Daily Dose - 990321 - proxy father, missionary, smartest man in the world, tech calls, Cosmo Mag, The Onion, Hey Martha

Another group of jokes from Joe in Calgary

The Smiths had no children and decided to use a proxy father to start their family. On the day the proxy father was to arrive, Mr. Smith kissed his wife and said, "I'm off. The man should be here soon".

Half an hour later, just by chance, a door-to-door baby photographer rang the doorbell, hoping to make a sale. "Good morning madam. You don't know me but I've come to...."

"Oh, no need to explain. I've been expecting you," Mrs. Smith cut in.

"Really?" the photographer asked. "Well, good! I've made a specialty of babies."

"That's what my husband and I had hoped. Please come in and have a seat. Just where do we start?" asked Mrs. Smith, blushing.

"Leave everything to me. I usually try two in the bathtub, one on the couch and perhaps a couple on the bed. Sometimes the living room floor is fun too; you can really spread out."

"Bathtub, living room floor? No wonder it didn't work for Harry and me."

"Well madam, none of us can guarantee a good one every time. But if we try several different positions and I shoot from six or seven angles, I'm sure you'll be pleased with the results."

"I hope we can get this over with quickly," gasped Mrs. Smith.

"Madam, in my line of work, a man must take his time. I'd love to be in and out in five minutes, but you'd be disappointed with that, I'm sure."

"Don't I know!!" Mrs. Smith exclaimed.

The photographer opened his briefcase and pulled out a portfolio of his baby pictures. "This was done on the top of a bus in downtown London."

"Oh my god!!" Mrs. Smith exclaimed, tugging at her handkerchief.

"And these twins turned out exceptionally well when you consider their mother was so difficult to work with." The photographer handed Mrs. Smith the picture.

"She was difficult?" asked Mrs. Smith.

"Yes, I'm afraid so. I finally had to take her to Hyde Park to get the job done right. People were crowding around four and five deep, pushing to get a good look."

"Four and five deep?" asked Mrs. Smith, eyes widened in amazement.

"Yes", the photographer said. "And for more than three hours too. The mother was constantly squealing and yelling. I could hardly concentrate. Then darkness approached and I began to rush my shots. Finally, when the squirrels began nibbling on my equipment I just packed it all in."

Mrs. Smith leaned forward. "You mean they actually chewed on your, er.., um.., ah.... equipment?"

"That's right. Well madam, if you're ready, I'll set up my tripod so that we can get to work."

"Tripod??" Mrs. Smith looked extremely worried now.

"Oh yes, I have to use a tripod to rest my Canon on. It's much too big for me to hold while I'm getting ready for action. Madam? Madam? Good Lord, she's fainted"

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Missionary

A missionary who had spent years showing a tribe of natives how to farm and build things to be self-sufficient gets word that he is to return home. He thinks that the one thing he never did was to teach these natives how to speak English..

So he takes the chief and starts walking in the forest. He points to a tree and tells the chief, this is a tree. The chief looks at the tree and grunts "tree". The missionary is pleased with the response. They walk a little farther and the missionary points to a rock and says this is a rock" at which the chief looks and grunts "rock".

The missionary is really getting enthusiastic about the results when he hears a rustling in the bushes. As they peak over the top they see a couple in the midst of heavy sexual activity. The missionary is really flustered and quickly responds, "riding a bike". The chief looks at the couple briefly, pulls out his blow gun, and kills them.

The missionary goes ballistic and yells at the chief that he has spent years teaching the tribe how to be civilized, and kind to each other, so how could he kill these people..

The chief replied ...."My Bike"..

__________________

Smartest Man In The World

A doctor, a lawyer, a little boy and a priest were out for a Sunday afternoon flight on a small private plane. Suddenly, the plane developed engine trouble. In spite of the best efforts of the pilot the plane started to go down. Finally the pilot grabbed a parachute, yelled to the passengers that they had better jump, and bailed out. Unfortunately there were only three parachutes remaining.

The doctor grabbed one and said "I'm a doctor, I save lives, so I must live," and jumped out.

The lawyer then said, "I'm the smartest man in the world, I deserve to live!" He grabbed a parachute and jumped.

