The Funny

This is probably my least favorite part of the year. It’s cold. We have storms, sometimes storms that interfere with our carefully laid out plans. It’s rainy and windy when it isn’t snowing and icing. It’s dark when I come to work and it’s dark when I leave for home at night. You can’t stand to be near even people you love, because of the hacking coughs and the sneezing.

It’s hard to even get dressed in the morning. Do you layer-up for the 20°s of dawn or do you leave the heavy coat at home and just wear a jacket because the afternoon is supposed to be around 50°?

Everyone who isn’t worried about getting their income taxes done is worried about their department budget, or their upcoming performance reviews at work. We are in that long lull between days-off holidays and even in my own family, it seems nobody has a birthday worth celebrating until later on when it finally gets warmer. It’s an ugly time.

So these are maybe good days to remind ourselves that everything goes better with a chuckle. Even the funerals I have been to have been easier to take when someone told the story of the time....

So what can we do, to keep things lighter?

I have yet to find the HTML joke that’s actually funny. Some years ago I searched Google for “HTML Jokes” thinking I might find something I could use in my training. Public speaking manuals always say it’s good to start off with a joke to break the tension in the room, but I turned up... nothing. I was amazed by that. I mean, you would think someone would have published a page somewhere of “How many FrontPage developers does it take to change a light bulb?” jokes, or something similar. Don’t the Adobe developers make jokes about the Microsoft guys? Well, apparently not. I couldn’t find anything, anywhere. Probably the best we can do today is the photo of the Tower of Pisa, in Italy, with the old italic tags on either side of the actual Tower. See? Italic? Italy? Slanty? Okay, maybe not. I could actually show you the image except that Blogger has recently improved the way they handle images, which means you can no longer post anything and get it the way you want it, and you very often can't post anything at all. It probably wouldn't have helped the joke much, anyway.

Listen, people. Physicists tell molecular jokes at their conventions. Doctors and airline pilots have jokes. Even Accountants have their funnies. There isn’t anything funny about this Web business? I’m asking; I don’t any answers here, but it seems like there should be something we can all do to avoid opening our veins.