Product Development Engineer: Professional Joke                                                                     PP    Macs Suck                                                                                               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 can be shared between those who have any type of personal laptop that they use. However, it is very common in this company between PP and her colleagues because basically everybody has a personal laptop that they work on, and because the people who work at the company are evenly split between the MacBook and PCs, which makes the joke even more relatable.

Item: 

“Beware, she has a Mac,” or “Oh, of course there’s a problem, it’s a Mac!”

Collector’s Notes:

Everybody who works in IT knows that there is some sort of competition between PC users and Mac users. You either use one or the other, and you always hate whichever one you don’t use. So, if somebody’s computer is not working or it needs to get fixed, a PC user always blames the MacBook for the problem and vice versa. It is usually friendly banter, and in the case of PP, the person who fixes her computer when it is damaged is a PC user. In jest, he blames the problem on the fact that PP uses a Mac, and that is when he uses the above phrases. In fact, he even changed her password to “Macsucks” once, and the Max was fixed!

Tags:

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

Khevna Joshi

Dartmouth College

RUSS 13

Fall 2020