Dave Colby posted this on the Groaners listserv. The computer nerds will groan louder than the others. The author is unknown.

The legend of the Tridkicker is already known far and wide, so I won’t repeat it. But there’s more to the story.

Our Tridkicker was getting old, and was finding it more difficult to kick Trids as far as he used to. Besides, he had recently installed cable TV and there was so much that he wanted to watch. So, he used his ingenuity to build a robot to kick the Trids for him.

As he was doing the programming, he thought that it would be a good idea to write some code to make the robot kick naked Trids twice as far, because he hated them the most. When he finished the coding and began to compile, he got a very cryptic error message: “TDX-24761 Do not compile until Xmas.” This message wasn’t in his error message manual, so he called the technical support line to get help.

The support rep did some checking and then replied, “It looks like you’ve found one of our undocumented features. You’re writing a handler for naked Trids, aren’t you?”

The Tridkicker was surprised and said, “Why yes; how did you know?”

Came the reply: “The compiler can’t parse the code until Christmas, because that’s the only time it makes sense — to put a bare Trid in a parse tree.”