So Martha did a humorous speech yesterday based off one of Michael McIntyre’s gigs. It was about how convoluted the process of buying tickets online had become, involving indecipherable captchas, countless fields to fill in and confirmations and legalese to read through if you really wanted to make sure your ass is covered and you haven’t actually signed / checkbox-ed away your firstborn child.
As she was talking about how strange it was that you have to confirm your email (they just want to make sure you really know your email!), all I could think of was the technical reasons behind it. It sucks when your system captures the wrong email address and keeps sending to a dead lead. Which then got me thinking. Why aren’t there any stand up comedians that work solely in professions. I’d think a stand-up comedian in IT would make a crazy killing in say San Fran, kind of like Dilbert but hardcore tech. Heck, even the word stand up means something different in IT than in comedy ~ta-dunk~.
So obviously the first thing you do when you have an idea like that is Google. And there really arent’t that many hits. For one there’s http://geekcomedytour.com/, which doesn’t seem like it’s been updated for about a decade. A whole tour of geeks doing comedy, who would have thought? It turn out that there’s quite some geek specific comedy like nerdist and even something like http://www.wcgeeksversusnerds.com/, where debates about the obscurest of topics in pop culture happen, like DOROTHY vs ALICE – “who is the best at navigating bizarre new lands?”. Random collection at http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/off-topic-31/nerdy-comedians-477293/ too which I have to go through at some point to figure out if they’re actually worth my while 🙂
But the bottom line is, I can’t seem to find any comedy specific to the IT industry. Something that will touch the soul of a tech person like http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/ does. Anybody who codes or has to maintain systems can identify with that. But why not bring that to life? Why not make it living and breathing?
Apart from the lack of mass appeal, I think a big question is time. More than any other industry, the face of the landscape changes in the blink of an eye. And you can show your age and affect your appeal based solely on the choice of tech stack you choose to make fun of. And desensitisation. I’ve only started working at the new place for 3 months now and I can already tell some people have well and truly drank the koolaid. And when you drink the koolaid and something just ridiculously crazy to an outsider or someone coming in for the first time happens, you just go – yeah, that’s normal, nothing to see here, just move on, even when your hair is on fire, the sprinklers are on and people are running around screaming.
So let’s try and make it happen. I’ll give my next speech from the humorous manual, and make it something about IT. Let’s see how that works out.