What If Dr. Seuss Did Technical Writing?
Saturday, October 28th, 2006You’ve seen it before. Someone may even have e-mailed it to you. “If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort…”. Yeah, that’s the one. I knew you’d seen it before. Maybe you saw it as “Why Computers Sometimes Crash! by Dr. Seuss” or as “Dr. Seuss Explains Why Computers Crash” or something similar but you’ve seen it.
It keeps popping up on sites and blogs all over the Internet (in fact, I saw it turn up yet again on someone’s blog yesterday and another a week ago, always as “author unknown”) and I was curious about its origins. It took very little time to find what I was looking for, so little time that I wonder at the people who are still posting it without taking the few seconds it required to find the true author.
Gene Ziegler’s Cornell University page offers a copy of the original poem as well as some background information. The original poem, entitled ”A Grandchild’s Guide to Using Grandpa’s Computer” and written in 1994 after his grandsons had wreaked havoc on his computer, had been edited, abridged, and anonymized by some unknown person before being recirculated far and wide on the Internet. Ziegler, aka Dr. Z, aka Dr. Zseuss, responded to the usurping and copyright infringement in the summer of 1995 with Hang the Information Highwayman!. His Digital Clocktower humour page includes “Oh, The LINKS you can Link!“, another Seuss-like poem about hyperlinks. ‘Cos I know you’re still in the mood for Seussisms. You know you are.
Eric Shackle’s 2004 article “Socket pocket packet is victim of a racket” offers some additional commentary on this particular case of copyright infringement, though it mostly quotes what Gene Ziegler himself wrote on his own site. It’s interesting to note that a Google search back then (a mere two and a half years ago) turned up “about 3410 references” for the search terms ”socket packet pocket”. The same search now turns up about 266,000 results. The good news is that Shackle’s article is second and Ziegler’s page is sixth, giving hope that people might actually find the truth. The bad news is that that is the only good news.