Find information technology (IT), computer and Internet humor for your next presentation.
According to Andrew Carnegie, "There's little success where there's little laughter." That would seem to suggest to us that most presentations are not very successful -- and could be vastly improved by the leavening agent of humor. With that in mind we've gathered an assortment of the best IT-related humor we could find. We've got videos, jokes, cartoons, quotations, a PowerPoint section and more to jazz up your presentations and have your audience eating out of your hand. Enjoy!
Quotations and Quotables
In a presentation, there's no better way to make a point than to say something pithy and amusing. And there's definitely no easier way to do THAT than to quote something pithy and amusing that someone else has already said! We've searched the Web to find the best pages for entertaining tech-related quotations.
- "In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it." Here's a collection of Our Favorite Technology Quotations.
- "Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Computers are from hell." Guillaume & Jennifer Dargaud's Web site has a great selection of computer quotes gathered from the Internet.
- Do you know what a sniglet is? It's a descriptive term that is not in the dictionary, although perhaps it should be. And now we've got that figured out, do you know what a "seagull manager" is? (That's the exec that flies in squawking, and dumps all over everything before flying out again). For more snappy (and quotable) definitions, see Our Favorite IT Sniglets.
- DangerousLogic.com has a nice selection of sniglets in Office Jargon for the 21st Century.
- Want to really dance on the bleeding edge? Try some of the totally prohibited buzzwords from Buzzwhack.com.
- Need to explain a catastrophe? Resort to one or more of Murphy's Laws of IT.
Multimedia Section: The Videos
If a picture's worth a thousand words, these moving pics must be extremely valuable. Watch and judge for yourself!
Help Desk Humor
Funny because they're true!
- The Computer Stupidities Web site maintains a collection of Tech support humor organized by topic.
- The BOFL Archive is the blog of a sysadmin. He may be sociopathic, but was he born that way or did his job warp him for eternity? Due to the sadistic nature of the BOFL (B**stard Operator From H*LL), this site may be especially funny for anyone who's ever worked a help desk.
- Harrison's Help Desk is another very funny collection of help desk humor.
- Amy Kucharik ponders the question, "Do admins dream of electric sleep?"
- In the interests of fair play, The Chronicles of George provides a collection of humorous trouble tickets from an inept tech rep for the rest of us to laugh at.
- TSI is a tech support Web series. Sometimes all you can do is laugh.
Networking Humor
- Q: My network administrator seems distant, and doesn't want to socialize with the other workers.
A: NA are private creatures that interact better on Internet chat rooms and e-mail rather than on a more personal level. Just give your NA some space and he or she might come to you on their own. It may also be that your NA is lonely. If after a year, your NA still doesn't fit in, try hiring another one.
-- You'll find the above (and similar sage advice) in Douglas Chick's FAQ about My New Network Administrator. For more Geek fun, see the links on the left-hand side at The Network Administrator.
- RouterGod.com is a Web site dedicated to Cisco technology. Check out the celeb interview section featuring unexpectedly knowledgeable celebrities, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Paris Hilton. Highly recommended: "Fabio on IGRP;" "Alicia Silverstone on Basic ISDN configuration," "Jessica Simpson on Open source routers."
- Is your router harboring a bad, bad secret? See this interesting, informative and crucially important article: Cisco Psychic TAC Hotline: Password Recovery (Or, how to banish Satan from a Cisco 2620). Also from Router God.
- We found some very interesting IETF Networking Group RFCs. Here's a quote: "While reading this document, at various points the readers may have the urge to ask questions like, "does this make sense?" "is this feasible?" and "is the author sane?" The readers must have the ability to suppress such questions and read on. Other than this, no specific technical background is required to read this document. In certain cases (present document included), it may be REQUIRED that readers have no specific technical background."
- A good starting place is RFC 1925, The Twelve Networking Truths. Word to the wise: No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can't increase the speed of light.
- You may have heard of Broadband over Power Line? Why not try Electricity over IP (RFC 3251)? It just makes sense!
Cautionary Tales
Call this the schadenfreude section -- these stories may be worse than anything that's ever happened to you and you can bask in delicious, malicious satisfaction in the troubles of others. And if you've done things as bad yourself, well, at least you know you're not alone.
