Humour
A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”
The man below says: “Yes, you’re in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field.”
“You must work in Information Technology,” says the balloonist.
“I do” replies the man. “How did you know?”
“Well,” says the balloonist, “everything you have told me is technically correct, but It’s of no use to anyone.”
The man below replies, “You must work in management.”
“I do” replies the balloonist, “But how’d you know?”
“Well”, says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”
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Programmer to Team Leader: “We can’t do this proposed project. **CAN NOT**. It will involve a major design change and no one in our team knows the design of this legacy system. And above that, nobody in our company knows the language in which this application has been written. So even if somebody wants to work on it, they can’t. If you ask my personal opinion, the company should never take this type of project.”
Team Leader to Project Manager: “This project will involve a design change. Currently, we don’t have any staff who has experience in this type of work. Also, the language is unfamiliar to us, so we will have to arrange for some training if we take this project. In my personal opinion, we are not ready to take on a project of this nature.”
Project Manager to Director: “This project involves a design change in the system and we don’t have much experience in that area. Also, not many people in our company are appropriately trained for it. In my personal opinion, we might be able to do the project but we would need more time than usual to complete it.”
Director to Vice President: “This project involves design re-engineering. We have some people who have worked in this area and others who know the implementation language. So they can train other people. In my personal opinion we should take this project, but with caution.”
Vice President to CEO: “This project will demonstrate to the industry our capabilities in remodeling the design of a complete legacy system. We have all the necessary skills and people to execute this project successfully. Some people have already given in-house training in this area to other staff members. In my personal opinion, we should not let this project slip by us under any circumstances.”
CEO to Client: “This is the type of project in which our company specializes. We have executed many projects of the same nature for many large clients. Trust me when I say that we are the most competent firm in the industry for doing this kind of work. It is my personal opinion that we can execute this project successfully and well within the given time frame.”
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- Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
- Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
- Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs.
- Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new bugs.
- Repeat three times steps 3 and 4.
- Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
- Users find 137 new bugs.
- Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.
- Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
- Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
- Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
- New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires a programmer to redo program from scratch.
- Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
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A programmer started to cuss,
Because getting to sleep was a fuss,
As she lay there in bed,
Looping ’round in her head,
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++.
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Project Timescales
The first half of a project takes 90% of the time.
The second half of the project takes the other 90%.
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There was this male engineer, on a cruise ship in the Caribbean for the first time. It was wonderful, the experience of his life.
A hurricane came up unexpectedly. The ship went down almost instantly.
The man found himself, he knew not how, swept up on the shore of an island. There was nothing else anywhere to be seen. No person, no supplies, nothing. The man looked around. There were some bananas and coconuts, but that was it. He was desperate, and forlorn, but decided to make the best of it. So for the next four months he ate bananas, drank coconut juice and mostly looked to the sea mightily for a ship to come to his rescue.
One day, as he was lying on the beech stroking his beard and looking for a ship, he spotted movement out of the corner of his eye. Could it be true, was it a ship? No, from around the corner of the island came this rowboat. In it was the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen, or at least seen in 4 months. She was tall, tanned, and her blond hair flowing in the sea breeze gave her an almost ethereal quality. She spotted him also as he was waving and yelling and screaming to get her attention. She rowed her boat towards him.
In disbelief, he asked, “Where did you come from? How did you get here”?
She said, “I rowed from the other side of the island. I landed on this island when my cruise ship sank.”
“Amazing”, he said, “I didn’t know anyone else had survived. How many of you are there? Where, did you get the rowboat? You must have been really lucky to have a rowboat wash-up with you?”
“It is only me”, she said, “and the rowboat didn’t wash up, nothing else did.”
“Well then”, said the man, “how did you get the rowboat?”
“I made the rowboat out of raw material that I found on the island,” replied the woman (who was a mechanical engineer). “The oars were whittled from Gum tree branches, I wove the bottom from Palm branches, and the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree”.
“But, but,” asked the man, “what about tools and hardware, how did you do that?”
