Computer Jokes

The parody Twitter account 
@boredElonMusk figured that if 
Musk could cofound PayPal and also develop the Tesla electric automobile, he might invent these next:

• A TV that gets louder to compensate for when you are chewing.

• An indoor trash bin that keeps 
getting taller until someone finally decides to take the garbage out.

• Eye-tracking software that will not allow you to share a link on Twitter or Facebook until you’ve read 70 percent of the article.

“Not Waldo, Not Waldo, Not Waldo, Not Waldo, Not Waldo, Not Waldo, Not Waldo, Not Waldo, Waldo, Not Waldo.” 
—Where’s Waldo audiobook


@jasonmustian

Here’s what your e-mail address says about your computer skills:

Own domain (e.g., @joesmith.com): You’re skilled and capable.

@gmail.com:When the Internet stops working, you actually try rebooting the router before calling a family member for help.

@hotmail.com:You still think that Myspace is hip.

@yahoo.com:You send e-mail chain letters saying that Bill Gates will eat your hard drive unless you forward this message to everyone you know.

@aol.com: You phone friends to tell them about a neat website, then say into the receiver, “OK, go to … h … t … t … p … colon … slash … w … w … w … dot …”

I finally convinced my mother that it was a good idea for her to learn to text. Her first message to me? “Whereisthespacebar?”

After an enthusiastic recommendation from my wife, I began listening to the audiobook version of Frank McCourt’s  Teacher Man.

“I love it, but his writing style is so disjointed,” I complained. “He refers to characters I don’t know and introduces them a half hour later.”

My wife was as confused as I was, but I soldiered on, disoriented by the jumpy story line. It wasn’t until the end of the book that my dilemma was explained—I had set the iPod to Shuffle.

The computer in my high school classroom was acting up. After watching me struggle with it, a student explained that my hard drive had crashed. So I called IT. "Can someone look at my computer?"

I asked. "The hard drive crashed."

"We can’t just send people down on your say-so," said the specialist. "How do you know that’s the problem?"

"A student told me."

"We’ll send someone right over."

Not everyone has mastered the art of texting. Case in point:

Mom: Stop at dollar store on way home and get lunch maggots.
Me: Lunch maggots?
Mom: Baffles.
Mom: Baggies.
Mom: Ziploc lunch Baggies.
Mom: Spell-check is not helping me.
Mom: By the way, this is Dad.

"I’ll miss you, Great-Grandma," wrote my mother’s great-grandson in an e-mail he sent before shipping out to Iraq.

"I’ll miss you too, dear," she responded. "Stay safe. LOL, Great-Grandma."

Poor Mom didn’t realize that LOL doesn’t stand for "lots of love."

Scene: A bookstore

Customer: Can you help me find a book?

Me: Of course. Do you know the author or title?

Customer: Well, I was at the beach and I saw this girl reading a purple book. She looked like she was really enjoying it. I want that book.

Me: Ma’am, you’re going to have to be more specific. There are a lot of books with purple covers.

Customer: Can’t you search on your computer for purple books?

Me: Unfortunately, no.

Customer: In that case, I’ll take my business to a bookstore that has better computers.

My techie husband and I were walking in the high desert when he stopped to photograph one stunning vista after another. Overcome by the sheer beauty, he paid it his ultimate compliment: "Everywhere I look is a screen saver!"

Facebook and Formspring are two of the many social-networking sites that allow users to embarrass themselves in front of millions of friends and strangers, like these people did.

LARRY: Happy Valentine’s Day to All, especially Wendy, Heather, Lindsey, Ellen, Valerie, Isabel, and all the other wonderful women I adore.

JENNIFER: You forgot your wife.

It was my friend’s first camping trip with her husband, and they were lost. He tried all the usual tactics to determine direction—moss on the trees (there was none), direction of the sun (it was overcast), and so on. Just as she began to panic, he spotted a cabin in the distance. "This way," he said as he led her back to their camp.

"How did you do that?" my friend asked.

"Simple. In this part of the country, the satellite dishes point south."

When I worked in my school library, a very confused guy asked me for help. "The computer just started typing in Latin. I can’t understand it," he said. It turns out he was typing in italics.

After a lengthy course on improving computer skills, a teacher finally seemed to get the hang of it. In fact, he admitted in his self-evaluation, "computers have simplified and shortened my life."

Simon Cowell: This entire trip has been simply ghastly. You missed two turns, and your side-view mirrors weren’t adjusted properly. And the worst part was the singing to the radio. Just awful. You’re no longer in the driver’s seat. In fact, I’d be surprised if you returned next week—because you’d probably get lost again.

Jack Bauer: I don’t have a lot of time. You’re going to have to trust me. The country’s fate is in my hands. So please, listen to me. The Walmart is on the left, 2.6 miles up the road. Today’s the last day for the rollback prices on that wicker hamper you want, so grab it and go. Then we have some business to take care of.

The Biggest Loser trainers: Come on! So you’re lost. Are you gonna cry? Don’t you dare reach for that glove compartment. I know that’s where you hide your Twix bars. Just take a breath. Pull over. Do some stretching. Get back in. And let’s turn around and get back on track! There’s a weigh station on the right.

Playing around with my new iTouch, I decided to get directions to my son’s base from my home in Maryland. So I typed "Wahiawa, Hawaii." I got turn-by-turn directions until I hit the coast. Then I was told, "Kayak across the Pacific Ocean entering Hawaii."

