Are your projects like this?

One of my regular readers emailed me a geeky cartoon which I'd not seen before (thanks Karl!). You're very lucky if you've never worked on a project like this:

I googled around to find the original source of this cartoon, but drew a blank. My searching did, however, uncover an article by Alan Chapman who has looked into the history of the Tree Swing drawings and found that it goes back aways - at least to the 1960s, and possibly earlier. He cites several appearances during the last forty or so years from many different constituencies in the working world, including an early version that apparently circulated through the British Civil Service in their internal newspaper (aptly named "Red Tape"). It seems the developers are not alone in feeling the frustration expressed in these pictures.

A micro-industry has grown around these cartoons. There's now a website devoted to them: The Project Cartoon.com (a Web 2.0 site, trendily in beta). You can buy the cartoon on posters or T-Shirts, or even create a customised version with your own captions, in myriad languages.

Here are my favourite additions: