IT Employment

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Humour at work Fun !!! Does it work ??

0 helpful
5 replies

by eujay 1 view

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

What's everyones opinion about humour at work ? Fun, laughter, the whole Monty Pythons flying circus thing.

Computers are Soooo serious. Often I find a little fun can really make the day go more quickly and can lighten up users so they can learn more and be less afraid of "The Computer man"

How does everybody else feel about this approach.

FYI here are some of the jokes I use from day to day, send out on emails etc.

http://home.earthlink.net/~eujay/eugene/jokes/joke_nav.html

HaveFun

Eujay

5 replies

by admin

We have a programmer on a contract who was at our site yesterday since there's a problem with our billing program. We were laughing our heads off at a gov BBS system still in use for major billing. We have been complaining about there being NO chioce of compression for uploading very large billings for a few years, they finally responded by adding the .zip compression scheme, which was publicised as a great responsive improvement. Too bad it is only a choice for downloading the couple of kilobyte batch acknowledgement files and won't handle any of the multi megabyte upload files! We laughed a bunch about it and used the word "grep" a lot. Later the director of the billing department told me that people were uncomfortable about us laughing at them for not being able to use the program!

It had NOTHING to do with them. It was a problem with the way the new modem was handling echo in the interface!

Anyway..... Don't laugh too hard about Compaq having a full page in their FAQ about finding the "any" key too loud either....

I love Monty Python, and "Ask JeffK" and BOFH etc. but sometimes I appear more serious than I am about computers, because it gets you in trouble to laugh too much about anything geeky or obscure unless you're in a real tech crowd.

by buffalodan

On Forward Men

Dedicated To the cube farm bosses all over

On forward men!
to the next great day
kingdoms to conquer,
dragons to slay!
{Submit you heathen,
for your life do pray!}
'tis better than,
each day more grey!!?

For the cubicle warfare,
which calls us away
doth lend itself
to the edging fray.
And to this end,
I'm frought to say...
M'Lord, M'lady,
we NEED to play!!

Dan Tomkinson

by chrisms

I find that having a laugh with the users will make them feel more comfortable with approaching the IT man, but make sure they understand your humour, as they might take sarcasm the wrong way.

by cscoville

Hey, I share an office with 3 other deskside support techs. If we can't laugh from time to time, we will die. The only rule is, if you are laughing at a user, at something that might be construed as laughing at a user, at anything potentially offensive AT ALL, CLOSE THE DOOR!!!!

by ebob

We had a person in here on contract. Great individual. Lots of laughs. Got no work done. We replaced this individual. Got the work done. Still had a few laughs. One does not need to be mutually exclusive from the other.

Also, as somebody else said, if what you're laughing about might be taken as "laughing at the user", shut the darn door! And in general, have some care about being potentially offensive.

With the actual users, I rarely use technical humour. After all, if these folks can't see how funny it is that they can't
"find the ANY key", then the humour in the fact that they don't have any paper in their printer will just escape them altogether.

This discussion is closed to new replies.