Quotas (no, not that kind)

Do you have quotas with your friends? Is it strange that I do? Like have you ever over-used a joke so much that you had to cut someone off? For instance, my old college roommate and I were allowed one gay joke per semester about each other. Just one. that's all you get. And then there was one other....

I might have blogged about this before...but oh well...it'll be a repeat. Back at UDel I took a Computer Engineering course. You learn all about circuits and the flow of electricity to send signals. As part of our labs we have a little black box (no, not that kind). It was like those science kits you get when you're a kid. It has a bunch of holes in the top so you could put circuits and wires in and then make lights lite up certain ways. Well, the circuits were called "gates". The 3 main gates were "OR", "AND", and "NOT". I won't get too deep into it but if a signal passes through a NOT gate then it reverses. So in binary language, if a 1 goes into the gate then it becomes a 0 when it comes out.

Anyway, being the comic geniuses that we were, we started making NOT gate jokes. "Hey, that would have been really funny if you put it through a not gate". Oh man...we were hilarious. But after a semester of those jokes, it just had to stop. So I told my friend that I was placing a quota on the joke. You can only use it once per year. And we both abide by it. Just about once per year one of us pulls out a random Not gate joke. And it's hilarious because we haven't heard it for a long time.

On a side note, I'm going to be living with him in my new apartment in a few weeks.

So moving on. We both used ours up today. He was telling me about a mutual friend who wasn't a great programmer and is now working for a company that we don't have much respect for. This was our conversation.

NOTE: While typing this, we were 8 feet away from each other in adjacent cubicles.

TrianK: he works on some missle tracking stuff
RobH: oh dear god
RobH: we're all screwed
TrianK: yeah i know
TrianK: jumpy person + missle tracking = BOOM
TrianK: he probably won't convert from meters to feet or something
RobH: lol
RobH: he'll put the missile through a NOT gate
TrianK: can I rethink this whole roommate thing?
TrianK: can I put the roommate thing though a NOT gate?
RobH: there...we've both used up our quotas for 2005
TrianK: praise allah
TrianK: and mohammed is his prophet
TrianK: humbala! humbala! humbala!

So there you go. Not much substance today. And this isn't nearly as funny when I read it now. But I wanted to share. And it's my blog so I'll type if I want to.

Peace out.