Face Down, Nine-Edge First

My friend, R, instant messaged me earlier today, with the following geek joke:

Q: How do you bury a programmer?
A: Face down, nine-edge first.

Not understanding the joke (and thus completely missing out on the absurd humor), but also not wanting R to know that I was completely clueless, I immediately switched to FireFox and Googled the punch-line.

The first (and only) link I followed led me to the website everything₂ - a veritable mish-mash of random factoids and miscellaneous lore - which happened to have the answer I was looking for: "Face down, nine-edge first is the proper way to insert card decks in the IBM 1402 and 1622 punch card readers."

What's great about this random discovery, however, beside the quick history lesson, is that the explanation went on to tell me that this phrase is used in a geek poem called "The Last Bug", hearkening back to the far-distant, dark, dusty days of punch card computing...

Ah, to stumble around the Internet and find a wonderful, random, old post like this.  It takes me back to the days of scowering the racks at the college library for books that hadn't been checked out since the early 1900s.

But I digress.  So, I IM-ed R back a link to the poem, thanking that dark overlord Google for pulling the weight of my obvious geek-slackerness.