Geekish Humor

The Seven Layer Inedible OSI Cake

The abuse of network packets must be stopped!

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I have always disliked the OSI networking model. No offense to the folks at ISO (though using a jumble of your own acronym is conceited, I think), but I have my reasons.

The first is that the damn thing is hellishly difficult to memorize. I was given the mnemonic “A priest saw ten nuns doing pushups”. That’s not very helpful. There are other mnemonics, but none of them are useful in any sense whatsoever.

Yesterday (or perhaps years earlier; time is nebulous in my world), a customer asked my why a vendor from whom he was attempting to buy a new switch was blubbering on about “Layer 2” as though that were important.

I became angry. My feeling is that customers should send checks and keep their yaps shut, especially when it comes to questions like this. Call me up and ask “How’s the weather up there?” and I can, with some effort, answer pleasantly, but seriously: how is anyone expected to politely respond to questions about the OSI model?

My wife, another hellishly demanding person, disagrees. She expects me to respond to such bleating on the theory that this will keep checks arriving in our mailbox. To keep marital harmony, I agreed to write up an explanation for…