AfterHours:Fun:Office

Contents 1 Navigation 2 Related categories 3 About the "Office fun and jokes" page 4 Office fun 5 Chimps' ladder shower 6 The boss is always right 6.1 Basic rules 7 (De) Motivational posters 8 Hiring 9 Dilbert wisdom 10 About consultants 11 CEO handbook - How to Keep Your Board from Meddling in Your Business 12 Terry Tate: Office Linebacker

Navigation

Related categories

About the "Office fun and jokes" page

Here we've put together a few fun or wisdom resources about office realities. Whether any grain of truth is to be found in these, is up to the readers to judge. We apologize for not poking enough fun at it, this page is still under construction. Please stay tuned, more fun is to come soon.

Office fun

• Workplace fun [1]
• Office humor archive [2]
• There are 3 types of people:
  • Those who make things happen
  • Those who watch things happen
  • Those who ask "What happened?"
• Great Office Signs [3]

Chimps' ladder shower

An experiment

Take 5 chimps, put them in a room. Tie a banana to the roof, then place a ladder, which would allow access to the banana. Be ABSOLUTELY sure that there is no other way to access the banana other than using the ladder.

Put in place a system that will flow the chamber with very cold water (from the roof, of course) every time somebody try to climb the ladder

Chimps will quickly learn that it's a very bad idea to climb the ladder indeed.

Now: Stop the flooding system, the water will freeze, and climbing the ladder won't start anything unpleasant.

Then: exchange one of the chimp with a new one.

This poor one will of course try to climb the ladder to catch the banana, and without knowing why, will have a good kicking by the others.

Now: Replace ANOTHER chimp. He will have a good kicking as well, but interestingly enough, it will be chimp number 6 (the last new one)that will kick the harder.

Continue the process until there are only new chimps in the room (i.e. none that encountered the cold shower)

None will try to climb the ladder, and if by any chance, one even think about it, he will be promptly squashed by the others.

Worse of all, no one among these chimps will have the faintest clue WHY it is forbidden to climb the ladder.

End of experiment

Ape society for us? We are not that much different and we are exactly the same - we follow rules, even if we forgot why they were settled in the first place.

The boss is always right

Basic rules

1. The Boss is always right!
2. In the impossible hypothesis that a subordinate may be right, rule 1 becomes immediately operative.
3. The boss does not sleep; he rests.
4. The Boss is never late; he is delayed elsewhere.
5. The Boss never leaves his work; his attention is required elsewhere.
6. The Boss never reads the paper in his office; he studies.
7. The Boss never takes liberties with his secretary; he educates her.
8. The Boss is always chief, even in his bathing togs.
9. Whomsoever may enter the boss's office with an idea of his own must leave the office with the boss's ideas.
10. If, in your lamentable ignorance, you fail to grasp the truth, fear not; return to rule 1.

(De) Motivational posters

• Despair Inc
• Increasing success by lowering expectations [4]
• De-motivational posters [5]
• demotivational images [6]

Hiring

Dilbert wisdom

• Famous Dilbert quotes [7]
• Dilbert zone [8]
• Large corporations welcome innovation and individualism in the same way the dinosaurs welcomed large meteors.
• Most problems go away if you just wait long enough. It might look like I'm standing motionless but I'm actively waiting for our problems to go away. I don't know why this works but it does.
• The entire economic system depends on the fact that people are willing to do unpleasant things in return for money.
• Work is for losers. A winner says 'That's on my list' and never commits to a deadline.
• Real-life Dilbert
  • Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule. (R&D Supervisor, Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing/3M Corp.)
  • Quote from the boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what 'I' say." (Mktg. executive, Citrix Corporation)
• Dogbert management handbook [9]

1. You?re always right, even when you?re stupid.

2. The physical laws of time and space were meant to be broken.

3. The problem is not a lack of resources, it?s a lack of meetings.

4. When in doubt, ask for status reports.

5. If you?re talking, you?re communicating.

6. Low morale is caused by character flaws in your employees.

7. If 10 people can complete a project in 10 days, then one person can complete the project in one day.

8. Teamwork is when other people do your work for you.

9. Employee illness is a manifestation of laziness.

10. Abuse is a form of recognition. And recognition is what every employee wants.

About consultants

• Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company.
• If you give a man a fish he will eat for a day. But if you teach a man to fish he will buy an ugly hat. And if you talk about fish to a starving man then you are a consultant.

CEO handbook - How to Keep Your Board from Meddling in Your Business

1. Meet by phone whenever possible. Most of them will be doing their email or goosing their admin or something and not paying any attention at all. They’ll just vote when you ask’em to.
2. Never distribute anything in advance; they might read it and get themselves all confused. Just present it all: gets you through most of the meeting.
3. Never number the pages of what you are presenting. Lots of time can be used constructively figuring out what page everybody is on. If you email the material (preferably just after the start of the meeting), send lots of separate files. Turkeys’ll never know what to look at. Bonus suggestion: send slightly different copies of files with different pagination to everyone; it’s a lotta work but it’s worth it.
4. Have your CFO present numbers, lots of numbers. Make sure they get a chance to go over variances in the pencil budget.
5. If you have to meet in person – it is gonna happen sometime – use food. Any discussion you don’t want input on should be right after lunch. No one’s gonna be awake then.
6. Speaking of lunch, you can play this for lots of time. Have your dumbest admin take orders off some huge takeout menu. Get what type of bread they want, dressing, meat, lettuce, all that. Then have a smart admin shuffle the list so NO order is right. Wrong bread with wrong filling etc. No veggies for vegetarians (they tend to be nitpickers anyway). Kills lots of time and helps make sure they meet on the phone next time. BTW, they’ll pay no attention to anything between when lunch is ordered and when it comes so minimum of an hour.
7. Do bring up board comp and director’s liability insurance. Sure to get their attention and won’t interfere with the real business of the company.
8. Have a nine person board with three insiders, four VCs and two people who don’t have a clue. Just four VCs alone should guarantee gridlock.

1. Every meeting should run way over schedule. You control the agenda: presentations up front; substance in the third overtime period.
2. If they’ve gotta discuss something, get’em down in the weeds. Color of the office; words for the new ad campaign; what bank to deposit tax payments in. That keeps everybody out of trouble.
3. If you’re public and their questions are going where you don’t want to go, tell them you’d be glad to answer but that’ll make them insiders for the next two years. You can also tell by who squirms who was planning to sell.

Terry Tate: Office Linebacker

"Terry Tate: Office Linebacker" was a series of short commercials created for Reebok, showing the "Terrible" Terry Tate, equipped in Reebok gear, punishing office workers who disobey office policy. Available on YouTube here and here and makes the object of an interesting marketing-techniques study named "Language and the Internet"