When I was hired to run the IT department of a major company my predecessor left three letters in the desk that was now mine. Each letter was clearly labeled; System Failure #1, System Failure #2, System Failure #3. A post-it note was attached to the bundle of letters.
In case of a substantial system failure open the letters in order, once per failure, and they will help you through the problem.
I put the letters back in the desk and forgot about them.
About one year later we had a cascading server failure that left our corporate intranet and several important production servers off-line. While repairing the problem I remembered the letters. Curious, I opened the first letter.
Blame me, your predecessor
The day after we got the servers back up I was called in to my boss;s office to explain what happened and why were down for so long. Taking my cue from the letter I blamed my predecessor. My boss was satisfied with my answer and let me go.
About six months down the road we had another big failure. This time our primary database server went down and the secondary was having trouble dealing with the load. I had to put a lot of extra hours into getting them back up and we lost a few transactions due to the backup server not being able to function under the load.
Once again, I reached into that desk drawer and opened letter #2.
Blame the equipment
This time I lamented to the boss about how it wasn't my fault. It was that backup server! If we had some good equipment to run on these things just would not happen. He was satisfied with my answer and I went back to work.
Things ran smoothly for the next 18 months. Then we got hit with a virus that somehow got past our firewall and wreaked havoc on our systems.
I opened the third letter.
Write three letters
PS: I wrote this based of the old Russian version. Consider this a derivative work and please follow my CC license when posting this to your own blog. i.e. provide a link back to me.
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******* lame. This story is old as hell, and there have been so many different iterations of it that it’s just a worthless cliche.
The joke originates during the Cold War. The new Soviet premier takes office and finds three letters in his desk. In the original the “equpiment” is replaced with “Americans.”
The only thing new is the history people don’t know.
It’s spelled “cue”, not “queue”.
(with reference to “Taking my queue from the letter I blamed my predecessor.”)
Doesn’t anybody learn English anymore?
The newer joke is more simple…
“When he sees the third letter, he puts in back in the drawer and takes out the second letter again.”
It’s spelled “wreaked”, not “wrecked”.
(with reference to “and wrecked havoc on our systems.”)
Doesn’t anybody learn English anymore?
Dumbass!
You commenter’s above me are the most disingenuous *****. Is it absolutely necessary to criticise everything. It’s a funny story old or not, write your own blog trolls.
define:wreaked
hmmm…
No, cue is correct.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=cue&x=0&y=0
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=queue&x=0&y=0
Maybe “wrought”?
It’s a short, humourous story well adapted to the modern world.
Everyone whining about it being recycled shoud go and pull their heads in and find something better to complain about.
The outgoing drug czar in the movie “Traffic” relates a version of this story. In the movie it is attributed to Khruschev.. by this time shoe-less. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/quotes.
Here’s what’s really funny. Cue is actually the correct usage in this context. You might hit dictionary.com next time before you start criticizing. Good thing you’re anonymous.
It’s spelled “cue”, not “queue”.
(with reference to “Taking my queue from the letter I blamed my predecessor.”)
Doesn’t anybody learn English anymore?
You’re dead wrong. A “queue” is a line of people. He is referring to cue as being a point marking an event.
You moron. Here’s a cue for you. Get in the queue and get the **** out
a queue is a line of people or vehicles waiting for something or an ordered list of tasks to be performed or messages to be transmitted; a cue is a signal or stimulus that helps to solve a problem or provides information about what to do – or a tapering rod used to strike a cue ball in pool or billiards
- thesaurus.com
clearly “cue” is correct
wit sucks
Your all a bunch of spelling nazis. Get over yourself it’s just a joke.
It’s “you’re” as in “you are” not “your” as in “I’ll kick your gonads”.
If “your” gonna be stickly about proper english grammer and word usage then don’t forget your own punctuations. “Your” missing a comma it your retort.
Of course “cue” is correct. It’s been corrected per the update you would have had to pass on your way to proving your superior intellect….
You could also have understood that it had been corrected by the context of the post you replied to as the author quotes the offending line with the word ‘queue’ in it.
Try define:wreak
Recasting searches by changing tense, using singular rather than plural and other things you probably don’t remember from English 101 can be really helpful when dealing with the imperfect results from a google definition serch.
“Grammer” is spelt Grammar, and you spelt “in” wrong in the final sentence in your post. This could go on all day… grow up and just enjoy the joke!
” “Your” missing a comma it your retort.”
That would be an apostrophe, not a comma.
For all the a**holes with nothing better to do than rip into some guys spelling; kudos for propagating the idea of the stererotypical IT guy.
It’s no wonder everyone at you work with think you’re arrogant pricks.
“guys” should have an apostrophe indicating its possessive function (”guy’s”).
Can we really help being amused when people leave out apostrophes in possessives (like “guy’s”) and spell “that” as “at”? Why can’t we enjoy the grammatical as well as the spelling mosh pit that follows it? :-P
Who cares about the misspellings and typos. It’s a joke, and old one yes, but still just a joke.
So get over the misspellings/typos and enjoy the joke; or move along to some other web site. Perhaps a site where you and your fellow spelling Republicans…I mean Nazis…can hang out and bash each other about the typos you find.
It should be “an”, not “and”.
Yoo guyz look rideeculouslee funnee, especialy ze one who is caring about punctuationz and grammarz, lolz! Gasp! Just appreciate ze joke man!
I,m sure ur gonna get mad at reeding dis one, lol!!!
stupid americans! learn to spell and stop polluting our planet!
You can spell it both ways.
“It’s spelled “cue”, not “queue”.
(with reference to “Taking my queue from the letter I blamed my predecessor.”)
Doesn’t anybody learn English anymore?”
clearly this is indicating that the author of this post had origianally seen the word spelt queue, and was correcting it here, the author then corrected it causing the confusion methinks.
Haha, this is so funny..
I recently posted a link back to my blog on both Digg and Netscape to see what would happen. The results were not as shocking as you might think… until you factor in StumbleUpon!
The entry I linked to with both news aggregators was The Three Letters.
Holy hell! It’s ironic how “grammar-aware” all of these commenters are! And you thought you were just sharing a story…
A lot of people wonder just how much money a front paged story on Digg is worth. My blog has made it there at least once and I’m going tell you what I made off of it. This may vary for others.This is a screen cap of my AdSense earnings from a few days pri
I love that someone posted Anonymous claiming ownership and *demanding* a linkback while having “Author unknown” on it.
[...] is a link to the story and here is the Digg [...]
[...] entry I linked to with both news aggregators was The Three Letters. I did not know what sort of result to expect but I was overwhelmed by the response of the Diggers [...]