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The Paging Game

paul@atherton.com (Paul Sander)

(computer, chuckle)
From the rec.humor.funny joke archives.

[I got this from my uncle, who works at one of IBM's Silicon Valley labs. I don't know where he got it.]

The Paging Game

Jeff Berryman, University of British Columbia

  1. Each player gets several million “things.”
  2. Things are kept in “crates” that hold 512 things each. Things in the same crate are called “crate-mates.”
  3. Crates are stored either in the “workshop” or a “warehouse.” The workshop is almost always too small to hold all the crates.
  5. Each thing has its own “thing number.”
  6. What you do with a thing is to “zark” it. Everybody takes turns zarking.
  9. Only the “Thing King” knows whether a thing is in the workshop or in a warehouse.
  10. The longer a thing goes without being zarked, the “grubbier” it is said to become.


  4. With the given set of rules, oft-zarked things tend to get kept mostly in the workshop while little-used things stay mostly in a warehouse. This is efficient stock control.

Long Live the Thing King

[The following appear to have been added later, as they were typed in a different font.]


  1. The VM Thing King is considerably stronger than the Thing King of the system described above. He uses crates containing 4096 things.
  2. Recently the Thing King has tired of carrying crates back and forth between the warehouse and the workshop one at a time and has purchased a forklift. When it is someone else's turn to zark their things, the Thing King stacks the grubbiest of your crates on his forklift and hauls them to the warehouse. The warehouse is too small for the forklift to do much maneuvering, so once a stack of crates has been taken to the warehouse it can't be unstacked without bringing it into workshop. This means if you want to zark a thing which is stacked in the warehouse the whole stack of crates must be brought into the workshop. While this might appear to generate a lot of unnecessary crate traffic, it is more than offset by the reduction in the number of trips necessary.

{ed From Multing Magazine}


The Free Software Foundation claims no copyrights on this joke.


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