Ardith Hinton to Anton Shepelev:

AH> I enjoyed this joke

Great,  a  couple  more  jokes are on the way that hopefully
will not turn out old hats to you, either.

AH> because I'm interested in how people think &  while  I'm
AH> not a techie some of my favourite people are.  :-))

If am a techie, then I suppose you are a teachie, although I
am not fond of eigther word.

AS>> A programmer's mother asks her son: "Will you please go
AS>> to the drugstore and buy us some buns?
AH> The larger drugstores around here do offer a limited se-
AH> lection of groceries, but in most cases it does not  in-
AH> clude perishables.  YMMV....  :-)

Of  course, it has to be a grocery store. I plumb forgot the
word and was further confused by Ilf & Petrov's 1936 account
of their journey through America, which received high praise
not only in the USSR but also in the  USA.  One  chapter  in
their travelog begins thus:

   We stopped in a small town and dined at a drugstore.
   [...]
   The  current  American  drugsotre  is large bar with a
   high counter and rotating piano stools before it.
   [...]
   Although the drugstore had  long  ago  turned  into  a
   fast-food  joint, its owner has to be a pharmacist and
   to possess, as it were, the scientific education abso-
   lutely required for serving coffee, ice cream, toasts,
   and other typical drugstore goods.

   In the fatherst corner of this jolly enterpirse  is  a
   glass  case  with jars, little boxes, and bottles. One
   need only spend half an our in a drugstore  to  notice
   it. In contains medicine.

But  history  repeats  itself.  One episode of The Heroes of
Corona and Arbidol has a gag where the hero says: "I went to
the  Post  office  and  bought  a bottle of beer" -- this is
about modern Russia.

Here is a revised intorduction to my joke:

   The mother of a programmer asks him to  go  down  to  the
   grocery and buy some buns for tea. "Oh," -- she stops him
   the doorway, "I plumb forgot: if they have  eggs,  please
   take a dozen."

Does that sound/read/flow any better than my original?

AH> Uh-huh.   Mom  speaks  English the way she learned it...
AH> and doesn't know how to use techie jargon  such  as  "if
AH> exist  goto",  which  would  have made more sense to her
AH> son.  I'm reminded of how my  mother  politely  enquired
AH> each  year  whether  I  had  "a  very  large  class".  I
AH> couldn't get it through her head that as a schoolteacher
AH> I had eight or more classes of various sizes.

I  do  not quite understand the nature of her delusion. What
made her think you had a single class? Had it been the  wont
and  custom  of  teachers in her own time, or did she misbe-
lieve that you were still attending school?

AH> I am also reminded of a joke in which a woman gives  her
AH> husband a shopping list with items numbered like this:
AH>
AH>       1.  lettuce
AH>       2.  carrots
AH>           [...]
AH>      14.  milk
AH>
AH> He returns with one head of lettuce, two carrots... plus
AH> fourteen gallons of  milk.   In  US  measurements,  this
AH> would be approximately sixty litres....  :-Q

I  must  be  a weak man: I can't imagine hauling this burden
back home even from the nearest grocery. Well, may be  haul-
ing  *is* the word -- on sledge in winter. As for me, I feel
midly reluctant to carrying as little as two  20-liter  bot-
tles of drinking water, because I have to stop every now and
then in order straighten up and wipe the sweat off my  fore-
head.

Your  joke reminded me of another one involving enumeration:
a naked programmer was found dead the bath. The coroner cer-
tified  he  died of utter exhaustion. A quarter-full shampoo
bottle was clenched in his hand. The instruction on it read:

  1.  apply a small quantity on wet hair,
  2.  wash it off under running water,
  3.  repeat.

---