Jokes instead of raises

["Allison, Nancy" <Nancy -dot- Allison -at- TFN -dot- COM>]

Esther requests some good tech writing jokes. I don't have any jokes, but I
have a true story.

At the height of the Unabomber scare,  a package arrived at a certain
Massachusetts high tech company. The package was addressed to the president
of the company, and had no return address. The package was small and dense,
containing something squarish inside. One of the Unabomber's hand-hewn
wooden containers, perhaps?

Scared, the president called the bomb squad. They took the package to the
far corner of the parking lot and painstakingly opened it.

It contained not a bomb, but a documentation set. A heavy, cumbersome, HUGE
documentation set. And a note from an irate customer, saying, "Look at all
this stuff that came pouring out when I opened my XYZ 2000 System from you
guys! This is ridiculous! Please reduce the size of your documentation!!
Please!!!"

I worked at that company within a few months or maybe a year of when it
happened. And yes, the writers were under the gun to cut out every
extraneous word, comma, and en space.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Esther Wheeler [SMTP:esther -at- GNNETTEST -dot- COM]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 1999 10:57 AM
> To:   TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject:      No more "raises," please
>
> OK, I'll play Eric.  We're never going to get an apples-to-apples
> comparison on raises on this list.  And it isn't pertinent to
> technical writing, particularly. Could you all take it off line?
>
> Now, how about some good tech writing jokes?
>
> - Esther
>
> From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=
> =
>
>
>

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=