The Word Cloud

This is an EzBloke blog; the warnings are implicit and the content used to be (think about it...); read at your peril... or at your desk, whichever is closer. This one is about two foot from the ground... if you are sitting down... two foot from the ground...

                    *** (Abandon lunch all ye who enter here) ***

Some of you may know what I do, but most of you can only guess and, for the most part, get it horribly wrong. (No, Whisks, I am not a fluffer, but thanks for the heads up...) So I’m going to share. I work, have worked for 25 years, and will in all likelihood still be working long after I’m dead, in IT. In the vast cosmos that is the term IT, I inhabit a small, spinning system that includes such heavenly bodies as Programmer, Project Manager, Team Leader, Database Analyst and, of late, ETL specialist. These are just five of the planets that drift lazily around my vast frame in tune to Ravels Bolero.

Into this calm and quiet quadrant of the universe occasionally is thrust riotous disruption and discord. Today is no exception.

First, though, I want to talk about political correctness and lament the passing of an era. It is sad, as I gaze longingly back over the years, that we are so deeply scarred that morality has to take precedence, and the risk of offence is seen as such a threat that we are to fear it lest its next foray into close proximity wipes out all but the hardiest of us dinosaurs. With this in mind you cannot possibly imagine the joy with which I found a longed for bastion of downright puerile incorrectness that just made my heart sing, my lungs ache, my eyes – and, yes, a little; my willy – weep.

The heavily sol-centric precursory passage is setting the scene for my most recent discovery; that not only does someone who works with me have a sense of humour, but that it is juvenile and completely inappropriate too. The man is a god.

He named the companies servers after planets.

(So who is way ahead of me? Can you see where this is going? No?)

Let me continue, then. So we have Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Data repositories, exchange, domain and time servers and an internet firewall. What of the seventh planet from the sun, I hear you ask? Uranus, says I? Well... if you’re going to be like that, I hear you huff...

The server, as is the planet, is pronounced “your anus”. Not, as a slim minority would have it “Yure-an-uss” or “Urr-an-uss”. To these people I would quietly melt the term down to “you’re an arse” but possibly not to their face... or their arse, for that matter. I don’t care what you think; 99.9% of the worlds population call it “your anus”, it is how it is spelled and how it is pronounced, live with it.

It is with this nom-de-plume and the inimitable fact that whilst I may have aged beyond seven, my sense of humour resolutely failed to follow that I share the following discourse;

“What’s going on?”

 “Uranus is jammed and we can’t free it up.”

“What do we do?”

“We need to get in to see what’s jammed.”

“It will be hard.”

“Agreed.”

“Would a network probe help?”

“Not really; we can see Uranus from the office, so I’m not sure a probe would tell us anything we don’t know.”

“That’s good. Last time I probed Uranus I lost my wedding ring and a watch...”

“...? Anyway... I called Bob...”
“Why Bob?”
“He had a hand in Uranus when he first started.”
“What did he say?”
“He said there isn’t a back door.”

“Then we’re buggered.”

“We’ll need to tear it down and get it up again.”

“How long will it take?”

“About an hour or so; once we have it to ourselves we should really take a look around.”

“What for?”

“I don’t think we should let everyone back in to Uranus unless it is squeaky clean.”

“Yes, but it’s a repository so everything is backing up.”

“What is?”

“Uranus.”

“No it isn’t; it’s a web serv... oh... hold on... sorry; My mistake. Uranus is fine; it’s Neptune that’s gone down on me.”

“Ahhh. Ah well, fuck it. Neptune is a web server it can wait until Monday.”

“... But it’s only Thursday...?”

                                                   *** (Exeunt) ***

I may have paraphrased some.
I may have removed some over-use of the word Uranus (chuckle)
I may even have left out the bit about not sticking my hand in Uranus because it was full of shit...
I may also have ommitted the sidebar about FaceBook and being poked in Uranus. Or that YouTube was naturally the next step on from Uranus.

And I definately never mentioned the bit about "the shit can't possibly hit the fan if Uranus is down."

S'True

Ez