It's true. No canned laughter here. If a show doesn't have a laugh track it's usually a bad move, a grasp at art that isn't really there, punctuated by long stretches of silence. Any comedy that can fill the background noise with real laughter is a great show.

OK, I'm not sure if that's true that there's no laugh track in The IT Crowd. It's a rumor I read somewhere on the internet and we all know how reliable that is. I've been too busy laughing and paying attention to the story that I haven't searched for anything phony in the show. There's a chance that normal people might not find it so funny, but the rest of us do, and I'm speaking of the computer literate or barely literate and the nerds who really do understand such things. Either you're one of us and you're laughing at the show, or you're not and you're laughing because you think we're funny anyway. Either one is fine.

I can identify with many things in this show. Electronics has fascinated me since our neighbors who lived a half mile down the road bought the first TV in the area and suddenly we were just happening to drive down to their place to visit, every evening, until our family became so unwelcome that we bought our own television. Crystal radios, transistor radios, shortwave radios, weird science home built kits from a company called Heathkit that nobody today has ever heard of -- and that was all before I reached the tenth grade in public school. Before there were nerds, I was a TV repairman, back in the day when technicians actually tracked down rogue components and busted wires and we had tools and spare parts and fixed things, dang it. Long time ago -- things are different now. Last tech support job I had was just like Roy's and Moss's in this show, except much more supervised and unpleasant. I didn't stay long -- the glory days of fixing things are over.

But comedy does come from tragedy, and this is it, the comedy part. If you haven't seen it, you must have a look. Take this clip from the first show for example, with the two facets of tech support clearly illustrated. There's the Roy approach, and then there's the Moss approach.

While still in the military I discovered the essence of the System of Roy, which is to seldom answer the phone. You never ever answer the phone on the first or the second ring, because that will give the impression that you aren't working. Even though you really aren't working, that isn't the impression you want to put across. If you answer the phone quickly, people will call absolutely all the time. Tech support needs to be virtually unattainable.

An emergency situation, so I learned back then, will usually not get worse with the passage of time. If you can ignore it long enough, it will almost always have resolved itself without your help. Either the people requesting assistance will find other solutions, or they will go away, and since that is what you almost always help them to do anyway, not answering the phone simply speeds up the process.

There's rarely any real work to do, because mostly the problem is an operator malfunction or something bleedin' obvious like batteries that have been installed backwards, in which case you look serious, say it has to go back to the shop, and a week later you put new batteries in it and give it back with an inscrutable explanation of a problem in the horizontal oscillator.

The Moss System, on the other hand, is completely a civilian concept. Without the brutality of military life to completely ruin your belief in the goodness of people, the normal response to a tech support call to is to actually want to help. Since this is what you went to school to do, you feel that charitable obligation to serve humanity well.

Too late, you realize that your education has been so esoterically technical that the majority of the population doesn't speak your language at all. Asked to speak in layman's terms, so that the untrained can understand you, you find that there really are no layman's terms for what you're saying. People just think you're being pompous, when actually you're just trying to break it down into language anyone can understand, provided they've gone to tech school for about four years. The first thing they do in tech school is teach you the language.

You find yourself completely offended by things other people don't even notice. Moss's tirade about firewalls is a good example. I gave a similar speech very emphatically and emotionally to someone from Yahoo who tried to tell me that to play Kudos I should first disable my firewall and anti-virus programs because they might interfere with gameplay. My email response was scathing. Or as scathing as typing can be.

As a technical person one becomes so accustomed to being totally ignored that it's actually difficult to know when people are talking to you. It's unexpected. You react to cues that you've heard about, and quite often you turn out to be wrong. Honesty becomes your best approach to life, and it's not a very effective approach.

An example from my own past would be a romantic moment with a lady friend of mine many years ago when I was asked what I would do if I was standing at a bar, she walked into the room, and our eyes met. I answered honestly, that I would turn around to see who she was looking at, and that was apparently the wrong answer, judging by her immediate response.

The ways of humans are mysterious and unknowable, and for techies who blunder across the line into their world briefly, the only workable ploy is to just keeping wading until you hit dry ground again. They'll soon forget you were there anyhow.

There's nothing wrong in any weird way with being prepared. Men have always cherished their tools and their weapons, and that's normal. When the battleground is a desk and a computer, the weapons and tools are less romantic, but the need to maintain things and sharpen edges remains. So I would expect a man like Moss to have a stapler, and backup pens for backup pens, and several coats handy. I'd expect him to check regularly to make sure the pens had ink and the stapler had staples.

In college I was having a conversation with someone as we were in between classes, and since he pegged me as someone who "understood" things he started telling me privately that he just detested those people, the ones who are always prepared and carry everything with them that they might need, and I totally agreed, understood exactly what he meant. Then we were getting things assembled for class and he realized he hadn't stapled his term paper together.

No problem -- I handed him mine. I was one of Those People. I understand these things.

"The superior man keeps his weapons in good repair." -- the I Ching.

As I watch more and more of this show, I don't exactly see my life flashing before my eyes, but I do see many little pieces of it there -- some of them funny in a happy way and some of them funny in a way that make me squirm and grimace. Even though the show isn't literal and grittily real and sometimes seems half farce and half magical fairy tale, real things shine through. I become more appreciative of Chris O'Dowd as an actor, because of the way he shows pain. The moments in your life when you suddenly realize you've done something horrible and it's too late to fix it are honestly portrayed in his role as Roy. Moss isn't injured by much, mentally too far beyond the limits of the world to notice the horror, but Roy can still see over the fence.

When Roy is on a date with a woman from work, and finds out too late that for most of the evening he's had something on his forehead that looks like poo, I laughed and laughed until I almost cried, because I know that feeling. I really know that feeling.

Actually, now that I think about it, I recall more than one example.

OK, enough reminiscing, it should have been a sign to me back in the 50's when the only fellow in the country who knew the things that fascinated me was a bachelor recluse who lived in a firetower, but I was too innocent to pay attention. Just watch the show. It's funny.