Oh dear, oblig. joke. Old and not very good but I think appropriate:
Man is looking for a clock and sees a shop with a big clock in the window. He goes in; no more clocks. He asks the man behind the counter “Do you sell clocks?”
“No, I’m a mohel.”
“But there’s a clock in your window.”
“If you were a mohel, what would you put in your window?”
Which reminds me of a story I was told but can’t vouch for the accuracy, about a developer who was creating form letters for automatic mailing to the clients of an investment company. Unfortunately for test purposes he set the default client name (in the absence of a database entry) to “Rich Bastard”.
You can of course guess what happened; the developer’s contract ended before things went live, there was a schema error and so on the day of first live run a load of letters went out addressed to “Dear Rich Bastard”.
The company went into mild meltdown, and sent out a load of new letters to the entire list telling them that unfortunately they might have had in error a letter addressed to a client named “Richard Bastard”, and please to ignore it.
They got a letter from one client saying his letter had been correctly addressed, but could they send him a “Rich Bastard” letter as he would like to frame it and put it on his wall.
(I originally thought this story was mythical but in fact it turns out that there are people in England surnamed “Bastard”, though they pronounce it “B’stard.” I have been assured by a colleague who was in the army that there was one such in his corps HQ, and that he had heard him one day say down the telephone “No, I am Major Bastard!”)
