How the Cringe stole Christmas, 2010

It’s that time of year again, when we give and share, look back and reflect — the time when even the blogosphere takes a few days off from repeating what somebody else has already said. In short, it’s a time where almost nothing happens. To celebrate, I’m reviving an old holiday classic, updated for 2010.

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How the Cringe Stole Christmas

Every noob

Who’s on Twitter

Likes Facebook a lot But the Cringe

A rare tweeter

Surely did not The Cringe hated Facebook and Zuckerberg too

Oh he had his reasons — maybe more than a few

It could be he abhorred clicking Like

For brain-dead posts by Tom, Dick, or Mike

It could be he didn’t have many friends

Or he hated the things everyone “recommends”

But the most likely reason (and the one I believe)

Was that he simply thought Zuckerberg kind of a dweeb

But it wasn’t just Facebook, oh no, not at all

That caused the Cringe’s green skin to crawl

It was Apple too, and the Apple boo-hoo-ers

Those iPhone and iPod and iPad froo-frooers

With their silly white earbuds and smug little grins

Who think words against Apple are cardinal sins

He stood there in Cringeville, hating those knobs

And the god that they worship, the one they call Jobs

With magical life-changing gizmos so white

That work only if you’re holding them right.

Listen more closely and you can hear them all sing: One more thing!

One more thing!

One more thing!

One more thing!

You’d think the Cringe heartless, but that isn’t quite true

There are geeks he feels sorry for, at least one or two

Like those poor Yahoo girls and sad Yahoo boys

Who’ll wake up on Christmas without any toys

With AltaVista, Buzz, and MyBlogLog now dead

And half the Yahooers tossed out on their heads

While all those shareholders held over a barrel

Will agree that Ms. Bartz is no Christmas Carol

Even the Cringe found some souls truly scary

Like the Google-head twins, Sergey and Larry

And their creepy old uncle, Eric the Schmidt

Who along with the twins was forced to admit

To spying on Wi-Fi networks

And proving themselves jerks

“Why,” he thought, “there are a million things I could hate

Like pimple-faced CEOs who can’t get a date

And all of those social networking freaks

And Gawker and Craigslist and of course WikiLeaks

Not to mention Anonymous and Hurd from HP

TechCrunch, and 4chan, and AT&T.”

Then the Cringe remembered whom he really despised

Who should be whacked with a stick and poked in the eye:

The spammers, the scammers, and slimy flimflammers

The BitTorrent blockers and neutrality knockers

Web censors from China to Kalamazoo

NSA snoops and the RIAA too

All of them this year were badder than bad

All should make Cringesters sadder than sad

So the Cringe waited, and waited, and waited some more

For the whining and moaning, the gnashing of teeth

The cries of despair, the calls for relief

He listened, and listened, and listened for it

But the geeks out in Cringeville didn’t whine — not a bit They kept Digging and Stumbling and gladly Slashdotting

They kept surfing and roaming and Wi-Fi hotspotting

Their BlackBerrys glowed from all that tap tapping

Their Flickr streams flowing, their Google Maps mapping

Amidst all this bustling, happy computing

They didn’t even mind their Windows rebooting

What happened then? Well in Cringeville they say

The Cringe’s snark supply shrank three sizes that day

Finally, exhausted, the Cringe gave up the fight

And he said, with a sigh, as he turned off the light,

“Merry Cringemas to all, and to all a good night.”

(Once again, apologies to the ghost of Theodore Geisel.)

Who’s been naughty and who’s been nice in your section of Cringeville? Submit your naughty/nice candidates below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “How the Cringe stole Christmas, 2010,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringeley’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.