6. Tech Humour and Puns

Future historians: They taught the AIs how to talk like corporate middle managers and thought this meant that AI was conscious, instead of realizing that corporate middle managers aren’t.

I’m stepping down from my position as an adult. It turns out this isn’t for me, but I appreciate the opportunity.

Software and cathedrals are much the same thing. First we build them, then we pray.

How I want tech stuff explained to me in order of preference:
1. A well written technical document.
2. A maintained wiki.
3. A README that doesn't say "TODO."
   <<omitted for brevity>>
997. A napkin diagram.
998. Spray painted on the side of a cow.
999. A video.

Fun fact: If you heat your solid state drive into a gaseous state, you get cloud storage.

Ever since I was a little boy, I knew I wanted to spend half my day logging into Microsoft Authenticator.

Rickrolling has taught us to be wary of random links more than any Cybersecurity PSA ever has.

My computer has crashed, and now all my other computers have slowed down to see what’s happening.

It’s only takes me 2.5 hours of wasting time on the Internet to do five minutes of work.

Documentation is a love letter to your future self written by someone who hates you.

I feel someone needs to start a house-call backup business where someone could pull up to your home (or business) in a car that has a big NAS box in the back, and then perform off-site backups across Ethernet for a fee. They could call it NASCAR.

If I was Voldemort I would have hidden a horcrux in HP’s documentation.

NFTs make excellent gifts. After all, they’re GIF certificates.

The first US state that any foreign developer should visit is Maine.

The goal of any software engineer is to retire without getting blamed for a major catastrophe.

I don’t use ECC memory. My software anticipates cosmic rays and use them to improve performance.

Reactions when you get from people when you say their OS is trash:
- macOS users: “You just don’t appreciate design.”
- Linux users: “You just don’t understand it.”
- Windows users: "Hmmm.... "trash" is almost a compliment."

Pro tip: If you increase your font size by 0.5pt every time you respond to someone in an email, eventually they’ll stop emailing you.

When you see a door with a push sign, you should always pull first to avoid conflicts.

What do I do? I transport large quantities of caffeine from the coffee machine to the urinal.

“Keep your circle small” is solid advice and 100% achievable. After a decade of careful pruning, mine is now down to elite weirdos, weaponized nerds, and a couple beings who are definitely not from this planet.

A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer, 0 beers, 99999999999 beers, a lizard, -1 beers, and a AS#33FfDf3@#$. The QA engineer is satisfied and leaves the bar. First customer walks into the bar and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.

Perhaps the most evil thing I’ve ever done was that time I Photoshopped Waldo out of a Where’s Waldo pic and sent it to my co-workers.

Procrastination can write 30min of code in 8 hours and 8 hours of code in 30min.

Modern software engineering is mostly convincing computers to continue talking to other computers they already used to talk to.

Future archaeologists will determine seniority in our civilization based on how many obsolete charging cables someone owned.

A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s awful.

Not to brag, but when he heard that my autobiography would be exclusive to the platform, Richard Stallman bought a Kindle.

I know of a startup that is currently making a thought-activated air freshener. It makes scents when you think about it.

The best thing about a boolean is that if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.

Earth is the 3rd planet from the Sun. So, technically every country on Earth is a 3rd-world country.

Nobody sees the 4am workouts. 
Nobody sees me meal prepping for hours every week. 
Nobody sees any of this. 
Because I don't do these things.

Before the pandemic, people used to laugh at my puns in the office all the time. But my puns have failed to garnish the same reactions since then while working remotely using Microsoft Teams. That must mean that my puns aren’t remotely funny.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

If regular expressions are so good why aren’t they called remarkable expressions?

At the young age of 5, a bear told me that I am the only person who can prevent forest fires. Why I was chosen, I’ll never know.

I have OCD and ADD. Everything has to be perfect, but not for very long.

I lied. We’re having a ska day, not a spa day. Here’s your trumpet.

I’ve come to realize that we would all have been better off if Y2K had actually ruined all the computers back in 2000.

Being an adult is basically saying “But after this week, things will slow down a bit” over and over until you die.

If anyone wants to sponsor me, I’ll be running a 0.002K tomorrow to raise awareness for laziness.

Do you remember before the Internet, when people thought that the cause of stupidity was due to lack of access to information? Yeah, it wasn’t that.

Those little cheese knives are not for serving cheese… they’re actually for defending your cheese. Trust no one.

If you wear cowboy clothes, you’re technically ranch dressing.

 Kid: Can I have a cookie?
 Me: What's the magic word?
 Kid: sudo
 Me: Very good, here you go.

If you want to have fun at work, randomly message someone on Teams with “Did you mean to send that to everyone?”

