A rather inhibited engineer finally splurged on a luxury cruise to the Caribbean. It was the “craziest” thing he had ever done in his life. Just as he was beginning to enjoy himself, a hurricane roared upon the huge ship, capsizing it like a child’s toy. Somehow the engineer, desperately hanging on to a life preserver, managed to wash ashore on a secluded island.

Outside of beautiful scenery, a spring-fed pool, bananas and coconuts, there was little else. He lost all hope and for hours on end, sat under the same palm tree. One day, after several months had passed, a gorgeous woman in a small rowboat appeared.

“I’m from the other side of the island,” she said. “Were you on the cruise ship, too?”

“Yes, I was, ” he answered. “But where did you get that rowboat?”

“Well, I whittled the oars from gum tree branches, wove the reinforced gunnel from palm branches, and made the keel and stern from Eucalyptus tree.”

“But, what did you use for tools?” asked the man.

“There was a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed on the south of the island. I discovered that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. Anyhow, that’s how I got the tools. But, enough of that,” she said. “Where have you been living all this time? I don’t see any shelter.”

“To be honest, I’ve just been sleeping on the beach,” he said.

“Would you like to come to my place?” the woman asked. The engineer nodded dumbly.

She expertly rowed them around to her side of the island, and tied up the boat with a handsome strand of hand-woven hemp topped with a neat back splice. They walked up a winding stone walk she had laid around a Palm tree. There stood an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white. “It’s not much, but I call it home.”

Inside, she said, “Sit down please — would you like a drink?”

“No, thanks,” said the man. “One more coconut juice and I’ll throw up!”

“It won’t be coconut juice,” the woman replied. “I have a crude still out back, so we can have authentic Pina Coladas.”

Trying to hide his amazement, the man accepted the drink, and they sat down on her couch to talk. After they had exchanged stories, the woman asked, “Tell me, have you always had a beard?”

“No,” the man replied, “I was clean shaven all of my life until I ended up on this island.”

“Well if you’d like to shave, there’s a razor upstairs in the bathroom cabinet.”

The man, no longer questioning anything, went upstairs to the bathroom and shaved with an intricate bone-and-shell device honed razor sharp. Next he showered — not even attempting to fathom a guess as to how she managed to get warm water into the bathroom — and went back downstairs. He couldn’t help but admire the masterfully carved banister as he walked.

“You look great,” said the woman. “I think I’ll go up and slip into something more comfortable.”

As she did, the man continued to sip his Pina Colada. After a short time, the woman, smelling faintly of gardenias, returned wearing a revealing gown fashioned out of pounded palm fronds.

“Tell me,” she asked, “we’ve both been out here for a very long time with no companionship. You know what I mean. Haven’t you been lonely, too…isn’t there something that you really, really miss? Something that all men and women need? Something that would be really nice to have right now!”

“Yes there is!” the man replied, shucking off his shyness. “There is something I’ve wanted to do for so long. But on this island all alone, it was just…well, it was impossible.”

“Well, it’s not impossible, any more,” the woman said.

The man, practically panting in excitement, said breathlessly: “You mean…you actually figured out some way we can CHECK OUR E-MAIL HERE!!??!!”

…..

An old farmer decided it was time to get a new rooster for his hens. The current rooster was still doing an okay job, but he was getting on in years, and the farmer figured getting a new rooster couldn’t hurt anything. So he buys a young cock from the local rooster emporium, and turns him loose in the barnyard.

Well, the old rooster sees the young one strutting around and he gets a little worried. “So, they’re trying to replace me”, thinks the old rooster. “I’ve got to do something about this.”

He walks up to the new bird and says, “So, you’re the new stud in town? I bet you really think you’re hot stuff, don’t you? Well I’m not ready for the chopping block yet, and I’ll bet I’m still the better bird. And to prove it, I challenge you to a race around that hen house over there. We’ll run around it ten times and whoever finishes first gets to have all the hens for himself.”

Well, the young rooster was a proud sort, and he definitely thought he was more than a match for the old guy. “You’re on, ” said the young rooster. “And since I know I’m so great, I’ll even give you a head start of half a lap. I’ll still win easy, ” said the young rooster.

So the two roosters go over to the hen house to start the race with all the hens gathering around to watch. The race begins and all the hens start cheering the roosters on. After the first lap, the old rooster is still maintaining his lead. After the second lap, the old guys lead has slipped a little, but he’s still hanging in there. Unfortunately, the old roosters lead continues to slip each time around, and by the fifth lap he’s just barely ahead of the young rooster.

By now, the farmer has heard all the commotion. He runs into the house, gets his shotgun, and runs out to the barnyard, figuring a fox or something is after his chickens. When he gets there, he sees the two roosters running around the hen house, with the old rooster still slightly in the lead. He immediately takes his shotgun, aims, fires, and blows the young rooster away.

As he walks away slowly, he says to himself, “Damn !!!! that’s the third gay rooster I’ve bought this month.”

…..

A young boy’s parents had paid a visit to the home of a neighbor one evening. The neighbor thought naturally, when she answered the doorbell the next morning and found the boy at the door, that his parents had forgotten something.

“Please, Mrs. Anderson,” said the boy, “may I look at your dining room rug?”

The woman was surprised but said, “Why, of course, Jon-Mark. Come right in.”

The lad gazed at the rug for several minutes. Then he turned to its owner: “It doesn’t make me sick,” he said.

…..

One day an out of work mime is visiting the zoo and attempts to earn some money as a street performer. Unfortunately, as soon as he starts to draw a crowd, a zoo keeper grabs him and drags him into his office.

The zoo keeper explains to the mime that the zoo’s most popular attraction, a gorilla has died suddenly and the keeper fears that attendance at the zoo will fall off. He offers the mime a job to dress up as the gorilla until they can get another one. The mime accepts.

