IBM shows off its sense of humor in not-so-funny letter leak
- Reference: 1692772268
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/08/23/ibm_internal_letter_joke_leak/
- Source link:
The Register brings you this important news after discovering three internal letters announcing the cancellation of products that seem not to exist other than to display a fondness for telling "Dad jokes" – weak and predictable puns delivered by middle-aged men in the utterly unfounded belief they represent comedy gold.
One letter references IBM's Guardium data security suite, and reports the withdrawal of a service named "Guardium of the Galaxy."
[1]
Rimshot!
[2]
[3]
The letter adds: "This is for information gathering only and is not an actual offering."
Also withdrawn from sale and support is a fictional software product called "SOARing right into a brick wall." A mock IBM offering called "CPaking It In, IAM Done for the Day" has also been dispatched to the digital dustbin.
[4]
IBM's Dad jokes – Click to enlarge
Comedy convention suggests that any joke that needs an explanation can't be funny, and explaining a funny joke immediately renders it not so. But just in case in case IBM's japes are too sophisticated:
The Guardium gag references the Marvel film franchise, Guardians of the Galaxy . Suggesting a security suite is a guardian is, of course, beyond hilarious.
The acronym SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response, and nobody wants deployment of such software stacks to hit a literal or metaphorical wall. Such mischief!
"Packing it in" is a British idiom for concluding a day of work. CP is a hypervisor and machine resource manager for IBM's Z environment. IAM is an acronym for Identity and Access Management. IBM's joke is therefore a triple zinger that will doubtless be taught in comedy schools for generations to come.
On a more serious note, at the time of writing these Dad jokes were visible to anyone with an IBM account. The Reg found them thanks to an email alert from an automated website-scanning tool we employ to dig up product bulletins that vendors place on obscure corners of their websites.
[5]IBM == Insecure Business Machines: No-auth remote root exec exploit in Data Risk Manager drops after Big Blue snubs bug report
[6]IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'
[7]There's that phrase again: JP Morgan CIO told Autonomy's first HP boss it was 'a shit show'
[8]George Clooney of IT: Dribbling disaster and damp disk warnings scare the life out of innocent user
While the content of the letters is seemingly intended for IBM staff only, Big Blue's customers that rely on the venerable firm to care for their important data might perhaps wish to ask how this silliness made it into view.
Our automated tool today notified us the letters have been deleted. But if IBM's content management systems are leaking more than lame jokes, that would be no laughing matter. ®
Get our [9]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZOXYw9U0D4IbQ-6EyPeSCQAAA4o&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZOXYw9U0D4IbQ-6EyPeSCQAAA4o&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2023/08/22/screenshot_ibm_internal_letters_dad_jokes.jpg
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/21/ibm_security_vulnerabilities/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2018/06/28/ibm_chief_rometty_texas_staff/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2019/06/21/autonomy_jp_morgan_cio_customer_evidence/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/23/on_call/
[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
IBM: Ha ha we really hate old people who know what they're doing! So we have to go with cheap memes and hope we can be like the Wendy's Twxttxr account!
explaining a funny joke immediately renders it not so.
1. as a low-paid, foreign-state agent, I am, nevertheless, emminently grateful for your disclosure. Every little helps, etc.
2. The story appears vaguely related to my resource pack item No Пе/Фонд/25236-4Д, aka 'The funnniest joke in the world', but I can't (yet) find a direct link, will report.
p.s. Are you communicating with me directly? I'm open to offers of re-employment!
Most established companies have variations on this.
In fact, you may remember the IBM "Mouse Balls" memo from 1988.
If you go back a trifle further, you may remember the DEC memo allowing as to how the Brightness Control Knob was not intended to affect the users.
There are a ton of them out there, all from actual companies, many on actual letterhead, with real names and positions/titles and even telephone numbers and part numbers. They look official, but are actually just the idle musings of bored office staff. They are usually intended for distribution within the local office, but somehow manage to get more widely distributed ... Originally these things were put together by folks who did very early desktop publishing, or people with access to their equipment, and then mimeographed. The widespread use of desktop computers and copiers made it a lot easier, and then use of email made it even easier.
On the early days, the mimeographed or xeroxed copies would then again be xeroxed, and those copies copied again, etc. until you had copies circulating that were 9th or 10th generation and so full of noise as to be almost unrecognizable. This is one thing that the digital copy has fixed ...
Fun times. Or not, depending on your perspective.
Re: Most established companies have variations on this.
Write only memory, the bitbucket, a random IPL setting to save the ops the work of restarting the wrong machine (that one may have been internal though).
Fools' Guild?