Q Who’s the patron saint of e-mail?

A: St. Francis of a CC.

Trying to explain to our five-year-old daughter how much computers had changed, my husband pointed to our brand-new personal computer and told her that when he was in college, a computer with the same amount of power would have been the size of a house.

Wide-eyed, our daughter asked, “How big was the mouse?”

My boyfriend and I met online and we’d been dating for over a year. I introduced Hans to my uncle, who was fascinated by the fact that we met over the Internet. He asked Hans what kind of line he had used to pick me up.

I was preparing lunch for my granddaughter when the phone rang. “If you can answer one question,” a young man said, “you’ll win ten free dance lessons.”

Before I could tell him I was not interested, he continued. “You’ll be a lucky winner if you can tell me what Alexander Graham Bell invented.”

“I don’t know,” I replied dryly, trying to discourage him.

“What are you holding in your hand right now?” he asked excitedly.

“A bologna sandwich.”

“Congratulations!” he shrieked. “And for having such a great sense of humor…”

After we got broadband Internet, my husband decided to start paying bills online. This worked great; in fact all our bill companies accepted online payments except one—our Internet service provider.

When my printer’s type began to grow faint, I called a local repair shop, where a friendly man informed me that the printer probably needed only to be cleaned. Because the store charged $50 for such cleanings, he told me, I might be better off reading the printer’s manual and trying the job myself.

Pleasantly surprised by his candor, I asked, "Does your boss know that you discourage business?"

"Actually it’s my boss’s idea," the employee replied sheepishly. "We usually make more money on repairs if we let people try to fix things themselves first."

Learning to use a voice-recognition computer program, I was excited about the prospect of finally being able to write more accurately than I type. First I read out loud to the computer for about an hour to train it to my voice, then I opened a clean page and dictated a nursery rhyme to see the magic. 

The computer recorded: "Murry fed a little clam, its fleas was bright and slow."

I purchased a new desktop-publishing program that surprised me by containing a make-a-paper-airplane option. I decided to give it a try. After I selected the plane I wanted, the software gave me a choice of accessories available for my plane, including a stick-up tail, adjustable flaps and an AM/FM radio. Out of curiosity I chose the AM/FM radio.

The program responded with a message box stating: "Come on, be serious. These are just paper airplanes."

Our newer, high-speed computer was in the shop for repair, and my son was forced to work on our old model with the black-and-white printer.

"Mom," he complained to me one day, "this is like we’re living back in the twentieth century."

Bill Gates and the president of General Motors were having lunch. Gates boasted of the innovations his company had made. "If GM had kept up with technology the way Microsoft has, we’d all be driving $25 cars that get 1,000 m.p.g."

"I suppose that’s true," the GM exec agreed. "But would you really want your car to crash twice a day?"

The chef of the upscale restaurant I manage collided with a waiter one day and spilled coffee all over our computer. The liquid poured into the processing unit, and resulted in some dramatic crackling and popping sounds. After sopping up the mess, we gathered around the terminal as the computer was turned back on.

"Please let it work," pleaded the guilt-ridden waiter.

A waitress replied, "Should be faster than ever. That was a double espresso."

My husband and I are both in an Internet business, but he’s the one who truly lives, eats and breathes computers. I finally realized how bad it had gotten when I was scratching his back one day. "No, not there," he directed. "Scroll down."

Students at Iowa State University proved once and for all that the computer just can’t replace human calculations. They held an "IBM mixer" dance, where each student fed his vital statistics and interests into a computer and was then paired off with a member of the opposite sex who, the computer said, was most suited to him.

Imagine the chagrin of one coed who ended up with her twin brother.

A solar-powered computer wristwatch, which is programmed to tell the time and date for 125 years, has a guarantee—for two years.

A co-worker asked if I knew what to do about a computer problem that was preventing her from getting e-mail. After calling the help desk, I told my colleague that e-mail was being delayed to check for a computer virus.

"It’s a variant of the I Love You virus, only worse," I said.

"What could be worse?" my single co-worker asked wryly. "The Let’s Just Be Friends virus?"

My husband, a computer-systems trouble-shooter, rode with me in my new car one afternoon. He had been working on a customer’s computer all morning and was still tense from the session. When I stopped for a traffic light, I made sure to leave a safe distance from the stop line to keep oncoming drivers from hitting the car.

I couldn’t help but laugh when my husband impatiently waved at me to move the car forward while saying, "Scroll up, honey."

My 50-something friend Nancy and I decided to introduce her mother to the magic of the Internet. Our first move was to access the popular "Ask Jeeves" site, and we told her it could answer any question she had.

Nancy’s mother was very skeptical until Nancy said, "It’s true, Mom. Think of something to ask it."

As I sat with fingers poised over the keyboard, Nancy’s mother thought a minute, then responded, "How is Aunt Helen feeling?"

The computer in my high school classroom recently started acting up. After watching me struggle with it, one of my students took over. "Your hard drive crashed," he said.

I called the computer services office and explained, "My computer is down. The hard drive crashed."

"We can’t just send people down on your say-so. How do you know that’s the problem?"

"A student told me," I answered.

"We’ll send someone over right away."

I realized the impact of computers on my young son one evening when there was a dramatic sunset. Pointing to the western sky, David said, "I wish we could click and save that."