Clancy @ Stack Overflow

For fans of coding… and Australian bush ballads.

(With apologies to A B ‘Banjo’ Patterson.)






I had written him an email, from an old abandoned gmail
Account, sent to an address I had forgotten that I knew,
He was hacking when I knew him, so I sent the email to him,
Twice encrypted, and directed: Clancy @ Stack Overflow.

And an answer came quite sprightly, in a typeface most unsightly
(And I think the same was written using bolded Comic Sans).
’Twas his hacker mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it,
’Clancy's gone to DEF CON, driving, and we don't know all his plans!

In my wild erratic fancy, visions come to me of Clancy,
Gone a-driving down the highway, with a scanner on the dash,
And finding open networks quickly, Clancy ‘borrows’ bandwidth slickly,
Grabs his laptop, downloads torrents, then moves on, all in a flash.

And Facebook hath friends to ‘like’ him, though I doubt that they would strike him
As important as the DEF CON group they've formed on Google+,
And he sees the vision splendid, of the back doors unattended,
And at night he grabs their data, and then leaves without a fuss.

I am sitting in my boring cubicle, where an imploring
Instant message up from QA asks me when I'll fix that bug.
And from over the partition, I hear sighs of mass submission,
And the click-clack sounds of keyboards hypnotise me like a drug.

And in place of sites succumbing, I can hear the tireless humming,
Of air-conditioners, and of fans in hundreds of PCs.
And the code that I am writing, in a language unexciting,
Compiles fitfully while warnings multiply like some disease.

And the coding monkeys scare me, and their pallid faces wear me,
As their fingers peck at keyboards just like nervous little birds,
With their desperate eyes and needy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For microserfs are little more than poor, downtrodden nerds.

And I somehow rather fancy, that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at hacking, quit this job and just shoot through,
While he faced the silent screams of co-workers’ fading dreams.
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy @ Stack Overflow.

Tags: Humour