A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer

review from ClifNotes, Nov 2006, permalink

From Clif:
I was reading the Hoax-Slayer premium newsletter and he'd mentioned that the poem below is often attributed to Dr. Seuss. This isnt' so. It was written by Gene Ziegler in 1994. I've shortened the poem up a bit, but you can see the whole thing if you follow the link at the end of the poem.

By the way, drop on by and visit the Hoax-Slayer website. It's a great place to find out the most recent email scams and you'll come away with a good laugh more often than not.

Quote from Gene Ziegler
This poem has probably received more attention and circulation than anything I have ever written. It was created in an hour, late one night in the fall of 1994 after my four year old grandson and his older brother had significantly rearranged the resources on my Macintosh.


If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory
makes your floppy disk abort
then the socket packet pocket
has an error to report!

If your cursor finds a menu item
followed by a dash,
and the double-clicking icon
puts your window in the trash,
and your data is corrupted cause
the index doesn't hash,
then your situation's hopeless,
and your system's gunna crash.

You can't say this? What a shame, sir!
We'll find you another game, sir.

If the label on the cable
on the table at your house
says the network is connected
to the button on your mouse,
but your packets want to tunnel
on another protocol,
that's repeatedly rejected
by the printer down the hall,
and your screen is all distorted
by the side-effects of gauss,
so your icons in the window
are as wavy as a souse,
then you may as well reboot
and go out with a bang,
cause as sure as I'm a poet,
the sucker's gunna hang!

When the copy of your floppy's
getting sloppy on the disk,
and the microcode instructions
cause unnecessary risc,
then you have to flash your memory
and you'll want to RAM your ROM.
quickly turn off your computer
and be sure to tell your mom!

http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/elz1/clocktower/DrSeuss.html


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