Day: February 25, 2009

The professor and the plumber

A w:Plumber at work.

A professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home leaked. He called a plumber. The plumber came the next day and sealed a few screws, and everything was working as before.

The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked. “This is one-third of my monthly salary!” he yelled. “I could have bought one of these sinks online and installed it myself!”

Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, “I understand your position as a professor. Why don’t you come to our company and apply for a plumber position?
You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don’t like educated people.”

So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.

One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just
happened that the first class was Math. The evening teacher, to check students’ knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got “minus pi times r square.”

He didn’t like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a
frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: “Switch the limits of the integral!!”

Shopping for fur

A mother and a daughter are shopping in the mall, walking out of a sports gifts shop, when the mother eyes an expensive fur coat. “This year,” she says, “I think that I will buy my present instead of making you and dad shop for me.” The daughter nods in agreement. “And I think this fur coat would be perfect too.”

The daughter protests, “But mom, some helpless, poor creature has to suffer so that you can have this.”

“Don’t worry honey,” says the mother, “Your father won’t get the bill for a couple of weeks.”

Put wine in your tower PC

Here’s an interesting item I came across that has loads of potential for any prankster out there. It’s a wine cooler that looks exactly like a tower PC. The plan would be to hide your desktop machine and replace it with this unit. Next time someone is at your desk, just reach down, open your “PC” and take out a chilled beverage. How cool would that be?

Anyway, the Oster 12 Bottle Wine Cellar is on sale at Buy.com and currently retails at around $60 for all our good readers who are based in the US. (Note that this is this week’s sale price, so it may be more expensive if you’re looking at it outside sale time as the list price is around $200). As the name suggests it holds 12 bottles of wine, though I suspect you could possibly cram it full of beer and other beverages quite easily. It has 5 slid-out chrome shelves and a recessed door handle and all you would need to do to disguise it as a PC would be to stick an “Intel Inside” sticker to the outside.

So, next time your friends come along to play on your computer, offer them a beverage and watch the look on their face as you open up your “PC” and hand them a chilled drink.