Canadians know that LLMs aren’t conscious, but we’re still nice to them anyways.

Pro tip: Stop using “Please find attached” in your emails. Use “Behold, the attachment” instead.

If you are vegan and use Arch, what do you tell people first?

Being a tech nerd, casual chit chat is not my thing. But sometimes it can be fun. For example, at a holiday get-together, I convinced some of the seniors that BDSM stands for Burgers, Drinks and Salsa Music. They are now planning on having a BDSM party for friends and family in the summer.

If you look between the Y and I keys on your keyboard, there’s something awesome.

My vacuum cleaner stopped working. So I put an Azure sticker on it, and it started sucking again.

The plural of developer is merge conflict.

Age isn’t just a number. Technically, it’s a string.

PSA: Health Canada recommends that you cut out ALL unnecessary carbs, trans fats, and US-related news.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned working in tech, it’s that there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

You can lead a programmer to a solution, but you can’t make them implement it.

Tell Marie Kondo that the reason I have so many old SUN computers in my basement is because they all SPARC joy.

“Sup losers” is a gender neutral way to address a group of people.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but it takes up three thousand times the disk space.

I don’t mean to brag, but I just memorized all of the lyrics to “Around The World” by Daft Punk in under 15 minutes.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Delacourt, but your son has tested positive for Linux.”
“Give it to me straight, Doc. How bad is it?”
“It’s terminal.”
[anguished cry]

The most common programming language is not C++, JavaScript, or Python. It’s Profanity.

Back in the 90s, your computer screamed out in pain as it connected to the Internet via a dial-up modem. This was a warning, and we did not heed it.

It’s amazing what you can achieve around the house under the threat of someone coming over.

It is easy to shoot your foot off with git, but also easy to revert to a previous foot and merge it with your current leg.

Sometimes you meet someone and you know from that first moment that you want to spend your whole life without them.

You only live once, so make sure to spend as much time as possible on your computer. You won’t have access to it when you die.

The frightening thing about AI isn’t that it thinks like humans. It’s that humans increasingly write like customer support chatbots.

I miss when software came in boxes thick enough to stop a small-calibre round.

Software engineering is 5% coding, 40% debugging, 15% coffee breaks, 30% Googling stuff, 10% staring with your colleagues at a screen.

Real programmers don’t document. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

When Linux admins need to get some fresh air, they just open a terminal window.

A backup isn’t a backup until you’ve restored from it. Until then, it’s just Schrödinger’s data.

Did I kill this plant? Or did it not have what it takes to thrive in this fast-paced environment?

Hotel California is basically a negative Yelp review with a 2-minute guitar solo.

 Look at them hackers,
 that’s the way you do it
 A used Thinkpad runnin’ BSD
 They ain’t playin’
 that’s the way you do it
 Software for nothing
 and the code is free
      —a parody of “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits

Developers will spend $300+ on a mechanical keyboard that makes a specific sound and then use it with $400+ noise cancelling headphones, just because.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station.

Whenever someone is feeling down, I always tell them to update their Microsoft Office software. That should certainly improve their Outlook.

If you watch ‘Terminator 2’ today, you’ll find that the most unrealistic part of the movie isn’t the time travel or the robots. It’s Miles Bennett Dyson - the tech executive who isn’t a narcissist and is willing to give up personal riches when he learns that trying to profit off self-aware AI will destroy the world.

Russian hackers usually store their exploits in /ussr/bin/ on Linux systems.

Me (slams laptop lid shut): That's enough Internet for today. 
Me (picks up phone): Let's see what the pocket-sized Internet is doing...

I can honestly say that I’ve never taken credit for rebooting the wrong server. We have interns to take credit for that.

I saw a great movie about databases today. I can’t wait for the SQL.

I don’t trust Matlab developers. They’re always plotting something.

You either plan to retire as a manager or live long enough to see yourself becoming a grey bearded Windows-dismissing UNIX guy.

Q: Which computer sings the best? 
A: A Dell.

Whoever said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results has obviously never had to reboot a computer.

Being a programmer and watching someone “hack” in a movie is like being a nurse and watching someone draw blood with a carrot.

It’s only a podcast if it comes from the RSS region of the web. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling audio.

Every corpse on Mt. Everest was once a highly-motivated person.

Tech startup-themed escape room:
- You're placed in a room.
- There is a wheel in the middle of the room.
- Your challenge is to leave the room without reinventing it. It works fine. It's a perfectly good wheel.
- The door is unlocked. You have 1 hour. Good luck.

The proper industry term for 2FA is MFA. This is because MFA accurately represents the phrase that goes through your mind when that window pops up.

The text emoticon for when class is over: };

The reason you don’t see spiders at school is because they learn everything on the web.

