About
Every profession under the sun has its humorous side; even undertakers can have us merrily laughing away if we were part of their inner circle. So IT too has its lighter side. But unlike a lot of other professions, most of it is readily accessible to non-IT people. After all, there are computers all over the place. IT is an inescapable part of our working lives. Whether you’re in the mail room or in an executive office somewhere, you’re likely to be able to relate to one or more of the following: poor response times, new software that’s too difficult to use, confusing websites, software upgrades you don’t really need, software upgrades you desperately need but won’t be getting for some time, and so on and so forth.
And yet, despite this enormous ‘market potential’, what passes for IT humor is stubbornly focused on computer hardware, the internet and dumb users – the lowest common denominator of the profession. Which is not to say we don’t need such humor – we do, and some it can be very good – it’s just that there’s so much more to IT than hardware, internet and dumb user jokes. This is one of the reasons why Scott Adams made such a hit with Dilbert : his comic strips and his books (especially his first one, ‘The Dilbert Principle’) managed to elevate the discussion from computer hardware to people and the organization.
Even in the IT trade press, humor is virtually non-existent. Back in the nineties when I first started writing short columns with a humorous angle (for Computerworld and iSeries NEWS, then called NEWS 3X/400) I found that there weren’t many of us around. The IT trade press has essentially remained a staid and serious business.
Clearly, this needs to change! Hence this bi-weekly blog, which tries to capture the subtle absurdities and ironies that arise from our daily interactions with computer systems and the people who build them, spanning areas like organization and jargon to technology and applications development. Happy reading!
