Oh God How Did This Get Here I Am Not Good With Computer

About

“Oh god how did this get in here I am not good with computers” is a catchphrase coming from a peculiar cropped picture of Happy Cat on a white sheet of paper. Eventually the catchphrase would become an ironic way of signifying that someone is “not good with computers.”

Origins

According to Oh Internet^[1] (former Encyclopedia Dramatica), that phrase came from Something Awful on December 8th 2004 in a forum thread created by SA goon Jer:

On December 08, 2004 SA forums goon Jer posted a thread entitled You can’t fight the man, but I’ll damn well try! which outlined his battles with local law enforcement over a ridiculous parking ticket. He protested the ticket once and was declined, but noticed that on the letter denying his protest outlined the process for a second appeal and quickly went to work writing a rambling and insane letter explaining his position, complete with diagrams and illustrations.

Most of that thread^[2] was centred upon Jer describing how he refused to pay a parking ticket and, upon receiving a letter denying his protest, wrote a series of detailed responses.
The followings are screenshots he posted with various diagrams and illustrations:

On the second page the phrase was used:

Associated with Happy Cat

The cut off Happy Cat photograph first found itself in a page from Cryptosystem.org^[3] in April of 2005. In 2006, famous webcomic Toothpaste for Dinner reused the catchphrase in one of its strip^[4].

Also in 2006, several YTMND sites were made. “Not Even Doom Madison” referenced the NEDM meme and has more than 16 000 views to date. “Happy cat is not good with computers”, and “I’m not good with computers” were created as well.^[5]

The YTMNDs used on a photograph of the catchphrase and the face published in a newspaper identified as the Badger Herald from the “University of Wisconsin Madison”.

Seeing an obscure Internet in-joke in a somewhat well-known newspaper made the Internet chuckle in awe as early as 2007, with many reposts of the photograph on websites such as Bungie^[6], My Confined Space^[7], Meh.org.^[8] It even reached Tumblr^[9].

Usage as a catchphrase

As a catchphrase alone, Oh god how did this get in here I am not good with computers is commonly used to introduce a thread or blog post about something computer-related that has gone wrong, such as website downtime ^[10], a thread in the wrong forum section ^[11], or the discovery of an unexpected virus.^[12]

The catchphrase returns a wide range of results on Google^[13] and Youtube^[14], showing its use in webpages titles and/or descriptions.

External references