An Air Commodore, an Admiral and a General are having a debate on a training ground. Now look here, chaps” says the Air Commodore, “my troops are as hard as they come; FLIGHT SERGEANT!!, let’s show these chaps what we are made of, I want you to do 100 push ups, then you see that mountain over there, I want you to run to the top, back down again and report back to me”. The Flight Sergeant does exactly as ordered, pushes out 100 perfect push ups, runs up and down the nearby mountain and reports back to the Air Commodore “All done, Sir!””Well done, Flight Sergeant, so you see chaps, the Air Force has the hardest troops” says the Air Commodore triumphantly. “Well, that’s nothing for a Sailor” says the Admiral. “CHIEF PETTY OFFICER!!, I want you to pick up that Flight Sergeant, do 200 push ups with him on your back and then carry him up and down that mountain over there and report back to me.” “As you wish, Sir” says the Chief Petty Officer, who duly picks up the Flight Sergeant, straps him to his back, does 200 push ups and carries him up and down the mountain. “All done, Sir!”, he says as he reports back. “So you see chaps, that’s why the Navy has the hardest troops”, says the now very smug Admiral. “Yes, all very good, but that’s nothing” says the unimpressed General, “watch this; WARRANT OFFICER!!, I want you to pick up that Flight Sergeant and that Chief Petty Officer over there, do 300 push ups with both of them on your back and then carry them both up and down that mountain over there and report back to me as soon as possible! “You can Kiss my hairy arse, Sir”, says the Warrant Officer back instantaneously.
“Now Gentlemen, that’s hard” says the General.
Joke Poo: The IT Helpdesk Hierarchy
Three tech leads, a Software Architect, a DevOps Engineer, and a CEO are arguing in the break room about who has the most resilient team.
“Listen up,” the Tech Lead for Frontend says, puffing out his chest, “my team is the absolute best at fixing bugs. SARAH! I need you to show them what we’re made of. I want you to track down the cause of this null pointer exception that’s crashing the application, and I want you to have it fixed within the next hour!”
Sarah, after downing her third coffee, proceeds to track down the root cause of the bug and fixes the exception within the next 40 minutes.
“Well, what do you think, my team fixes errors in no time at all!” says the Tech Lead.
“Hold on a second,” says the DevOps Engineer, “my team is the best, BILL! I want you to deploy a fix to production in the next 10 minutes, with zero downtime!”
Bill replies, “on it!” and he quickly deploys the hotfix to production, again with no downtime.
“See that is why my team is better!” says the DevOps Engineer.
“Oh please,” says the CEO, with a superior smirk. “You want to see resilience? JEFF! I want you to take a look at Sarah’s bug fix, Bill’s deployment, the last five years of audit logs, our new AI-powered data lake, and make me a PowerPoint presentation summarizing the insights for the board meeting tomorrow morning. Oh, and I also want you to fix the printer.”
Jeff stares blankly, “Why, can’t you get one of the interns to do this?”.
The CEO beams, “Exactly! That’s resilience. He knows he’ll just get pawned off to the interns anyway!”
Alright, let’s break down this joke and then build something new from it.
Joke Dissection:
- Setup: Three officers from different branches of the military (Air Force, Navy, Army) are bragging about the toughness of their troops.
- Punchline: The Air Force and Navy demonstrate impressive feats of physical endurance. The Army’s “toughness” is revealed to be insubordination, implying their soldiers are so hardened they’ll even defy a direct order.
- Humor Elements:
- Stereotypes: Plays on stereotypes of military service branches (e.g., Air Force being focused on athleticism, Navy on brute strength, Army on discipline or lack thereof).
- Escalation: Each branch attempts to one-up the previous one, leading to increasingly absurd demands.
- Subversion: The expected demonstration of physical prowess is replaced with outright defiance, an unexpected and humorous twist.
- Bathos: The anti-climax of the warrant officer’s response.
Now, let’s use some military-related facts and observations to build something new. Here’s an amusing “Did You Know” that plays off the joke’s theme of military toughness and escalating absurdity:
Did you know: The military’s quest for ever-tougher troops has inadvertently created a logistical nightmare for morale. Uniform manufacturers are now struggling to find buttons tough enough to withstand the Warrant Officer’s glare after being asked to do 300 pushups with two superior officers on his back, leading to a new, top-secret initiative code-named “Operation Super-Fasteners.” Sources suggest the current leading contender is a miniature, cold-forged tungsten alloy, but some worry about the secondary effect of soldiers becoming magnetic.