To all who share geek humor only to be greeted with a blank stare:
welcome to my world.

I have a good friend that I went to engineering school with who has the same problem- we're surrounded by engineers, people who've had the same education that we have, but they don't ever quite seem to understand our jokes. Now if we were making references to the Tao Te Ching or something I might understand that- but we're not.

Example: Richard, who works as a building inspector, called to tell me of a set of plans he was reviewing that contained drawings of a wheelchair ramp. By building code, the slope of the ramp is a set value, so the difference in elevation is a function of the distance of the ramp. But this ramp was nowhere near long enough to do the job- it started out at grade, did one switchback with no landing, then came to the first floor elevation.

Richard looked at this and started laughing. "We have a historical document here! Building plans that use non-Euclidean geometry!"

His co-workers all looked blankly at him.

So he called me and explained it as I have above, and I chuckled. He exclaimed, "Thank god! I was getting worried!"

Feh. Some days being a witty geek among non-geeks and people who've gone through the geek barrier to the point of being robotic is a serious drag.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Wed 10 Sep 2008, 13:25, Reply)