In "Stranger in a strange land" Valentine Michael Smith is puzzled by the concept of humor, until he realizes that we laugh because it hurts.
"Is it funny that Elsa Mae lost her panties? Not to Elsa Mae!"
Remember what got VMS to finaly laugh? A monkey got beaten to let go of some peanuts, and it immediately found a smaller monkey to beat up.
You can't insult users who call your help desk, you can't even play a laugh track to accompany their most glaring stupidites. But you can laugh about it later.
I remember one case, where a customer had trouble logging in. I told him his username must be all lowercase, and he firmly told me that he WAS using all lowercase (he could see it on the screen) and he still couldn't log in. After several rounds of back-and-forth I finaly restarted the tacacs demon in debug mode, and I saw him capitalize his username. When I asked him why, he said "I have to. It's the name of our company".
This after several times telling me quite firmly that he WAS NOT using any upper case letters in his username.
I can laugh about it now. I couldn't laugh about it then - the whole thing took an hour and a alf, and it literaly had me banging my head against the wall.
I don't live in Serbia, but I do speak Serbian as a second language, so I'm able to compare the TV news that people in Serbia get to see with what is shown on news stations like CNN, SKY news, BBC world etc.
The main difference is doubt. The western media is full of doubt. They interview Serbian representatives, they question political figures, they have pundits representing various points of view.
Serbian TV is full of certaneity. There is no doubt, there is only one truth, and that truth can be completely changed from one day to the next. If a foreign politician voices something which can be interpreted as in any way favorable of Serbia, he is a coragous paragon of wisdom. If the next day the same person utters something moderately critical of Milosevic, the same TV anchor will with a straight face declare them a "serb-hater from way back".
And the Belgrade TV method is to repeat the same point over and over (and over) again, so even when the people see what is true and what isn't they still believe the TV rather than their own eyes. I've had occasion to compare Belgrade TV reports of events I've witnessed to what I saw.
By the end of the news I was ready to believe in alternate realities, the differences were that bad.
The internet gives people in Serbia the chance to see other views, but not everybody wants to hear other views, and even when they do, 12 years of Belgrade TV propaganda has brainwashed them to a point where they can't recognise truth when they see it.
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"Is it funny that Elsa Mae lost her panties? Not to Elsa Mae!"
Remember what got VMS to finaly laugh? A monkey got beaten to let go of some peanuts, and it immediately found a smaller monkey to beat up.
You can't insult users who call your help desk, you can't even play a laugh track to accompany their most glaring stupidites. But you can laugh about it later.
I remember one case, where a customer had trouble logging in. I told him his username must be all lowercase, and he firmly told me that he WAS using all lowercase (he could see it on the screen) and he still couldn't log in. After several rounds of back-and-forth I finaly restarted the tacacs demon in debug mode, and I saw him capitalize his username. When I asked him why, he said "I have to. It's the name of our company".
This after several times telling me quite firmly that he WAS NOT using any upper case letters in his username.
I can laugh about it now. I couldn't laugh about it then - the whole thing took an hour and a alf, and it literaly had me banging my head against the wall.
And that's why I find UF funny.
The main difference is doubt. The western media is full of doubt. They interview Serbian representatives, they question political figures, they have pundits representing various points of view.
Serbian TV is full of certaneity. There is no doubt, there is only one truth, and that truth can be completely changed from one day to the next. If a foreign politician voices something which can be interpreted as in any way favorable of Serbia, he is a coragous paragon of wisdom. If the next day the same person utters something moderately critical of Milosevic, the same TV anchor will with a straight face declare them a "serb-hater from way back".
And the Belgrade TV method is to repeat the same point over and over (and over) again, so even when the people see what is true and what isn't they still believe the TV rather than their own eyes. I've had occasion to compare Belgrade TV reports of events I've witnessed to what I saw.
By the end of the news I was ready to believe in alternate realities, the differences were that bad.
The internet gives people in Serbia the chance to see other views, but not everybody wants to hear other views, and even when they do, 12 years of Belgrade TV propaganda has brainwashed them to a point where they can't recognise truth when they see it.