Category: Work

Speaker Phone Remedy

Have you ever worked in an office where someone insists on listening to their voice-mail using the speakerphone (at full volume, naturally). It can really begin to bother you after a while.

I found a fairly easy fix for that though. I had my wife call his phone when he wasn’t there and left this message: “Hi, this is Candy from 1-900-HOT-BABE. You haven’t paid for the ‘toys’ we sent you, you naughty boy. You wouldn’t want me to come over there and spank you, would you?”

That was the last time I heard *that* particular speakerphone!

Tribal Wisdom

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

However, in modern business, because of the heavy investment factors to be taken into consideration, often other strategies have to be tried with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

2. Changing riders.

3. Threatening the horse with termination.

4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.

5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.

6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.

7. Appointing an intervention team to reanimate the dead horse.

8. Creating a training session to increase the riders load share.

9. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.

10. Change the form so that it reads: “This horse is not dead.”

11. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

12. Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.

13. Donate the dead horse to a recognized charity, thereby deducting its full original cost.

14. Providing additional funding to increase the horses performance.

15. Do a time management study to see if the lighter riders would improve productivity.

16. Purchase an after-market product to make dead horses run faster.

17. Declare that a dead horse has lower overhead and therefore performs better.

18. Form a quality focus group to find profitable uses for dead horses.

19. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for horses.

20. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Being Observant

Bill was in a terrible accident at work. Oddly, however, the only permanent damage done to him was that both of his ears were amputated. But, because he was permanently disfigured, he settled with the company for a rather large sum of money and went on his way.

One day, Bill decided to invest his money in a small, but growing computer business. And, after weeks of negotiations, he bought the company outright. But, after signing on the dotted line, he realized that he knew nothing about running such a business and quickly set out to hire someone who could do that for him.

The next day he had set up three interviews. The first guy was great. He knew everything he needed to and was very interesting. But at the end of the interview, Bill asked him, “Do you notice anything different about me?” And the gentleman answered, “Why yes. I couldn’t help but notice you have no ears.” Bill got very angry and threw him out.

The second interview was with a woman, and she was even better than the first guy. But he asked her the same question, “Do you notice anything different about me?” And she replied, “Well, you have no ears.” Bill again was upset and tossed her out.

The third and last interview was the best of all three. It was with a very young man who was fresh out of college. He was smart. He was handsome. And he seemed to be a better businessman than the first two put together. Bill was anxious, but went ahead and asked the young man the same question, “Do you notice anything different about me?”

And to his surprise, the young man answered, “Yes, you wear contact lenses.”

Bill was shocked, and said, That’s incredibly observant, young man. How in the world did you know that?

The young man fell off his chair laughing hysterically and replied, “Well, it’s pretty hard to wear glasses with no ears!”

Did You Do It?

One afternoon a man came home from work to find total mayhem in his family’s house. Their three children were outside, still in their pajamas, playing in the mud, with empty food boxes and wrappers strewn all around the front yard. The door of his wife’s car was open, as was the front door to the house.

Proceeding into the entry, he found an even bigger mess. A lamp had been knocked over, and the throw rug was wadded against one wall. In the front room the TV was loudly blaring a cartoon channel, and the family room was strewn with toys and various items of clothing. In the kitchen, dishes filled the sink, breakfast food was spilled on the counter, dog food was spilled on the floor, a broken glass lay under the table, and a small pile of sand was spread by the back door.

He quickly headed up the stairs, stepping over toys and more piles of clothes, looking for his wife. He was worried she may be ill, or that something serious had happened. He found her lounging in the bedroom, still curled in the bed in her pajamas, reading a novel. She looked up at him, smiled, and asked how his day went. He looked at her bewildered and asked, “What happened here today?”

She again smiled and answered, “You know every day when you come home from work you ask me what in the world I did today?”

“Yes,” was his incredulous reply.

She answered, “Well, today I didn’t do it.”

Following Directions

The CIA had an opening for an assassin. After all of the background checks, interviews, and testing were done, there were three finalists, two men and a woman.

For the final test, the CIA agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun. “We must know that you will follow your instructions no matter what the circumstances. Inside of this room, you will find your wife sitting in a chair. Kill her!!!!”

The man said, “You can’t be serious. I could never shoot my wife.”

The agent said, “Then you are not the right man for this job.”

The second man was given the same instructions. He took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about five minutes. Then the man came out with tears in his eyes. “I tried, but I can’t kill my wife.”

The agent said, “You don’t have what it takes, take your wife and go home.”

Finally, it was the woman’s turn. She was given the same instructions, to kill her husband.

She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one shot after another. They heard screaming, crashing, banging on the walls. After a few minutes, all was quiet.

The door opened slowly and there stood the woman. She wiped the sweat from her brow and said, “You guys didn’t tell me the gun was loaded with blanks. I had to beat him to death with the chair.”

Fast Dads

“My dad’s so fast,” said one boy, “that he can fire an arrow at a tree, run like buggery and catch the arrow before it hits it.”

“My dad’s faster than that” said the second kid. “He can drop a brick from the tenth floor of a building and run down the stairs and catch it before it hits the ground.”

“My dad’s faster than your dads,” said the third kid. “He works for the City. He knocks off at five and he’s always home by two-thirty.”

The Nervous Tick

A man with a winking problem is applying for a position as a sales representative for a large firm. The interviewer looks over his papers and says, “This is phenomenal. You’ve graduated from the best schools; your recommendations are wonderful, and your experience is unparalleled. Normally, we’d hire you without a second thought. However, a sales representative has a highly visible position, and we’re afraid that your constant winking will scare off potential customers. I’m sorry … we can’t hire you.”

“But wait,” he said. “If I take two aspirin, I’ll stop winking!”

“Really? Great! Show me!”

So the applicant reaches into his jacket pocket and begins pulling out all sorts of condoms: red condoms, blue condoms, ribbed condoms, flavoured condoms; finally, at the bottom, he finds a packet of aspirin. He breaks it open, swallows the pills, and stops winking in a few moments.

“Well,” said the interviewer, “that’s all well and good, but this is a respectable company, and we will not have our employees womanising all over the country!”

“Womanising? What do you mean? I’m a happily married man!”

“Well then, how do you explain all these condoms?”

“Oh, that,” he sighed. “Have you ever walked into a pharmacy, winking, and asked for aspirin?

University Graduate

A young man hired by a supermarket reported for his first day of work.

The manager greeted him with a warm handshake and a smile, gave him a broom and said, “Your first job will be to sweep out the store.”

“But I’m a University graduate,” the young man replied indignantly.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that,” said the manager. “Here, give me the broom and I’ll show you how.”