GENE WEINGARTEN

BELOW THE BELTWAY

Poems that byte

Toughts on data entry-level versification

drawn to the literary arts. Okay, I am being overly kind. In terms of poetic

I

sensibilities, computer people don’t exactly have tin ears — it’s actually worse than that. Because tin is a metal, it is able to catch sound waves and reverberate at least a little. Computer people’s ears appear to be made of something much more dead to sound than is tin: Styrofoam, for example, or pudding. I know this is an uncharitable generalization; I have

arrived at it only reluctantly after reading the results of a recent online limerick contest by a techie Web site for techie types. One winner rhymed “whimsical” with “despicable.” Another rhymed “hand” with “hand,” and “book” with “myself.” None of the limericks made any coherent point, and they failed with appalling inattention to meter. They all appear to have been wrought by persons whose language fluency is limited to HTML. I’ve decided to show them the way.

Musicians who march for some teams, In their dining will go to extremes. They’ll pig out through the night Till their pants are too tight. (You can have too much bandwidth, it seems. An inmate by name of Zaleski Was devious, daring and pesky. He had friends in IT So he managed to flee By using a butt-smuggled ESC key.

A computer technician, Kim Nutt Had to name her new puppy, a mutt. She tried Fido, then Rover (He wandered all over) But ’twas “Browser” that made the last cut.

“Waterboarding” is when you immerse A suspect who just won’t converse. But a fried CPU Is its own torture, too — (Might it be “motherboarding” is worse?)

weingarten@washpost.com.

52 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | April 11, 2010

t’s not often that you see poetry about computer technology. The reason may be that the people most interested in computer technology are computer technologists, a group not naturally

Bill’s laptop was on the old side (“It’s got floppies!” his wife said, and sighed.) But the marriage would thrive — An external hard drive Left the missus, and Bill, satisfied.

If you “quicken” when pregnant, it proves That your baby’s developed some moves. As a home-finance app, “Quicken,” too, gets a clap, And if you find this comparison amusing and see nothing wrong with the meter and rhyme, you are probably one of those computer doofs.

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