Medical Warning
The Center for Disease Control has issued a medical alert about a highly contagious, potentially dangerous virus that is transmitted orally, by hand, and even electronically. This virus is called Weary Overload Recreational Killer (WORK). If you receive WORK from your boss, any of your colleagues, or anyone else via any means whatsoever – DO NOT TOUCH IT.
This virus will wipe out your private life completely. If you should come into contact with WORK you should immediately leave the premises.
Take two good friends to the nearest grocery store and purchase one or both of the antidotes – Work Isolating Neutralizer Extract (WINE ) and Bothersome Employer Elimination Rebooter (BEER). Take the antidote repeatedly until WORK has been completely eliminated from your system.
You should immediately forward this medical alert to all your friends. If you do not have friends, you have already been infected and WORK is controlling your life.
You Might Be an Engineer if…
your favorite James Bond character is “Q”.
you see a good design and still have to change it.
you still own a slide rule and you know how to use it.
your family haven’t the foggiest idea what you do at work.
in college you thought Spring Break was metal fatigue failure.
you have modified your can-opener to be microprocessor driven.
you are better with a Karnaugh map than you are with a street map.
you think the real heroes of “Apollo 13” were the mission controllers.
you take a cruise so you can go on a personal tour of the engine room.
you think “cuddling” is simply an unproductive application of heat exchange.
you have owned a calculator with no equal key and know what RPN stands for.
you make four sets of drawings (with seven revisions) before making a bird bath.
you have trouble writing anything unless the paper has horizontal and vertical lines.
your ideal evening consists of fast-forwarding through the latest sci-fi movie looking for technical inaccuracies.
you think the value of a book is directly proportionate to the amount of tables, charts and graphs it contains.
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.
How To Get A Raise
A boss tells his new employee, “I’ll give you 8 bucks an hour starting today and in three months, I’ll raise it to 10 bucks an hour. So when would you like to start?”
“In 3 months.”
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.