The priest looked at the little boy and said, "My son, I've lived a long and full life. You are young and have your whole life ahead of you. Take the last parachute and live in peace".

The little boy handed the parachute back to the priest and said "Not to worry, Father. The smartest man in the world just took off with my back pack."

________________________

Here are some stories from the guys and gals who answer the phones when we need help with our computers ( I feel a lot smarter after reading these! ):

********************
Customer: "Your sound card is defective and I want a new one."
Tech Support: "What seems to be the problem?"
Customer: "The balance is backwards. The left channel is coming out of the right speaker and the right channel is coming out the left. It's defective."
Tech Support: "You can solve the problem by moving the left speaker to the right side of the machine and vice versa."
Customer: (sputter) (click)
Tech Support: (snicker)

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Customer: "I'd like to return this scanner."
Store Clerk: "Excuse me?"
Customer: "This scanner I bought. I paid eighty dollars for this scanner, and it doesn't work!"
Store Clerk: "Uh . . . sir, that's a trackball."
Customer: "No, it isn't. It says 600 dpi tracking resolution right here!"
********************

Got a call from a woman said that her laser printer was having problems: the bottom half of her printed sheets were coming out blurry. It seemed strange that the printer was smearing only the bottom half. I walked her through the basics, then came over and printed out a test sheet. It printed fine. I asked her to print a sheet, so she sent a job to the printer. As the paper started coming out, she yanked it out ands howed it to me. I told her to WAIT until the paper came out on its own.

Problem solved.

********************

I had been doing Tech Support for Hewlett-Packard's DeskJet division for about a month when I had a customer call with a problem I just couldn't solve. She could not print yellow. All the other colors would print fine, which truly baffled me because the only true colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. For instance, green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green printed fine. Every color of the rainbow printed fine except for yellow. I had the customer change ink cartridges. I had the customer delete and reinstall the drivers. Nothing worked. I asked my co-workers for help; they offered no new ideas.

After over two hours of troubleshooting, I was about to tell the customer to send the printer in to us for repair when she asked quietly, "Should I try printing on a piece of white paper instead of this yellow construction paper?"

*******************

A man attempting to set up his new printer called the printer's tech support number, complaining about the error message: "Can't find the printer." On the phone, the man said he even held the printer up in front of the screen, but the computer still couldn't find it!

*****************

Customer: "Hello? I'm trying to dial in. I installed the software okay, and it dialed fine. I could hear that. Then I could hear the two computers connecting. But then the sound all stopped, so I picked up the phone to see if they were still connected, and I got the message, 'No Carrier,' on my screen. What's wrong?"

*****************

An unfailingly polite lady called to ask for help with a Windows installation that had gone terribly wrong.

Customer: "I brought my Windows disks from work to install them on my home computer." (Training stresses that we are "not the Software Police," so I let the little act of piracy slide.)

Tech Support: "Umm-hmm. What happened?"

Customer: "As I put each disk in it turns out they weren't initialized."

Tech Support: "Do you remember the message exactly, ma'am?"

Customer:(proudly) "I wrote it down. 'This is not a Macintosh disk. Would you like to initialize it'?"

Tech Support: "Er, what happened next?"

Customer: "After they were initialized all the disks appeared to be blank. And now I brought them back to work, and I can't read them in the A:drive; the PC wants to format them. And this is our only set of Windows disks for the whole office. Did I do something wrong?"

******************

For a computer programming class, I sat directly across from someone, and our computers were facing away from each other. A few minutes into the class, she got up to leave the room. I reached between our computers and switched the inputs for the keyboards. She came back and started typing and immediately got a distressed look on her face. She called the teacher over and explained that no matter what she typed, nothing would happen. The teacher tried everything. By this time I was hiding behind my monitor and quaking red- faced. I started to type, "Leave me alone!"

They both jumped back, silenced. "What the . . . " the teacher said. I typed, "I said leave me alone!"

The kid got real upset. "I didn't do anything to it, I swear!" It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. The conversation between them and HAL 2000 went on for an amazing five minutes.

Me: "Don't touch me!"

Her: "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hit your keys that hard."