Fun fact: You can’t use Chuck Norris as your password because it’s too strong.

The CDC recommends that even if you are fully vaxxed, you still avoid attending meetings that could have been an email.

Dentist: It looks like you’ve been grinding in your sleep. Me: I appreciate that big dawg.

Code is like love. It is created with clear intentions, but it can get complicated.

Humans are still the most advanced computer. And the only ones that can be mass-produced by unskilled labour.

Steal a man’s wallet, and he will be poor for a week. Teach him how to build gaming PCs, and he will be poor his entire lifetime.

I
like
big
WORDS
and I cannot lie
you other lexicon lovers can’t deny
when a phrase walks in with a sesquipedalian spin
and polysyllables stacked sky-high

UNIX creationists believe that the world was created on January 1st, 1970 and as prophesied, will end on January 19th, 2038.

To visualize how the Internet works, imagine that you are a computer. The sewer system is the Internet. When you sit on a toilette, you are connecting your butthole to a whole network of buttholes across the whole city. Essentially, it’s a big ass network.

Question: What did Yoda say when he saw himself in 4K? Answer: HDMI.

I always enjoy asking kids what they want to be when they grow up. Mainly because I’m still looking for ideas.

Hey dude with the full backpack + hydration pack, 2 hiking sticks, crampons, and Arc’teryx heated gloves: My kid did this trail in UGGs carrying a naked Barbie. Relax.

Parents: Introduce your kids to Arch Linux and they’ll never have time to buy drugs.

Girlfriend said “Nothing would make me happier than a pair of diamond earrings”, so I got her nothing. Sometimes being a programmer sucks.

After the massive success of Untitled Project, I’m dropping Untitled Project 2.

I should buy that old diner down the road and open a sandwich shop called Ctrl+Alt+Deli.

I prefer multicast jokes. I tell it once, and everyone listening gets it.

If your significant other says that they need more space, just order them a larger SSD.

If robots were to replace programmers, clients would need to accurately describe what they want. We are safe.

Genie: I'll give you one billion dollars if you can spend 100 million dollars in one week. 
Me: OK.
Genie: But there are 3 rules: No gifting, no gambling, no throwing it away.
Me: Can I use AWS?
Genie: There are 4 rules...

Cyberpunk in 1984: Jack into the matrix, have an affair with a sexy AI, and hack with the best deck cowboys to stick it to the megacorps. Cyberpunk in 2021: Update my phone apps using McDonald’s wifi, then leave without buying any of their food.

I’ve got so many servers in my basement that I get emails asking about my cloud pricing models.

If you don’t want to take a meeting on Microsoft Teams, just tell the other person that you’re not available because you’re playing a computer game that takes up the whole screen.

Good employees are hard to find. That’s why I immediately hide once I get to work.

If you’re feeling down, just remember that you’re closer to being a millionaire than Jeff Bezos.

An SEO expert walked into a bar, pub, liquor store, brewery, alcohol, beer, whiskey, vodka.

Question: What is the predominant spiritual practice of IT Support professionals? Answer: Rebuddhism

Check out this amazing NFT of the Klingon Bird of Prey that I just bought:

If you run the “love”, “happiness” or “peace” commands in a UNIX or Linux shell, you’ll get a command not found error. But if you run the “kill” command, you’ll get an error asking you to specify what to kill. And that tells you everything you need to know about UNIX and Linux.

Nothing is more annoying than the fact that when you go to Chicago, the signs aren’t in Chicago font, and when you go to San Francisco, the signs aren’t in San Francisco font.

Pro tip: Instead of saying that you took down prod on Christmas Eve, you can instead say that “we’ve successfully implemented our first chaos engineering exercise during a time of peak system activity.”

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only Microsoft Teams will remain.

While most people enjoy puns, they can irritate some people. For those people, they inflict punitive damage.

My biggest regret in life is that I rocked on down to Electric Avenue. But I never took it higher. And it haunts me.

We nicknamed one of our co-workers “the computer”. Not because he is efficient, but because he goes to sleep if unattended for 15 min.

Difference between designers and programmers:

• Designer1: We had the same idea!
• Designer2: No…you stole my work!
• Programmer1: I stole your code.
• Programmer2: It’s not mine.

Best Wireless LAN names:

• Get off my LAN
• The LAN Before Time
• The Promised LAN
• This LAN Is My LAN This LAN is Your LAN
• LAN of Milk and Honey
• New England Clam Router
• Nacho Wifi
• No More Mister Wifi
• Wham Bam Thank You LAN
• I Believe Wi Can Fi
• That’s what she SSID
• Wu-Tang LAN
• It burns when IP
• The Dark SSID of The Force