Re: Fortune cookies

[poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net]

Two stories:
1. A former coworker had previously worked as tech writer for a manufacturer of pneumatic nail guns. This was way back in the early or mid-1980s when they were still rather new. The instructions specifically stated to use nails no larger than a specific size. Inevitably, the company would get jammed nail guns for warranty repair -- complete with oversized nails in place as the cause of the jam. My former coworker said that one of the managers suggested adding a warning in the documentation, "Do not use nails larger than the size specified here or else jamming will occur. If you do use oversize nails, #%#&*$^ you, it's your problem because we told you not to!"
And no, they didn't add THAT warning -- though I'm sure many of us on this list would LOVE to add a VERY direct warning to some of our own stuff to not do this or that or product damage or worse may result.
 
2. Two software programmers I worked with back in the mid-1980s got their jollies by running a compiler/decompiler (I think that's what it was called) on commercial software just to see the code. They once showed me what they said was a fairly common in-joke that served as a "gotcha" among programmers. After running their decompiler on a fairly common commercial package of the time, they scrolled all the way to the bottom where the following message appeared: "Hey! What the hell are you doing here? You know you're not supposed to be here! Go away!" Like I said, they told me lots of programmers knew other programmers were hacking into their code, so this was their way of at least letting them know it was no big secret.
I swear every word of this is true.
-------------- Original message from David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com>: -------------- 


> "You regard free speech not as a right, but as a never-ending obligation" 
> 
> "Everything's better with monosodium glutamate" 
> 
> Two of the "Misfortune cookie" slogans from 
> 
> 
> I actually bought a bag of hilarious "Misfortune Cookies" at an 
> airport some years ago. Just for grins, I Googled "misfortune cookie" 
> and found some rather hilarious results. 
> 
> My favorite political campaign prank of all time was when a San 
> Francisco fundraiser luncheon was held years ago at a restaurant in 
> Chinatown--the opposing campaign managed to substitute fortune cookies 
> with *their* candidate's slogan on the "fortunes" inside. 
> 
> David 
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Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help  
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

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