In-Depth

June Humor

• 06/01/2000

The answer to the eternal question, "Is it better to be a jock or a nerd?"

Michael Jordan, having "retired," with $40 million in endorsements, makes $178,100 a day, working or not.

If he sleeps seven hours a night, he makes $52,000 every night while visions of sugarplums dance in his head.

If he goes to see a movie, it’ll cost him $7, but he’ll make $18,550 while he’s there.

If he decides to have a five-minute egg, he’ll make $618 while boiling it.

He makes $7,415 an hour more than minimum wage.

He’ll make $3,710 while watching each episode of Friends.

If he wanted to save up for a new Acura NSX ($90,000), it would take him a whole 12 hours.

If someone were to hand him his salary and endorsement money, they would have to do it at the rate of $2 every second.

He’ll probably pay around $200 for a nice round of golf, but will be reimbursed $33,390 for that round.

Assuming he puts the federal maximum of 15 percent of his income into a tax deferred account (401k), his contributions will hit the federal cap of $9,500 at 8:30 a.m. on January 1st.

If you were given a penny for every $10 he made, you’d be living comfortably at $65,000 a year.

He’ll make about $19.60 while watching the 100-meter dash in the Olympics, and about $15,600 during the Boston Marathon.

While the common person is spending about $20 for a meal in his trendy Chicago restaurant, he’ll pull in about $5,600.

If Jordan saves 100 percent of his income for the next 450 years, he’ll still have less than Bill Gates has today.

Game over. Nerd wins.

***

I want to hurt my computer. I want to buy a software program that causes my computer to suffer grievously, though not permanently.

I want a device that stores an electrical charge in my telephone. For every minute I spend on hold waiting for technical support to answer, the charge would increase in intensity. When the guy from tech support finally answers, the electrical bolt of energy would be discharged into him.

This should not affect my ability to hear what’s going on at the other end of the line, of course. And a special function would allow the volts to double every time a tape-recorded message urges me to continue holding. "Your call is important to us," the featureless voice always claims. I want my phone to be outfitted with a translation program which will reconstitute this irritating reminder into the truth: "Actually, we already have your money, so we couldn’t care less about you. Our technical support department consists of two college kids, both of whom are busy playing ‘Doom.’ Eventually, one of them will come on the line, but it will be the one who doesn’t speak English."

I want my modem to sense when my PC has committed an "illegal function" and issue a warrant to arrest Bill Gates. When my system crashes and I lose a file that has taken me more than an hour to create, I want someone from the computer company to come out and retype it for me.

I don’t understand why new, "upgraded" software creates files that cannot be read by old, reliable software with the same name. Is there no one in the computer industry who has noticed that word processor files all look alike once they are open? Why can’t 6.0 recognize a 7.0 file? It’s all just words, isn’t it? There should be a rule that when software engineers buy a new car, their old cars should cease to function.

I want to know what good a Web search engine is that returns 324,909,188 "matches" to my keyword. That’s like saying, "Good news, we’ve located the product you’re looking for. It’s on Earth."

I want to know why, when I had a tiny hard drive, my operating system was virtually crash-proof and took up so little space. My new operating system is five times the size of my original hard drive. With every "upgrade," it seems to grow 75 percent. That’s as if every time your mother-in-law came to visit, she weighed another 500 pounds.

Now I’ve found out that my PC no longer "recognizes" my floppy drive. How could they not recognize each other? They live together!