Me: "Who do you think you are anyway?!" Etc. Finally, I couldn't contain myself any longer and fell out of my chair laughing. After they had realized what I had done, they both turned beet red. Funny, I never got more than a C- in that class.

***************

I have a friend who just bought a computer and was instructed to load a program by typing "A:" and then the name of the program. My friend told me it would not work because his keyboard was no good. He said he couldn't type the "dot over dot thingie" and that every time he tried to type the "dot over dot thingie" he kept getting the "dot over comma thingie" no matter how careful he was to press only on the very top of the key. When I taught him about the shift key, he thought I was a genius.

*****************
This guy calls in to complain that he gets an "Access Denied" message every time he logs in. It turned out he was typing his user name and password in capital letters.

Tech Support: "OK, let's try once more, but use lower case letters."

Customer: "Uh, I only have capital letters on my keyboard."

****************
Email from a friend:

"CanYouFixTheSpaceBarOnMyKeyboard?"

****************

My friend was on duty in the main lab on a quiet afternoon. He noticed a young woman sitting in front of one of the workstations with her arms crossed across her chest and staring at the screen. After about 15 minutes he noticed that she was still in the same position only now she was impatiently tapping her foot. He asked if she needed help and she replied, "It's about time! I pushed the F1 button over twenty minutes ago!"

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It occurs to me that there should be a three-day mandatory waiting period after reading Cosmopolitan magazine before a woman is allowed to have contact with a member of the opposite sex. If this were so, I'm sure that the following humiliating moments would not have taken place:

Shortly after reading an article entitled "What Every Man Wants, But Will Never Admit", Jennifer McKenzie (all names have been changed to protect the humiliated) of Minneapolis goes to a New Year's Eve party with her boyfriend, Stewart. At the appropriate moment, she leans over and flirtatiously whispers, "I'm not wearing any underwear." To which he says, "What? I can't hear you." "I'm not wearing any underwear", she whispers in his ear, a bit more loudly. "You're not wearing any what?" "Underwear!! Underwear!!" she yells at the top of her lungs. The room falls silent. The hush is punctuated only by the sound of a pair of heels clicking across the floor to the nearest exit.

Shortly after reading an article entitled "How to Make Him Lust After You 24 Hours a Day", Shelly Barnes of Atlanta calls her boyfriend at work. The first words out of her mouth are, "I want you, Steven". "Um. Not now", he whispers. "Yes, now, Steven Phillips. I want you this minute."
"There are 17 people in my office." "Oh, um..." "We're on speakerphone."
"My, what an incredibly small world it is! Wrong number. Wrong Steven Phillips. Pardon the ring." (CLICK)

Shortly after reading an article entitled "Risque Business: Lingerie Styles That Will Set Your Boudoir On Fire", Martha Jones of Buffalo races to the nearest boutique and buys a black merry widow with red lace trim.
She hurries home, hooks herself into it and proceeds to fling herself onto her bed, practicing the pose she will strike when her boyfriend Jonathon arrives. Oh, the look in his eye when he sees me, she thinks.
Unfortunately, she never gets to see the look in Jonathon's eye. However, she does get to see the look in her mother's eye after phoning and begging mom to come and free her from the bedspread in which 25 merry widow hooks have become hopelessly entangled.

Shortly after reading an article entitled "How to Let Him Know What Drives You Wild", Sandra Fenton of Dayton composes a saucy love poem to her boyfriend, Jeff, spritzes it with perfume and drops it in the mailbox.
Four minutes later, Jeff calls to say he wants to break up. Two minutes after that, Sandra takes a sledgehammer to the mailbox and is arrested for tampering with government property.

Shortly after reading an article entitled "Businesswoman By Day, Temptress By Night", Phyllis Stockard of Terre Haute shows up at her boyfriend Edward's apartment wearing nothing but a trench coat and a pair of four-inch stiletto heels. When he opens the door, she coyly says, "I've got a little surprise for you."
"Wait! Wait! I want to see it too!" his mother says, racing in from the kitchen.
"Your mother's here?" "Oh, I just popped in, dear. Let me take your coat."
"I'll get her coat!" his father says, racing in from the living room. "Your father's here?"
"Mom. Dad. Please. I'll get her coat." Edward says. "No, really, I'll leave it on."
"Don't be ridiculous. Give me your coat," he persists, reaching for her shoulder. "Get back! Get back, all of you!" she shrieks, limping backward on one stiletto heel while wildly waving the other one at them.
"So help me, God, I'm keeping this coat on if it's the last thing I do!"

