you can’t get the darn thing to work. After he/she’s turned it on, wait 5 minutes, turn it off again, & repeat the process for a good half hour.

4. Type frantically, often stopping to look at the person next to you evilly.

5. Before anyone else is in the lab, connect each computer to different screen than the one it’s set up with.

6. Write a program that plays the “Smurfs” theme song and play it at the highest volume possible over & over again.

7. Work normally for a while. Suddenly look amazingly startled by something on the screen and crawl underneath the desk.

8. Ask the person next to you if they know how to tap into top-secret Pentagon files.

9. Use Interactive Send to make passes at people you don’t know.

10. Make a small ritual sacrifice to the computer before you turn it on.

11. Bring a chainsaw, but don’t use it. If anyone asks why you have it, say “Just in case…” mysteriously.

12. Type on VAX for a while. Suddenly start cursing for 3 minutes at everything bad about your life. Then stop and continue typing.

13. Enter the lab, undress, and start staring at other people as if they’re crazy while typing.

14. Light candles around your terminal before starting.

15. Ask around for a spare disk. Offer $2. Keep asking until someone agrees. Then, pull a disk out of your fly and say, “Oops, I forgot.”

16. Every time you press Return and there is processing time required, pray “Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease,” and scream “YES!” when it finishes.

17. “DISK FIGHT!!!”

18. Start making out with the person at the terminal next to you (It helps if you know them, but this is also a great way to make new friends).

19. Put a straw in your mouth and put your hands in your pockets. Type by hitting the keys with the straw.

20. If you’re sitting in a swivel chair, spin around singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” whenever there is processing time required.

21. Draw a picture of a woman (or man) on a piece of paper, tape it to your monitor. Try to seduce it. Act like it hates you and then complain loudly that women (men) are worthless.

22. Try to stick a Nintendo cartridge into the 3 1/2″ disc drive, when it doesn’t work, get the supervisor.

23. When you are on an IBM, and when you turn it on, ask loudly where the smiling Apple face is when you turn on one of those.

24. Print out the complete works of Shakespeare, then when it’s all done (two days later) say that all you wanted was one line.

25. Sit and stare at the screen, biting your nails noisely. After doing this for a while, spit them out at the feet of the person next to you.

26. Stare at the screen, grind your teeth, stop, look at the person next to you. Grind some more. Repeat procedure, making sure you never provoke the person enough to let them blow up, as this releases tension, and it is far more effective to let them linger.

27. If you have long hair, take a typing break, look for split ends, cut them and deposit them on your neighbor’s keyboard as you leave.

28. Put a large, gold-framed portrait of the British Royal Family on your desk and loudly proclaim that it inspires you.

29. Come to the lab wearing several layers of socks. Remove shoes and place them on top of the monitor. Remove socks layer by layer and drape them around the monitor. Exclaim sudden haiku about the aesthetic beauty of cotton on plastic.

30. Take the keyboard and sit under the computer. Type up your paper like this. Then go to the lab supervisor and complain about the bad working conditions.

31. Laugh hysterically, shout “You will all perish in flames!!!” and continue working.

32. Bring some dry ice & make it look like your computer is smoking.

33. Assign a musical note to every key (ie. the Delete key is A Flat, the B key is F sharp, etc.). Whenever you hit a key, hum its note loudly. Write an entire paper this way.

34. Attempt to eat your computer’s mouse.

35. Borrow someone else’s keyboard by reaching over, saying “Excuse me, mind if I borrow this for a sec?”, unplugging the keyboard & taking it.

36. Bring in a bunch of magnets and have fun.

37. When doing calculations, pull out an abacus and say that sometimes the old ways are best.

38. Play Pong for hours on the most powerful computer in the lab.

39. Make a loud noise of hitting the same key over and over again until you see that your neighbor is noticing (You can hit the space bar so your fill isn’t affected). Then look at your neighbor’s keyboard. Hit his/her delete key several times, erasing an entire word. While you do this, ask: “Does *your* delete key work?” Shake your head, and resume hitting the space bar on your keyboard. Keep doing this until you’ve deleted about a page of your neighbor’s document. Then, suddenly exclaim: “Well, whaddya know? I’ve been hitting the space bar this whole time. No wonder it wasn’t deleting! Ha!” Print out your document and leave.

40. Remove your disk from the drive and hide it. Go to the lab monitor and complain that your computer ate your disk. (For special effects, put some Elmer’s Glue on or around the disk drive. Claim that the computer is drooling.)

