I'm shocked, shocked!

Apparently policemen have a macabre sense of humor. A dry-erase board soliciting suggestions for dealing with problems caused by the homeless who congregate at the end of State Street wound up including "Burmese tiger trap," "swarms of bees," and similar ideas. The administration is apologizing, of course, and some outsiders said this doesn't reflect the attitude officers on the street show in real life. Well, no, of course it doesn't.

I'm told med students and ER workers have a wacky sense of humor too. I'd bet that most folks working in life-or-death occupations blow off steam with jokes that would freak out peaceful desk jockeys. I work in IT these days, and even on the worst days(*), as one of our guys says, "Babies ain't dyin'." But at lunch some of our jokes might make the system users shiver. We have a team of people who like to help, but when the same (otherwise brilliant) fellow keeps coming back with the same problem, he can expect there to be a little behind-the-scenes merriment. But we'll cheerfully keep fixing the problem.

Prediction: Among themselves park rangers will have wry jokes about bears and over-confident hikers, ambulance drivers will have coarse phrases for frequently visited locations, and firemen will have theirs about places and stupid people tricks.

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(*)E.g. When we lost an un-backed-up 3PB filesystem. We were saying to each other "Well, they needed more disk space, and now look--3PB of free space!" We got the system fixed, and only lost about 100,000 files, almost all of which were reconstruct-able--not too shabby.