In today’s more “green” conscious society, it’s helpful to know whether or not you’re wasting too much energy. Here’s a helpful list to see if you are:

1. A plasma screen in every room is this year’s home improvement goal.
2. You think “Energy Star” is an award for burning more electricity.
3. Your electric bill is delivered by hand-truck.
4. Your home draws so much power it has a nice, warm glow on Google Maps.
5. When you get home and turn on the lights there’s a ‘hit’ on the national power grid.
6. Your home entertainment system needs its own electric meter.
7. before starting your car, you program your SUV’s GPS to get you from gas station to gas station.
8. You paved over your herb garden for extra parking.
9. when you enter an appliance store, the first words out of your mouth are “Show me the biggest one you’ve got.”
10. You scoffed at “Cash for Clunkers” and bought a Nissan Titan to tow your SUV because it ran out of gas between stations.

Defining Computer Terms From a “Marketing” Point of View:

• All New — The software is not compatible with previous versions.
• Advanced Design — Upper management doesn’t understand it.
• Breakthrough — It nearly booted on the first try.
• New — It comes in different colors from the previous version.
• Design Simplicity — It was developed on a shoe-string budget.
• Exclusive — We’re the only ones who have the documentation.
• Field Tested — Manufacturing doesn’t have a test system.
• Foolproof Operation — All parameters are hard coded.
• Futuristic — It only runs on the next-generation supercomputer.
• High Accuracy — All the directories compare.
• It’s Here At Last — We’ve released a 26-week project in 48 weeks.
• Maintenance Free — It’s impossible to fix.
• Meets Quality Standards — It compiles without errors.
• Performer Proven — It works through beta test.
• Revolutionary — The disk drives go round and round.
• Satisfaction Guaranteed — We’ll send you another copy if it fails.
• Stock Item — We shipped it once before, and we can do it again, probably.
• Unmatched — It’s almost as good as the competition.
• Unprecedented Performance — Nothing ever ran this slow before.
• Years of Development — We finally got one to work.

An engineer dies and reports to the Pearly Gates.

St. Peter checks his dossier and says: “Ah, you’re an engineer, but you worked for a high-tech startup company and got rich. You’ve had too good of a life, so now you can’t come in here.”

So the engineer reports to the gates of hell and is let in. Pretty soon, the engineer is dissatisfied with the level of comfort in hell, and starts designing and building improvements.

After a while, they’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators. The computers are all upgraded and there are speaker wires running to every room. People get all the modern conveniences they were used to when they were alive and the engineer becomes a pretty popular guy.

One day God calls up Satan on the telephone and says with a sneer, “So, how’s it going down there in hell?”

Satan replies, “Hey, things are going great. We’ve got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators. The computers are faster than ever and we’ve got music in every room. There’s no telling what this engineer is going to come up with next.”

God replies, “What? You’ve got an engineer? That’s a mistake, he should never have gotten down there! Send him back up here, now.”

Satan shouts back, “No way! I like having an engineer on the staff, and I’m keeping him.”

God says, “Send him back up here or I’ll sue.”

Satan laughs uproariously and answers, “Yeah, right… and just where are you going to find a lawyer?”

Here’s a great example of engineers over thinking a problem.

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity.

To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and billions of dollars to develop a pen that would work.

Their research produced a pen the effectively writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 Celsius.

The Russians used a pencil.

A young Programmer and his Project Manager boarded a train headed through the mountains on their way to a business meeting.

They can find no place to sit except for two seats right across the aisle from a young woman and her grandmother. After a while, it is obvious that the young woman and the young programmer are interested in each other, because they are giving each other looks.

Soon the train passes into a tunnel and it is pitch black. There is a sound of a kiss followed by the sound of a slap.

When the train emerges from the tunnel, the four sit there without saying a word.

The grandmother is thinking to herself, “It was very brash for that young man to kiss my granddaughter, but I’m glad she slapped him.”

The Project manager is sitting there thinking, “I didn’t know the young tech was brave enough to kiss the girl, but I sure wish she hadn’t missed him — hitting me instead.”

The young woman was sitting and thinking, “I’m glad the guy kissed me, but I wish my grandmother had not slapped him!”

The young programmer sat there with a satisfied smile on his face. He thought to himself, “Life is good. How often does a guy have the chance to kiss a beautiful girl and slap his Project manager on the same day!”

1. For every function, there is an equal and opposite malfunction.
2. To err is human. To blame your computer for your mistakes is even more human; in fact it is downright natural.
3. He who laughs last probably made a back-up.
4. If at first you don’t succeed, blame your computer.
5. A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked fine.
6. The number one cause of computer problems is computer solutions.
7. The number two cause of computer problems is computer users.
8. A computer program will always do what you tell it to do, but rarely what you want it to do.
9. When computing, whatever happens, behave as though you meant it to happen.
10. When you get to the point where you really understand your computer, it’s probably obsolete.
11. The first place to look for information is in the section of the manual where you least expect to find it.
12. When the going gets tough, upgrade.
13. When you need to send an email quick, that’s when the mail server is down.

Any time you feel dumb, don’t worry.

Check out the following excerpts from a “Wall Street Journal” article by Jim Carlton. Lots of people are dumber than you.

1. Compaq is considering changing the command “Press Any Key” to “Press Return Key” because of the many calls asking where the “Any” key is.
2. A technical support rep had a caller complaining that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.
3. A Dell technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and close the door. The customer asked the tech to hold on, and was then heard putting the phone down, getting up and crossing the room to close the door to his room.
4. Another Dell customer called to say he couldn’t get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of trouble-shooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the “send” key.