Product Development Engineer: Professional Joke                                                                     PP    KT                                                                                                             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 share between PP and a few of her other colleagues while teaching something new (computer-related) to another person. Because the job is very dynamic and flexible, everyone who is working in the company must be willing to adapt to new changes. Thus, people are always teaching each other new things. This phrase is repeated when a certain function or method has been taught or transferred very quickly (quicker than expected) to somebody.

Item:

“That’s the fastest KT I’ve ever seen!”

Collector’s Notes:

KT stands for knowledge transfer, which is a phrase that is used to represent a transfer or files or other information from one place to another on a computer, which usually happens instantaneously. Saying that there is a fast KT is like saying something (a teaching of new knowledge or communication of information between two people or parties) that was expected to take a long transmission time happened almost as quickly as it happens on the computer.

Tags:

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

Khevna Joshi

Dartmouth College

RUSS 13

Fall 2020