I’m squishing your head!

Overrated. ON ERROR RESUME was much more fun.

Back when I still rode airplanes, I used to never shut my notebook off except when I was about to leave for a flight. Then I had the pleasure of watching Windows install 957 updates while the cab was honking outside.

I remember Macintosh computers from circa 1990. Even then Apple loved to just remove buttons because they hate buttons. Because it was so perfectly intuitive to drag a disc icon over to the fucking trash can icon in order to eject the floppy disc, they didn’t have a physical eject button for the floppy drive. Helpfully, they instead put the power button right where a floppy drive eject button should have been. So I was constantly turning the computer off whenever I wanted to eject a disc.

“Can’t find a better man.”

One of my “favorites” (not mentioned in the Wiki article) is that in the 1980s Trump offered to pay for the funeral of a child killed by a bear … and then of course reneged.

TBF this was all more than 5 years ago when the job interviewing process at most IT companies involved just putting a moistened finger underneath the candidate’s nostrils. Apparently the programmer job market is pretty horrific these days, although I wouldn’t know since I drive a school bus now.

How about an example from the last 40 years?

MS is waaaay too big to fail.

I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people

As a programmer, I’ve had numerous colleagues who have ended up as software engineers at MS. They were mostly either unbelievably lazy or extremely incompetent. The rest who were both ended up there as managers.

I assume this meme was meant to be pronounced like Gal Gadot’s “Kal El, NO!”?

I usually preferred male PMs, solely because my contempt for their lack of technical knowledge was never mistaken for chauvinism. Women PMs who stayed in their lane – or even better were actually technically competent – were A-OK with me.

My good PMs understood that their role was to attend meetings and create a buffer between myself (who understood what had to be done and was doing most of the work) and the higher-ups. The awful PMs were the ones who thought they were running the show and driving everything.

I used to tell my bosses that everything would take three months. I would then ensure that everything took three months, usually by fucking off for two and a half months and then blasting something out in the last two weeks.

Prostate Manipulator

I used to work for (more accurately at since I was a contractor) a large cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. Most of the people in charge of the projects I was working on (usually vice-presidents, a thoroughly overblown title there since there were hundreds of vice-presidents) were hopelessly technically incompetent and/or bordering on clinically insane. For a refreshing change of pace, I occasionally had bosses who were just soulless and amoral. None of them lasted more than a few months before they were suddenly and without warning disappeared. One day you would come in to work and their office was emptied out and they were never mentioned ever again. I’d like to think they were just fired and escorted out, but I would not be surprised to find they were executed and rendered down for the fats they contained.

“Comedic” is a better title for this than “Tragic”.

I have no idea how an engineer working in a software company could trust that thing

Because many of us are fucking morons. I had one colleague who was writing the control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Despite being way past the deadline and way over budget, the client asked him to create a special version of the software so the machine could be used with Little League teams. He decided to do his first test of this version on a field with actual Little Leaguers on it, which resulted in a 125 mph knuckleball (no spin at all so incredibly erratic in flight) a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. Which resulted in the only time in my programming career that I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between two people (my boss and the client).

When I read that shit as a kid, I thought Asimov’s laws of robotics were like natural laws, so that it was just naturally impossible for robots to behave otherwise. That never made any sense to me so I thought Asimov was just full of shit.

Limbed Lugubrious Motherfucker