Product Development Engineer: Professional Joke                                                                           PP    Almost the 21st Century                                                                            East Brunswick, New Jersey                                                                                                                                              October 28, 2020

Informant Data:

PP was born in Pune, India on March 31, 1980. Shortly after completing her undergraduate education in India, she and her husband moved to the States in 2008 about 6 years after their marriage. She completed a post-graduate course in NYC about fashion, design, and the textile industry, as that is what she was interested in at the time. She and her husband currently have two children (one 5-year-old and one 14-year-old), and they currently live in East Brunswick, New Jersey. She works as a Product Development Engineer at Blinds to Go, where she has been working for 2 years now after working at a few other design companies.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: Blinds to Go is a company that sells blinds and helps customers and clients to figure out which blinds would be best for their home, based on color and current design. While PP does a lot of work on the computer with figuring out prices/costs of materials and managing the software, she also enjoys human interaction and works with clients by talking to them face-to-face on a daily basis. Surprisingly, her job is considered an essential job, so she has been going to the factory in person during the COVID-19 crisis.

Social Context: This joke is shared between only PP and her colleagues in the company because it is specific that only their company uses. If something is not working up to speed or the day’s work has been very slow because of the slow computer, then PP and her colleagues always use this phrase.

Item: 

“Ugh, it must be because of AS 400.”

Collector’s Notes: 

Nobody would know what AS 400 is except for those people who work for Blinds to Go. This is the only company that still uses this old, very slow processing system. While everything else in the company is extremely modernized and technologically advanced, this primary processing system is slow and still wastes a lot of time on some days. Thus, when something goes wrong in the software or crashes, the employees blame it on AS 400 in jest.

Tags:

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

Khevna Joshi

Dartmouth College

RUSS 13

Fall 2020