A Jolly Phisherman I asked a jolly phisherman: Have you any phish? Yes, sir! Yes, sir! More than you could wish. One sent a bank account, one sent a PIN. One sent a password that let me log right in. I said to myself, and I thought to myself, And I said to myself, said I: If an eMail asks for your name and a PIN, You never should click Reply.
	Hickory, Dickory, Dare Hickory, dickory, dare. The user flew up in the air. The screen turned blue, And he was through. Hickory, dickory, dare.
	There Once Was a Program There once was a program, That needed some RAM, Before it even would open. When it ran well, It ran very, very well, But when it blue screened, It was broken.
	A Diller, a Dollar A diller, a dollar, a service-desk caller: Why answer you so soon? I used to wait till 10 o’clock, And now it’s only noon.

 

Blue Screen: When the screen of a program running under the Windows operating system [q.v.] turns blue, the program has had a fatal error [q.v.]—one that it cannot recover from—and the computer does not know
what to do next.

Error is short for programming error. Computers are very literal minded and do exactly what they are told to do, whether it makes sense or not. If the program instructs the computer to jump off a cliff, it will. The computer
equivalent of jumping off a cliff is known as a crash , i.e. the program terminates or quits unexpectedly.

One of the most frustrating and, unfortunately, still common error messages is the program (fill in the blank) has quit because an unspecified error occurred. It does not tell you what went wrong. They way that computer engineers write error messages, even if the message were more explicit about what went wrong, you would need a degree in computer science to understand it.

Hardware is the name of all the pieces of computing equipment you can touch, like the computer itself, the screen [q.v.], the hard drive [q.v.], the keyboard and mouse [q.v.].

Phishing is an eMail [q.v.] scam in which the confidence trickster or con artist sends the mark a phony (spoofed [q.v.]) message pretending to be one of the eCommerce establishments that the mark does business with. In
the message, the con artist asks that the mark confirm his/her account number and password. Once the con artist has this information, the account is quickly cleaned out.

Service desk: a place that a user [q.v.] can call to ask the manufacturer questions about a piece of computer hardware [q.v.] or a program [q.v.]. It is also known as the help line or the help desk . Some service desks are
notorious for making callers wait for a long time before answering the telephone.

Windows operating system: The operating system produced by Microsoft Corporation is known as Windows.

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"The rhymes are 99.9% excellent, and imaginative. [The] cartoons are funny and entertaining," said one reader. The glossary "is so very informative on I.T. practice and precedent, the book could be marketed as an I.T. Primer for Complete Idiots or Geriatric Ignoramuses (Ignorami?)," says another.