[244] in Humor
HUMOR: Sure writes a mean COBOL
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Wed May 4 11:12:10 1994
From: abennett@MIT.EDU
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 04 May 94 11:09:22 EDT
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 94 18:17:34 PDT
From: ckleinja@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
----------------
San Francisco, California:
At the recent UniForum computer trade show in San
Francisco, the visiting techies rocked to the sounds of
two bands: the Beach Boys and the Talking Propellerheads.
While the Beach Boys might be a better-known band, the
Talking Propellerheads were probably better at
interfacing with the crowd. That's because they play
songs like "UNIX on the Desktop," sung to the tune of
"Message in a Bottle" by the Police: "Just an old OS,
isolating me -- oh, and I must confess better than NT -
- oh. More Windows hype than anyone can bear, buy my
code before I fall into despair -- oh!"
The Talking Propellerheads were born 13 years ago when
six salesmen at Westboro, Massachusetts-based Data
General showed up for the annual sales meeting with
pencils, tables, charts -- and guitars, keyboards and
drums. They performed "hitech" classic rock parodies,
such as "Psycho Salesrep," to the tune "Psycho Killer"
by the Talking Heads, and "Sales Man," a spoof of "Soul
Man," last popularized by the Blues Brothers. Their
fellow employees and management called for encores. The
sextet, most of them former systems engineers, took its
name from the slang for tech nerds -- "propellerheads."
Last year in Boston, the Talking Propellerheads won the
Lotus World "Battle of the Bands" fund-raiser by
outperforming groups from Lotus Development, Digital
Equipment and ComputerVision.
In "Cobol Wizard," to the music of "Pinball Wizard"
from the Who's rock opera, "Tommy," they proclaim,
"Ever since I was a young boy, I used to write Cobol.
>From mainframes down to micros, I must have done them
all. But I ain't seen nothing like him in any sales
office stall. That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure
writes a mean Cobol."
