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I welcome free, not for profit, personal and educational use and
distribution of the electronic text version of this copyrighted work,
so feel free to distribute it, but please read the special copyright
notice
at the
bottom of this
page.
I first became aware of this
joke
in the form of a cartoon a friend showed to me a long time ago. I don't
remember where or when the cartoon was published, but I think it may
have
been in the New Yorker. As I rememebr the cartoon, it
showed a farmer
feeding chickens spread around an open field, and a second person
suggesting
putting the chickens in a pen to make the feeding more efficient.
The joke
can be interpreted two ways, and I changed it in "Feeding the Chickens"
to
make it clear which interpretation I preferred. I think the
original intended
interpretation was that the joke is on the advisor, that is the son,
since
accepting the advice would not reduce the farmers work substantially.
In
our household we use the punchline "How much is a hen's time worth?" as
a
catch phrase, usually my wife saying it to me, with the joke usually
being
on the farmer, that is, usually me. Here are two common
examples.
I am working on some household chore with the wrong tools because
of my
usual inertia which inhibits me from fetching the proper tools.
Or maybe
we don't own the right tools, so I would have to go to a hardware store
to
buy the right tools. In either case, it would save me overall a
lot of
time to fetch or even go out to buy the right tools, but I persist to
continue
using what I have on hand.
I install some new software on the computer, and immediately procede to
use
it based on the assumption that the graphical user interface (GUI) has
been
designed well enough so that I can by intuition figure out how to get
done
what I want to get done without bothering to read any manual or on-line
tutorial.
COPYRIGHT
NOTICE
This document is
copyright © 2003 by Buzz Bloom. All rights reserved.
It may be freely copied, reproduced, forwarded, and/or distributed in
electronic form for personal and educational purposes provided you
copy, reproduce, forward, and/or distribute it in its entirety. This
means that all copies must include the following: the copy permission
statement, this copyright notice, the Buzz's Place website title, and
the full text of the document including the title, the author's name,
and the date.
This document may not be distributed for profit or reproduced in
printed form or in any edited form without the author's consent. A
document may be distributed with a clearly distinct and separated
appendix with notes and comments where the appendix has a clearly
separate attribution of authorship.
You may contact the author using the comment space on the home page of
the Buzz's Place website:
http://users.rcn.com/bbloom/
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