_____________________

The Onion

Evil Genius Gates Drops Windows 98 Into NYC Water Supply

NEW YORK--Determined to circumvent Justice Department action forestalling the release of his powerful new operating system, Microsoft CEO and evil genius Bill Gates dropped Windows 98, coded into liquid form, into New York City's water supply sometime this past weekend.

"Excellent," said Gates, watching his scheme unfold on a 30-foot video screen deep within Microsoft's Redmond, WA, compound. "Everything is going exactly according to plan."

Doctors say the risk to New Yorkers who consume Windows-tainted water is considerable. "As little as three ounces of water can carry the entire Windows 98 installer file into the drinker's cerebral cortex," said Dr. Terry Braithwaite of New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital. "Once this insidious operating system enters a person's brain, it may take years to fully rebuild his or her original neurological programming, and even then, old files can remain in their memories for years."

According to New York water commissioner Glenn Portnoy, the Susquehanna and Catskill reservoirs were contaminated with the software in question late Saturday night, rendering 100 percent of the city's taps Windows-compatible only. Those living in any of the city's five boroughs, Portnoy said, are now at risk of having the system installed in their bodies by drinking, cooking with, or even showering with New York City water.

"Residents of New York!" said Gates in a televised address early Monday morning. "Some of your neighbors, your friends, your own family members have not yet joined us in operating within our glorious system. Why not? Is something affecting their judgment? Are they perhaps... thirsty?"

"Water," Gates added. "The source of all life."

Gates then emitted a sinister, high-pitched laugh and faded out, returning televisions across New York to their regular programming with the push of a button.

Justice Department officials said they plan to come down hard on the software giant for its latest controversial move. "Not only is tampering with a major metropolitan area's water supply illegal," U.S. attorney Joel Klein said, "but mass, involuntary bio-installation of operating-system software is a gross violation of federal antitrust law."

Klein said Microsoft has also taken steps to prevent rival Netscape from placing its web browser in New York's reservoirs, an act he said may constitute a further illegal monopolistic trade practice. If found guilty of dispatching winged Microsoft henchmen to block Netscape's access to the reservoirs, Microsoft may face fines of up to $670 million.

Gates refused to respond to the allegations, but spoke directly to the people of New York via Microsoft's Windows 98 brainwave transmitter, saying, "Command priority reformat unit sub-Klein-delete//DELETE: A-Priority." Klein's whereabouts are currently unknown.

Despite Microsoft's tainting of their water supply, New Yorkers seem relatively unfazed.

"There is nothing wrong with having Windows 98 in my body," said a glassy-eyed Queens woman identifying herself as "7398473289348390-98.01." "Windows 98 is good. Where do I want to go today, O Gateslord?"

Added the woman: "Invalid sector error Type -41."

_____________________

Hey Martha

Friday, April 17, 1998

Where have all the cowboys gone?

SISTERS, Ore. (AP) -- Tom and Susie Flenniken knew it could take as long as five years to sell their 60-acre horse ranch east of Sisters, so they decided to try an essay contest to find a winner instead.

With a nine-stall horse barn, a 1,700-square-foot house and six wooden corrals, the ranch -- appraised two years ago at $600,000 -- is an ideal home for any lyrical cowboy.

"I would love for the Cinderella story to work," Flenniken said.

The Flennikens are asking for a $150 entry fee and essays of 500 words or less. The deadline is July 31. Flenniken said he needs at least 4,000 entries for the scheme to break even. The couple wants to retire to Arizona.

"If it works, I'm going to look real smart," Flenniken said. "If it doesn't, I'm going to look real dumb."

The couple isn't necessarily looking for the best writer, and grammar and spelling don't count.

"I don't want the cowboy with the eighth-grade education to be intimidated," he said.