- Gather round, children, and hear the tale of the hapless Lotus developer who filled the hard drive on his high-end server with more than a million agent logs, and in less than an hour at that. Read this sad story, and many more in SearchDomino.com's True Domino Bloopers.
- Here's a blooper with a message: It's clean enough.
- There's much, much more. For example, a user's stiletto heel gets tangled up in the cord on her computer's ...um... foot pedal. Read about this and other sad tales in Welcome to the Blooper Zone.
- You can go home again, after all! Here's The Blooper Zone Revisited. Still not enough? On the theory that you can never have too much of a good thing, try the main page, True IT Bloopers.
Jokes
How can you identify an extroverted programmer? (He's the one that looks at your shoes when he's talking to you.) Here's our collection of some of the best computer joke sites:
- Best of RHF: Computer, Science and Math Jokes has a great assortment of jokes and funny stories listed by title. (Why was Stonehenge abandoned? It wasn't IBM compatible.)
- BSD.org offers an amusing list of New Computer Viruses, such as the MCI virus, which reminds you every three minutes that you're paying too much for the AT&T virus.
- David Shay's non-discriminatory Web site, Jokes about the professions of the twenty-first century, targets programmers, technicians, and engineers -- along with just about anyone else you can think of. Great ice-breakers for presentations and speeches.
- We're pretty sure you can find a use for at least some of the pages in the Google directory of Useless Pages, such as the one giving advice on how to use up lots of bandwidth.
- ComputerJokes.net has some pretty funny ones and also lets you submit your own.
- So, two strings walk into a bar... Sara Ford's blog has a nice assortment of programmer humor.
- Want to use cuss-words in a presentation, but can't find a socially acceptable way? Try a foreign language! Insultmonger.com offers a Swearsaurus, a random generator of insults in 165 languages (Warning -- Results may be politically incorrect, also possibly actionable).
Cartoons
- Dilbert naturally needs no introduction to any self-respecting geek. But here he is anyway.
- User Friendly is a great resource and a lot of fun to visit for anyone who's ever worked a help desk -- or called one. Features include the cartoon, animations, true tales of help desk woe (and archives of all these) as well as a search function to find just the right cartoon for that special topic. Enjoy!
- Want to catch up on the adventures of "Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet" or take the "Densa" quiz to see just how dumb you are? ITPRC.com's Geek Humor has links to these, and Other Fun Ways to Kill Time.
- Argon Zark chronicles the adventures of a geek being physically transported around the Web via PTP (Personal Transport Protocol).
PowerPoint Humor
There's humor about PowerPoint, and humor delivered via the popular presentation tool. Either way, though, they make excellent presentation fodder.
Name and Phrase Generators
Are you a few buzzwords short on an overdue report? Want to find a special pet name for your supervisor? These generators can help!
- The Brunching Shuttlecocks offer a nice selection of generators, including the Star Trek Title Generator, the Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator, and the Acronym Interaction, Expansion and Extrapolation Engine (AIEEE).
- Whether you're a Klingon, Ferengi, or Vulcan, here's a site where you can find your Star Trek character name.
- I'm Rabbit-ear Fairy Eyes! The Ultimate Nickname Generator will help you also create nicknames for yourself and your friends. Choose from "nice," "naughty," "rude," and "get me kicked out of school."
- Want to convert to paganism, but too busy for a vision quest? Try the Pagan Name Generator to get you started.
- This LOTR name generator lets you choose from Elven, Hobbit, Ork, Troll & etc. Loads of fun -- take it from me, Dolly Muddle-of Mickle-hallow.
- The Dialectizer translates anything into dialects like Hacker, Swedish Chef, Pig Latin and more! Also other fun things like this at Rinkworks.com
- Bored.com offers handy tools, such as an application to tell you what your phone number spells.
Who Created Linux?
SearchOpenSource.com featured a Who Wrote Linux? contest, "Who wrote Linux? I did! No, Harry did! Or was it the monkey? See some entries, below.
Last but not Least...
Here are some sites that don't fit any of our other categories that we just had to share with you anyway.
Do you have a favorite IT humor link that you think we should add? Share it with us!
24 Apr 2009