41. Stare at the screen of the person next to you, look really puzzled, burst out laughing, and say “You did that?” loudly. Keep laughing, grab your stuff and leave, howling as you go.

42. Point at the screen. Chant in a made up language while making elaborate hand gestures for a minute or two. Press return or the mouse, then leap back and yell “COVEEEEERRRRRR!” peek up from under the table, walk back to the computer and say. “Oh, good. It worked this time,” and calmly start to type again.

43. Keep looking at invisible bugs and trying to swat them.

44. See who’s online. Send a total stranger a talk request. Talk to them like you’ve known them all your lives. Hangup before they get a chance to figure out you’re a total stranger.

45. Bring a small tape player with a tape of really absurd sound effects. Pretend it’s the computer and look really lost.

46. Pull out a pencil. Start writing on the screen. Complain that the lead doesn’t work.

47. Come into the computer lab wearing several endangered species of flowers in your hair. Smile incessantly. Type a sentence, then laugh happily, exclaim “You’re such a marvel!!”, and kiss the screen. Repeat this after every sentence. As your ecstasy mounts, also hug the keyboard. Finally, hug your neighbor, then the computer assistant, and walk out.

48. Run into the computer lab, shout “Armageddon is here!!!!!”, then calmly sit down and begin to type.

49. Quietly walk into the computer lab with a Black and Decker chainsaw, rev that baby up, and then walk up to the nearest person and say, “Give me that computer or you’ll be feeding my pet crocodile for the next week”.

50. Two words: Tesla Coil.

How can you tell if a blonde has been using a computer?

The joystick is wet and theres white out on the screen!

DANGER: new viruses discovered!:

Congressional Virus v

2.0 : Runs every program on the hard drive simultaneously, but doesn’t allow the user to accomplish anything.

Tipper Gore Virus : When you attempt to play any sound file, it pops up a warning window stating that some lyrics may be unsuitable for children.

Government Ecomomist Virus : Nothing works, but all your diagnostic software says everything is fine.

New World Order Virus : Probably harmless, but it makes a lot of people really mad just thinking about it.

Warren Commission Virus : Won’t allow you to open your files for 75 years.

David Duke Virus : Makes your screen go completely white.

Pat Buchanan Virus : Shifts all your output to the extreme right of your screen.

Texas Virus : Makes sure it’s bigger than any other file.

Adam And Eve Virus : Takes a couple of bytes out of your Apple.

Warren Beatty Virus : Constantly tries to prove it’s virility by attaching itself to younger or newer files.

Airline Virus : You’re in Dallas, but your data is in Singapore.

Freudian Virus : Your computer becomes obsessed with marrying its own motherboard.

PBS Virus : Your PC stops what it’s doing every few minutes to ask for money.

Jimmy Hoffa Virus : Nobody can find it.

Kevorkian Virus : Helps your computer shut down whenever it wants to.

Healthcare Virus : Tests your system for a day, finds nothing wrong, and sends a you a bill for $4,

500.

LAPD Virus : It claims it feels threatened by the other files on your PC and erases them in “self-defence”.

Billy Graham Virus : When you save a file, it prints, “I am saved!” to the screen.

Michael Jackson Virus : Hard to identify because it is constantly altering its appearance. This Virus won’t harm your PC, but it will trash your car.

And finally…

JokeGalore.com Virus : poses as a harmless list of funny computer Virus names! Is quickly passed from one user to all other users known via e-mail, consequently consuming all known network resources.

A language instructor was explaining to her class that French nouns, unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine. Things like ‘chalk’ or ‘pencil,’ she described, would have a gender association although in English, these words were of neutral gender.

Puzzled, one student raised his hand and asked, “What gender is a computer?”

The teacher wasn’t certain which it was, and so divided the class into two groups and asked them to decide if a computer should be masculine or feminine. One group was composed of the women in the class, and the other of men. Both groups were asked to give four reasons for their recommendation.

The group of women concluded that computers should be referred to in the masculine gender because:

1. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.

2. They have a lot of data but are still clueless.

3. They are supposed to help you solve your problems, but half the time they ARE the problem.

4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that, if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better model.

The men, on the other hand, decided that computers should definitely be referred to in the feminine gender because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic.

2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.

3. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.

4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

Through infinite myst, software reverberates

In code possess’d of invisible folly.

Wilt thou dare interface

With thy Apple Macintosh keypad

By toggling my tweaky bosom?

Alack!

Leave laserjet laughter to the laptop lover.

