Olifanten jagen

Nou zeg, zo heb je ’n maand niks, zo twee binnen een kwartier.

MATHEMATICIANS hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant and catching one of whatever is left

EXPERIENCED MATHEMATICIANS will attempt to prove the existence of at least one unique elephant before proceeding to Step 1 as a subordinate exercise

PROFESSORS OF MATHEMATICS will prove the existence of at least one unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual elephant as an exercise for their graduate students

COMPUTER SCIENTISTS hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A:

  1. go to Africa
  2. Start at the Cape of Good Hope
  3. Work Northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent alternately East & West
  4. During each pass: a) catch each animal seen b) compare each animal caught to a known elephant c) stop when a match is detected

EXPERIENCED COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS modify Algorithm A by placing a known elephant in Cairo to ensure that the Algorithm will terminate

ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE PROGRAMMERS prefer to execute Algorithm A on their hands and knees

ENGINEERS hunt elephants by going to Africa, catching gray animals at random and stopping when any one of them weighs within plus or minus 15% of any previously observed elephant

ECONOMISTS don’t hunt elephant, but they believe that if elephants are paid enough, they will hunt themselves

STATISTICIANS hunt the first animal they see N times and call it an elephant

CONSULTANTS don’t hunt elephant and many have never hunted anything at all, but they can be hired by the hour to advise those people who do

OPERATIONS RESEARCH CONSULTANTS can also measure the correlation of hat size and bullet colour to the efficiency of hunting elephant strategies, if someone else will only identify the elephant

POLITICIANS don’t hunt elephants, but they will share the elephants you catch with the people who voted them in

LAWYERS don’t hunt elephants, but they do follow the herds around arguing about who owns the droppings

SOFTWARE LAWYERS will claim that they own an entire herd based on the look and feel of one dropping

VICE PRESIDENTS OF ENGINEERING, RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT try hard to hunt elephants, but their staff are designed to prevent it. When the vice president does get to hunt elephant, the staff will try to ensure that all possible elephants are completely prehunted before the vice president sees them. If the vice president does see a nonprehunted elephant , the staff will:

  1. compliment the vice president’s keen eyesight
  2. enlarge itself to prevent any such recurrence

SENIOR MANAGERS set broad elephant hunting policy based on the assumption that elephants are just like field mice, but with deeper voices

QUALITY ASSURANCE INSPECTORS ignore the elephants and look for mistakes the other hunters made when they were packing the Jeep

SALES PEOPLE don’t hunt elephants, but spend their time selling elephants they haven’t caught, for delivery two days before the season opens

SOFTWARE SALES PEOPLE ship the first thing they catch and write up an invoice for an elephant

HARDWARE SALES PEOPLE catch rabbits, paint them gray and sell them as desktop elephants