There apparently was less laughter when my boss pointed the finger at Maintenance for not handling the upkeep contract properly for the generators. Site manager walks up and asks 'When's the power going to be back up?' The Maintenance manager looks at him 'I'm not psychic, that's why I'm on the phone with the company right now.' I laughed and told him that's how IT feels half the time and the 3 of us chuckled for a bit. Power went out, generator failed and he's on the phone. He wasn't good with tech but he didn't cause issues for us. I got to have a good laugh with the Maintenance manager once.
When you're trying to explain to a manager who knows how to get bags of flour filled by the machine that the SaaS application that handles the weights and measures is down (and also not owned by IT) you have to simplify. Computer knowledge was low to non-existent in over half of the people I dealt with and average to competent for about 30%.
I would have phrased it a bit differently to fit the audience. The 'dumbed down' version would be after explaining that the vendor service/site was down and outside of our control. Depends on the audience, the example I gave is what I would have used at my last job which was a food production warehouse.