“Oh, no problem,” replied the woman (who was also a geologist), “on the south side of the island there is a very unusual stratum of alluvial rock exposed.”
“I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron,” said the woman (who was also an accomplished metallurgist). “I used that for tools, and used the tools to make the hardware. But, enough of that,” she said. “Where do you live?”
At last the man was forced to confess that he had been sleeping on the beach.
“Well, let’s row over to my place,”she said. So they both got into the rowboat and left for her side of island.
The woman (who was also a bodybuilder) easily rowed them around to a wharf that led to the approach to her place. She tied up the rowboat with a beautifully woven hemp rope. They walked up a stone walk and around a Palm tree, there stood an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white (she was also a civil engineer and an architect).
“It’s not much, ” she said, “but I call it home. Sit down, please, would you like to have a drink?”
“No,” said the man, “one more coconut juice and I will puke.”
“It won’t be coconut juice,” said the woman (who was, of course, also a chemical engineer, experienced in brewing and distillation), “I have a still, how about a Pina Colada?”
Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepted, and they sat down on her couch to talk.
After a while, and they had exchanged their stories, the woman asked, “Tell me, have you always had a beard?”
“No”, the man replied, “I was clean shaven all of my life, and even on the cruise ship”.
“Well if you would like to shave, there is a man’s razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom.” So, the man, no longer questioning anything, went upstairs to the bath room. There in the cabinet was a razor made from a bone handle, two shells honed to a hollow ground edge were fastened on to its end inside of a swivel mechanism (as you’ve probably guessed, she had a degree in Industrial Design as well). The man shaved, showered and went back downstairs.
“You look great,” said the woman, “I think I will go up and slip into something more comfortable.” So she did.
And, the man continued to sip his Pina Colada. After a short time, the woman returned wearing fig leaves strategically positioned, and smelling faintly of gardenia.
“Tell me,” she said, “we have both been out here for a very long time with no companionship. You know what I mean. Have you been lonely, is there anything that you really miss? Something that all men and woman need. Something that it would be really nice to have right now?”
“Yes there is,” the man replied, as he moved closer to the woman while fixing a winsome gaze upon her, “Tell me…. Can I check my email from here?”
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“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
very long pause….
“Java.”
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A few Chuck Norris funnies
- When Chuck Norris throws exceptions, it’s across the room.
- All arrays Chuck Norris declares are of infinite size, because Chuck Norris knows no bounds.
- Chuck Norris doesn’t have disk latency because the hard drive knows to hurry the hell up.
- Chuck Norris writes code that optimizes itself.
- Chuck Norris doesn’t need garbage collection because he doesn’t call .Dispose(), he calls .DropKick().
- Chuck Norris burst the dot com bubble.
- Chuck Norris can write infinite recursion functions…and have them return.
- Chuck Norris can solve the Towers of Hanoi in one move.
- Chuck Norris finished World of Warcraft.
- Project managers never ask Chuck Norris for estimations… ever.
- Chuck Norris doesn’t use web standards as the web will conform to him.
- Chuck Norris can unit test entire applications with a single assert.
- Chuck Norris’s keyboard doesn’t have a Ctrl key because nothing controls Chuck Norris.
- Chuck Norris can access private methods.
- Chuck Norris can instantiate an abstract class.
- Chuck Norris can overflow your stack just by looking at it.
- Chuck Norris knows the last digit of PI.
- Chuck Norris can divide by zero.
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A Few Amusing Quotes
- “C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.”
Bjarne Stroustrup - “Nothing from the future quite works yet. If it did, it would be the present.”
James May - “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977 - “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943 - “I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true – I no longer know how to use my telephone.”
Bjarne Stroustrup - “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”
Edsgar Dijkstra - “If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?”
Seymour Cray (1925-1996), father of supercomputing - “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
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Feel free to add your own jokes in the comments below.
My name is David Azzopardi and I'm a software developer by profession. I have been working in the software industry for around eleven years now and I have learned a few things through my experiences.
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