custom engine

An original recording of a Verizon customer service call in which the rep fails to understand the difference between cents and dollars, known as Verizon Math.

A one-minute clip of David Mitchell on a UK panel show explaining why he respects poor customer service in Britain. He argues that people who do their job well should not also be required to be nice.

A short claymation music video by animator savannahXYZ satirizing how bad web search has become, with SEO spam and ads crowding out real answers. It is comedic rather than analytical.

Alamo Drafthouse posted an angry voicemail from a customer who was kicked out for texting in the theater. The theater turned it into a humorous in-house preview.

A KRAZAM comedy sketch in which a character recites reassuring affirmations to site reliability engineers, satirizing on-call and outage culture.

A short comedic video in which a man poses as an Apple engineer talking about the 2016 MacBook Pro. It is a critique of the USB-C-only design.

A three-minute scene from season 2, episode 4 of Silicon Valley in which Jared is excited after the company hires a woman engineer. It satirizes tokenism in tech hiring.

A clip from Terry Gilliam's film Brazil in which the illegal heating engineer Harry Tuttle visits Sam Lowry to fix his heating problem.

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

A short satirical video, originally titled Broccoli Man, in which an engineer who only wants to serve 5 terabytes gets tangled in Google's internal resource and production processes. It is the source of the phrase about forgetting how to count that low.

A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.

A satirical Onion Talks episode in which a startup founder explains making money by selling his users' data to oppressive governments. It parodies tech conference talks and monetization of communities.

A one-minute clip of Scotty from Star Trek giving advice to engineers about managing expectations in estimates. It is a comedic bit of workplace wisdom.

A comedy sketch of a business meeting in which an engineer, the expert, is asked to do impossible things like draw red lines with blue ink.

Lily Tomlin's classic 1976 Saturday Night Live sketch as telephone operator Ernestine, mocking the monopolistic Bell phone company with the line 'We don't care. We don't have to.' It is a one-minute parody of arrogant corporate indifference.

A short comedy video of the Turbo Encabulator, a piece of technobabble nonsense describing an imaginary machine in deadpan engineering language.

A short KRAZAM comedy sketch in which engineers explain an absurdly tangled microservices architecture to a manager. It parodies how backend complexity gets justified with jargon.

The Little Britain sketch in which call-center worker Carol types into her computer and replies 'computer says no' to every request.

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

A That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which a customer tries to buy a gift for his aunt in a shop that keeps pushing him toward extras.

The TruCoat scene from the Coen brothers' Fargo, in which car salesman Jerry Lundegaard sells an irate customer undercoating he never ordered.

A sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound in which a caller learns that identity theft is, in effect, a bank robbery in which the bank blames the customer. It runs about two minutes.

A short Simpsons clip from Who Shot Mr. Burns Part 1 in which Mr. Burns declares the sun his enemy and plans to block it out.

A clip from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where Scotty introduces an astonished engineer to future technology to build the whale tanks.

A short parody ad about iOS 4.0 running slowly on the 3G iPhone, made by a disappointed Apple customer.

A two-minute clip from the film Fight Club in which the narrator, a former recall coordinator, explains the formula companies use to decide whether a recall costs more than paying out settlements.

An SNL sketch in which Adam Sandler plays a tour operator who bluntly clarifies what his Italy tours can and cannot do for customers' lives.

A short clip from the movie Office Space in which a character insists he has people skills.

A Nathan For You sketch in which Nathan Fielder tackles customers' privacy fears at computer repair shops with an awkwardly absurd business solution. It is a comedy clip from the Comedy Central show.

Tom Scott shows a robot double of himself, built from an Engineered Arts Mesmer robot, delivering a VPN advertisement in his place.

The classic Monty Python sketch in which a customer tries to return a dead parrot to a pet shop owner who insists it is only resting.