Behold beta beauty in a keyboard’s keen kindness.

Now yet torment thy melancholy hardware

By always vexing the amorous flame

Of thine model motherboard.

This tyrant widget conceals scuzzy games

And pleasure treasured dear:

Then kiss me.

Celestial evil’s idolatrous template within AOL

Will deceive some cybersex users

And email “cancel our service.”

Tis a rare tongue

That many maiden bugs command,

Revealing bounteous distress,

Trashing bold memory:

Click and crash gloriously.

Weep not, beauteous Microsoft!

Hereafter reboot.

Q: What do a blonde and your computer have in common?

A: You don’t know how much either of them mean to you until they go down on you.

Q: What’s the difference between a blonde and a computer?

A: You only have to punch information into a computer once!

“Hard drive” — Trying to climb a steep, muddy hill with 3 flat tires and pulling a trailer load of fertilizer.

“Keyboard” —- Place to hang your truck keys.

“Window” —— Place in the truck to hang your guns.

“Floppy” —— When you run out of Polygrip.

“Modem” ——- How you got rid of your dandelions.

“ROM” ——— Delicious when you mix it with coca cola.

“Byte” ——– First word in a kiss-off phrase.

“Reboot” —— What you do when the first pair gets covered with barnyard stuff.

“Network” —– Activity meant to provide bait for your trot line.

“Mouse” ——- Fuzzy, soft thing you stuff in your beer bottle in order to get a free case.

“LAN”——– To borrow as in, “Hey Delbert! LAN me yore truck.”

“Cursor” —— What some guys do when they are mad at their wife and/or girlfriend.

“bit” ——— A wager as in, “I bit you can’t spit that watermelon seed across the porch longways.”

“digital control” — What yore fingers do on the TV remote.

“packet” —— What you do to a suitcase or Wal-Mart bag before a trip.

Idiocy in the Computer World

When I worked for a company that had a contract with 3M, 3M had asked me to write them a memo describing why we were having problems with diskette failures. I said in the memo that the disks were failing due to head crashes. “If the customers would just clean their heads periodically, we wouldn’t have these problems,” I said in the memo. One customer responded with “What kind of shampoo do you recommend?”

An end-user hotline received a call about a bad software disk. They asked the customer to make a copy of the disk and mail it in to the hotline. A few days later, they received a letter with a mimeographed copy of the disk. Since it was a double-sided disk, both sides of the disk had been Xeroxed.

A Computer Operator says as she is lifting an RP06 disk pack from the drive: “Gee, how much does one of these weigh?”

Me: “It depends on how much data is on the disk.

The operator believed it.

I had a similar experience while working as a student operator at Michigan Tech. One particularly trying afternoon, the computer was merrily crashing for a number of reasons. After about four such spectacles, we broadcast that the computer would be down for the remainder of the afternoon. There was a resigned groan from the users and they began to file out of the Center, except for one comely young woman with wide blue eyes who wandered up to the counter and queried: “What’s wrong with the computer?”

Too tired and irritated to give her a straight answer, I looked her straight in the eye and replied: “Broken muffler belt.”

A look of deep concern wafted into her expression as she asked: “Oh, that’s bad. Can you call Midas?”

A few excerpts from the Computer Help Desk:

Caller: “What’s the name for when you’re entering data into the computer?”

HD: “Data Entry.”

Caller: “Thank you!”

Overheard in a student computer lab:

Client (raising hand and waving frantically): “The computer says ‘Enter your name and press RETURN. ‘What do I do??”

Lab Assistant: “Enter your name and press RETURN.”

Client (as if a revelation has struck): “Oh!”

486 – The average IQ needed to understand a P.C. state – of – the – art computer you can’t afford.

Obsolete – Any computer you own.

Microsecond – The time it takes for your State – of – the – art computer to become obsolete.

Syntax Error – “Hello, I want to buy a computer and money is no object.

GUI (pronounced “gooey”) – What your computer becomes after spilling your coffee on it.

Computer Chip – Any starchy food stuff consumed in mass quantities while programming.

Keyboard – The standard way to generate computer errors.

Mouse – An advanced input device to make computer errors easier to generate.

Floppy – The state of your wallet after purchasing a computer.

Hard Drive- The sales technique employed by most computer salesmen.

Portable Computer – A device invented to force business men to work at home, on vacation and on business trips.

Disk Crash – A typical computer response to any critical deadline.

Power User – Anyone who can format a disk from DOS.

System Update – A quick method of trashing ALL of your current software.