So the next morning the mime puts on the gorilla suit and enters the cage before crowd comes. He discovers that it’s a great job. He can sleep all he wants, play and make fun of people and he draws bigger crowds than he ever did as a mime. However, eventually the crowds tire of him and he tires of just swinging on tires. He begins to notice that the people are paying more attention to the lion in the cage next to his. Not wanting to lose the attention of his audience, he climbs to the top of his cage, crawls across a partition, and dangles from the top to the lion’s cage. Of course, this makes the lion furious, but the crowd loves it.

At the end of the day the zoo keeper comes and gives the mime a raise for being such a good attraction.

Well, this goes on for some time, the mime keeps taunting the lion, the crowds grow larger, and his salary keeps going up. Then one terrible day when he is dangling over the furious lion he slips and falls. The mime is terrified. The lion gathers itself and prepares to pounce. The mime is so scared that he begins to run round and round the cage with the lion close behind. Finally, the mime starts screaming and yelling, “Help, Help me!”, but the lion is quick and pounces.

The mime soon finds himself flat on his back looking up at the angry lion and the lion says, “Shut up you idiot! Do you want to get us both fired?”

…..

A very timid woman went to the grocery store to buy several items. When she reached the check-out counter, the clerk discovered that the price tag was missing from her box of Tampax. (This was before the days of bar-code scanning.) So over the loudspeaker, the clerk asked for the stockboy to check the price of Tampax. This embarassed the woman to no end.

Imagine her mortification when the confused stockboy, thinking the clerk had said “thumbtacks” came back over the loudspeaker asking, “Do you mean the kind you push in with your thumb or the kind you pound in with a hammer?”

…..

A woman approached the Pearly Gates, and Saint Peter asked for her social security number. The woman told him, and Saint Peter typed on his workstation:

pearly-gates:~/petergrep 212-53-6432 /earth/human/status

The computer responded:

212-53-6432 Cindy Smith !earth naughty pearly-gates:~/peter

Saint Peter then told her she was eternally damned, and that a minivan to hell would be arriving shortly.

Cindy began to protest, “but what did I do wrong? I loved my fellow neighbor as I loved myself, I was a kind, warm, gentle person! Surely there must be a mistake!”

So, Saint Peter looked up on the files, and saw, lo and behold, that she truly was a kind, warm, gentle person … until he saw the entry for Jan 7, 1992-Earth, which read:

**DAMNABLE VIOLATION #69*** Posted irrelevant article to newsgroup.

After probing a little more, Saint Peter explained to the woman, “It seems that on January 7, 1992, you posted an article to alt.religion.computers.

This article gave no praise of Emacs, no snide remarks toward Microsoft, and not even a comment on the proper definition of ‘hacker’! In fact, the article was not even relating to computers at all, and discussed, of all things, human religion! There wasn’t even a reference to Bob or Discordianism, Zen, or the Tao of programming.

“Oh dear, this is terrible. You see, heaven is a perfect place, and we only have room for the most perfect people. Ever since we ran the T-3 line up from New Jersey, we’ve been particularly harsh on breakers of netiquette. Didn’t you read RFC-23654? The one proposing commandments 11 through 15?”

He opened up an XTerm window and searched for some files. After a few moments, the laser printer spat out a crisp sheet of paper. It read:

11: Thou shalt not flame spelling or grammar. 12: Thou shalt not have a .sig file longer than 3 lines. 13: Thou shalt not send “All fags must die” messages to 19 random groups. 14: Thou shalt not request post a frequently asked question. 15: Thou shalt not post to a group without first reading a week’s worth of posts, thereby avoiding irrelevant articles.

When she was done reading, she began to stammer, but Saint Peter stopped her, saying “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do. To register a complaint, you’ll have to send mail to We have a group of cherubim who manage such requests. But don’t send it to , or your request will be distributed to the whole mailing list. They *hate* that! In fact, there’s some discussion about making that the 16th commandment…”

At that point, a Dodge minivan drove up and came to a stop. Satan, in the form of a Microsoft salesman, stepped out. “Welcome!” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you…” Cindy, almost in a trance, stepped into the minivan and was whisked away to the netherworld, a world of COBOL, System 36s, punch cards, incompatible network standards, and irresponsible news posters. Satan turned to Cindy, and smiled. “You’ll like it here”, he said, “We have netnews, but we’ve greatly simplified it. We have only one group, it’s alt.talk.sci.comp.soc.rec.misc!”

…..

GENERATION X AND THEIR OFFICE LINGO

Blamestorming – sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed and who was responsible

Body Nazis – hard-core exercise and weight-lifting fanatics who look down on anyone who doesn’t work out obsessively

Chainsaw consultant – an outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the top brass with clean hands

Cube farm – an office filled with cubicles

Ego surfing – scanning the Net, databases, print media, and so on, looking for references to one’s own name

Elvis year – the peak year of something’s popularity — Barney the dinosaur’s Elvis year was 1993.

404 – someone who is clueless, from the World Wide Web error message “404 Not Found”, meaning the requested document couldn’t be located — Don’t bother asking him, he’s 404.

Idea hamsters – people who always seem to have their idea generators running

Mouse potato – the on-line generation’s answer to the couch potato

Ohnosecond – that minuscule fraction of time in which you realize you’ve just made a big mistake

Prairie dogging – something loud happens in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on

SITCOM – stands for Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage

Stress puppy – a person who thrives on being stressed-out and whiny

Tourists – those who take training classes just to take a vacation from their jobs — “We had three serious students in the class; the rest were tourists.”

Uninstalled – euphemism for being fired

Xerox subsidy – euphemism for swiping free photocopies from a workplace