《IBM's joke is therefore a triple zinger that will doubtless be taught in comedy schools for generations to come.》
Presumably added to the syllabus of Terry Pratchett's Discworld's "The Guild of Fools and Joculators and College of Clowns"
Pratchett would have the ranks of Foolery (Degrees of Cowning) as:
Muggins
Gull
Dupe
Butt
Fool (Upon achieving this rank, a student gets his trousers filled with official whitewash)
Tomfool
Stupid Fool
Arch Fool
Complete Fool
We would appear to live in an age graced with a surfeit of high achieving graduates from this Guild.
[1]https://wiki.lspace.org/Fools'_Guild
[1] https://wiki.lspace.org/Fools%27_Guild
Really?
"Packing it in" is a British idiom for concluding a day of work."
As a Brit, I've NEVER used or heard it in that context. I've only ever heard it as "I'm giving it up completely"
Re: Really?
I totally agree with IGotOut, although there are several nuanced uses.
Such as "Pack it in" said to someone to tell them to stop what they're doing (I'm sure I heard Reagan and Carter say this frequently in "The Sweeny")
Or "I'm packing this job in" meaning that you're going to change what you do for a living.
Re: Really?
'Packing it in for the day' is legit though.
Re: Really?
El Reg is continuing its USAzian journey, giving sloppy translations of whacky British usage.
Re: Really?
Speaking as a North Country girl, many is the time I would hear weary mothers on the bus shouting at their misbehaving progeny "Pack it in, our Wayne or I'll get yer Dad to leather you". Such tender maternal care! This demi-paradise! This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings! Sigh ... makes you proud to be ... half-Welsh
At list some humor fans
Editors here had The Register liked it well enough to publish it. Can't say that I agree with their decision.
You don't have to be from IBM or middle-aged
" weak and predictable puns delivered by middle-aged men in the utterly unfounded belief they represent comedy gold "
Middle aged male IBM-ers are far from being the only perpetrators. [1]All the 'top 10' jokes at the Edinburgh Fringe are of much the same standard, the winner being " I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah ". We used to just groan at quips like these when found in cheap Christmas crackers -- now they win prizes. And actually, the IBM quips are less glaringly obvious than the Edinburgh set.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2023/aug/22/comedian-lorna-rose-treen-funniest-joke-fringe
Re: You don't have to be from IBM or middle-aged
> We used to just groan at quips like these when found in cheap Christmas crackers -- now they win prizes
The Fringe winners hope to Carry On and win the new prize at the Cannes Comedy Festival, the coveted Palmes Dork.
Re: You don't have to be from IBM or middle-aged
In fact, as far as I can tell, there are only two marginally non-awful jokes on that list.
Someone was on the radio the other day (or maybe it was the BBC News website) moaning that the way this "competition" is run is that comedians - or more likely their publicists - submit the jokes a couple of weeks ahead of the festival itself and they are judged "offline" as it were. This favours artists who script their entire performance and disadvantages those who are better at reacting to events on-the-fly or ad-libbing. It also disadvantages new comedians who are not familiar with the way things work, and especially those without publicists to work for them.
The other thing the competition is for, and arguably what it is really for, is not to help up-and-coming comedians, it's to get the name of the sponsor onto all the news websites, newspapers and TV and radio "and finally" segments.
M.
IBM gave the PowerPC chip an assembly language instruction Enforce In-order Execution of I/O .
The Assembler directive is EIEIO .
And there was me thinking ....
.... that there weren't any middle-aged men left at IBM! I thought they'd all been offered the opportunity to "excel in a different environment"
Re: And there was me thinking ....
Which is why all these products are being retracted: no one left to support them.
"While the content of the letters is seemingly intended for IBM staff only, Big Blue's customers that rely on the venerable firm to care for their important data might perhaps wish to ask how this silliness made it into view."
Suggesting that the only thing that has less of a sense of humour than IBM is IBM customers.
Well, IBM probably bill extra for delivering service with a smile.
Dad Jokes
Surely the joy of dad jokes is that both parties to "the joke" are aware that they are experiencing/delivering the worst of the genre.
Re: Dad Jokes
Not sure about that. I had occasion to fit a radio mic to someone at work the other day. I was met with:
How many sound engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
One-two, one-two, one-two
as if I thought it would be funny.
Even the children who had arrived early for the performance looked blank.
M.
Blame AI
Someone forgot to blame AI for the bad jokes. IBM is turning A watson I into a joke machine. You know, machine learning mimicking as AI for funny model languages. And what do you expect when machines have a jab at jokes? Well, what do you get? Well,...?