New Rules For Employment
A survey of top personnel executives of 100 major American corporations asking for stories of unusual behavior by job applicants revealed the following low-lights:
1. ”… stretched out on the floor to fill out the job application.”
2. ”She wore a Walkman and said she could listen to me and the music at the same time.”
3. ”A balding candidate abruptly excused himself. Returned to office a few minutes later, wearing a hairpiece.”
4. ”… asked to see interviewer’s resume to see if the personnel executive was qualified to judge the candidate.”
5. ”… announced she hadn’t had lunch and proceeded to eat a hamburger and french fries in the interviewer’s office – wiping the ketchup on her sleeve”
6. ”Stated that, if he were hired, he would demonstrate his loyalty by having the corporate logo tattooed on his forearm.”
7. ”Interrupted to phone his therapist for advice on answering specific interview questions.”
8. ”When I asked him about his hobbies, he stood up and started tap dancing around my office.”
9 . ”At the end of the interview, while I stood there dumbstruck, went through his briefcase, took out a brush, brushed his hair, and left.”
10. ”… pulled out a Polaroid camera and snapped a flash picture of me. Said he collected photos of everyone who interviewed him.”
11. ”Said he wasn’t interested because the position paid too much.”
12. ”While I was on a long-distance phone call, the applicant took out a copy of Penthouse, and looked through the photos only, stopping longest at the centerfold.”
13. ”During the interview, an alarm clock went off from the candidate’s brief case. He took it out, shut it off, apologized and said he had to leave for another interview.”
14. ”A telephone call came in for the job applicant. It was from his wife. His side of the conversation went like this: ”’Which company? When do I start? What’s the salary?’ I said, ‘I assume you’re not interested in conducting the interview any further.’ He promptly responded, ‘I am as long as you’ll pay me more.’ I didn’t hire him, but later found out there was no other job offer. It was a scam to get a higher offer.”
15. ”His attache [case] opened when he picked it up and the contents spilled, revealing ladies’ undergarments and assorted makeup and perfume.”
16. ”Candidate said he really didn’t want to get a job, but the unemployment office needed proof that he was looking for one.”
17. ”… asked who the lovely babe was, pointing to the picture on my desk. When I said it was my wife, he asked if she was home now and wanted my phone number. I called security.”
18. ”Pointing to a black case he carried into my office, he said that if he was not hired, the bomb would go off. Disbelieving, I began to state why he would never be hired and that I was going to call the police. He then reached down to the case, flipped a switch and ran. No one was injured, but I did need to get a new desk.”
You Might Be a Technician if…
you have ever tried to repair a $15.00 radio.
you think of the gadgets in your office as “friends.”
you think your computer looks better without the cover.
you have ever purchased an electronic appliance “as is.”
you have ever saved the power cord from a broken appliance.
you think jokes about being unable to program a VCR are stupid.
the salespeople at Circuit City can’t answer any of your questions.
the microphone at a meeting doesn’t work and you rush up to fix it.
you have a neatly sorted collection of old bolts and nuts in your garage.
you own a set of itty-bitty screwdrivers and you actually know where they are.
you just don’t have the heart to throw away the 100-in-1 electronics kit you got for your ninth birthday.
you have never sat through an entire movie without having at least one device on your body beep or buzz.
New Office Words
1. BLAMESTORMING : Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
2. SEAGULL MANAGER : A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.
3. ASSMOSIS : The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
4. SALMON DAY ;: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.
5. CUBE FARM : An office filled with cubicles.
6. PRAIRIE DOGGING : When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.
7. MOUSE POTATO : The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.
8. SITCOMS : Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.
9. STRESS PUPPY : A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.
10. SWIPEOUT : An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
11. XEROX SUBSIDY : Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.
12. IRRITAINMENT : Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.
13. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE : The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again. Often feel like doing this to my computer.
14. ADMINISPHERE : The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.
15. 404 : Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested site could not be located.
16. GENERICA : Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.
17. OHNOSECOND : That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake).
18. WOOFS : Well-Off Older Folks.
19. CROP DUSTING : Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm.
20. MUSHROOM MANAGER: Keeps all of their staff in the dark. Whenever employees grow too big, they chop off their heads.
A Manager’s Decision Making
The manager of a large corporation got a heart attack, and the doctor told him to go for several weeks to a farm to relax. The guy went to a farm, and after a couple of days he was very bored, so he asked the farmer to give him some job to do.
The farmer told him to clean the shit of the cows. The farmer thought that to somebody coming from the city, working the whole life sitting in an office, it will take over a week to finish the job, but for his surprise the manager finished the job in less than one day.
The next day the farmer gave to the manager a more difficult job: to cut the heads of 500 chickens. The farmer was sure that the manager will not be able to do the job, but at the end of the day the job was done.
The next morning, as most of the jobs in the farm were done, the farmer asked the manager to divide a bag of potatoes in two boxes: one box with small potatoes, and one box with big potatoes.
At the end of the day the farmer saw that the manager was sitting in front of the potatoes bag, but the two boxes were empty. The farmer asked the manager: “How is that you made such difficult jobs during the first days, and now you cannot do this simple job?”
The manager answered: “Listen, all my life I’m cutting heads and dealing with shit, but now you ask me to make decisions.”
Nurse Nancy
Two doctors are in the hallway complaining about nurse Nancy.
”She’s out of control!” the first doctor says. ”She does everything backwards. Just last week I told her to give a man two milligrams of morphine every ten hours, she gave him 10 milligrams every two hours, he alomost died!”
”That’s nothing,” said the second doctor, ”earlier this week I told her to give a man an enema every 24 hours, she tried to give him 24 enemas in one hour!”
All of a sudden they heard a blood curldling scream from down the hallway.
”OH MY GOD! I just realized that I told nurse Nancy to prick Mr. Smiths boil!”’
