Success Architect Senior Director: Professional Joke                                                                   PJ          Forget About It                                                                                           Nashua, New Hampshire                                                                                                                                              October 29, 2020

Informant Data:

PJ was born in Vadodara, Gujarat on June 10, 1973. He completed his undergraduate education at M.S. University, and went to S.P. Jain Institute of Management, where he completed his MBA. He got married in India and just after his wife gave birth to their daughter, they moved to the States when their daughter turned one. Now, PJ has a sixteen-year-old son and twenty one-year-old daughter. He has now been working at Salesforce, a cloud computing company, for 6 years. He was recently promoted to Success Architect Senior Director. He was working remotely for Salesforce, even before the COVID crisis.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: Salesforce is a cloud computing company based in San Francisco. However, it has employees all over the world, many of whom are working remotely. It prioritizes customer and client satisfaction, and it is also rated as being one of the top 10 best companies to work for with extremely high employee satisfaction. Salesforce is also known for considering the physical and mental wellbeing of its employees as well, ensuring that they are not too overworked. Although PJ’s job is not programming, it is still very much related to the software and cloud platform that is specific to Salesforce.

Social Context: People in this company tend to say this joke when they are trying to tell somebody to forget about something or remove it out of their memories forever, especially if something bad happened to that person.

Item:

“Just Control-Alt-Delete!”

Collector’s Notes:

This is a very common computer function, often known by many who have worked with a computer. When you press these keys in that order on the computer, it terminates any function or ends an application or program on the computer. Saying this in daily life would be like telling somebody to let go of something and never think about it again.

Tags:

• Jokes
• Verbal folklore
• Verbal humor
• Computer science/IT

Khevna Joshi

Dartmouth College

RUSS 13

Fall 2020