When CSIs stray too close to home

I remember an interview with Emma Thompson way back when she was in The Tall Guy with Jeff Goldblum.

"You play a nurse, did you spend time at a hospital to observe how nurses work?" she was asked.

"No." She replied, "I'm an actress, I acted being a nurse."

I loved that response, skewering in a few words a legion of method actors and the interviewer into the bargain.

Yet, how many of us have watched our profession portrayed in film or on TV by some walking cosmetic-surgery commercial and cried, "No one buffs nipple-gimlets like that!"  (or words to that effect).

Well, I was enjoying an episode of CSI:NY the other day - it told the story of the Cabbie Killer, an evil taxi driver who kidnapped and gassed his passengers.  The idea of a killer cabbie is ironic as most of them seem to be trying to kill themselves and everyone within side-swiping distance anyway.  Anyway, the Cabbie Killer had kidnapped some irritating blogger (bloody bloggers) and was forcing him to live-blog the killer's moments with his current corpse.  Our hero, Mac Taylor and his attractive but useless sidekick, Montana were reading the web-site with distate.  On recognising that the page was being updated in real-time, Montana turned to Mac and said...

"I'll create a GUI interface using Visual BASIC and see if I can track an IP address"

WHAT????

Ignoring the fact that no-one except the Goateed Bassman writes anything in VB, it doesn't make any sense.  She may as well

Write a Java app that connects to the domain using ASP.

or

Prototype a Ruby executable that will decode the URL.

or

Create an extreme program with DSDM that derives the TCP/IP.

Developers don't really sound like that!

Do we?