I Have A Bad Feeling About This

And unfortunately, it's a feeling I've learned to trust: Humor and IT do not make for the best match. Ditto sex and IT, though catch me sometime late at a tradeshow and I might be persuaded to recount the one about the desktop support guy fired by a local government entity for using up more than a quarter of the agency's server capacity with porn he'd stored.Oh, yes ... we'll laugh and laugh. But I digress.

Two vendors, Microsoft and Seagate, are co-sponsoring Heroes Happen Here, a reader-driven, RSS-fed online comic strip that will depict "how you, your team, or your company were heroes because of how you used IT or programming to save the day." So it sounds like there will be more to it than just documenting the madcap adventures of scanning log files, or that giddy feeling from each zany backup performed.

ITdevcomics.com is encouraging IT pros to write in with their own anecdotes. And apparently truth need not be a barrier to entry: "Stories that really happened are encouraged," the creators say. Hmmmm ... sounds a lot like trade journalism.

OK, it's easy to mock. But getting IT pros to tell their stories is no small task -- ask me or any of my colleagues, who've plied you all with the most mind-numbing questions we can imagine to get to the bottom of Business Process Management (BPM), or Token Ring's topological superiority, for starters. I wish the sponsors and the artists well with this, but they've got their work cut out for them.

You can see a Day One mockup to get a gander at the look and feel of HHH. Looks like they'll go live the first week of February, and it will be curious to see where they take this and how much untapped humor there may be in IT.

If laughter is indeed the best medicine, I'll be reading every day for a regular dose.