Top Ten Things You’ll Never Hear from your Consultant
10. You’re right; we’re billing way too much for this.
9. Bet you I can go a week without saying “synergy” or “value-added”.
8. How about paying us based on the success of the project?
7. This whole strategy is based on a Harvard business case I read.
6. Actually, the only difference is that we charge more than they do.
5. I don’t know enough to speak intelligently about that.
4. Implementation? I only care about writing long reports.
3. I can’t take the credit. It was Ed in your marketing department.
2. The problem is, you have too much work for too few people.
1. Everything looks okay to me. You really don’t need me.
Two Spoons
At a restaurant, one of the customers noticed that all of the waiters had two spoons in their vest pockets. Upon being asked, one waiter said, “We see that the most frequently dropped silverware are spoons, therefore we keep them for replacement.”
Then the customer noticed that a string was hanging out of all the waiters’ flies and asked what the string was for. “The string is for us to go to the bathroom,” explained the waiter, “that way, when we pull it, it shoots and aims right away. Then we don’t have to stop to wash our hands.”
The customer asked, “Well, that’s how you get it out, but how do you get it back in?”
The waiter whispered confidentially, “I don’t know about the others, but I use the two spoons.”
Top Ten Things That Sound Dirty At The Office But Aren’t
10. I need to whip it out by 5.
9. Mind if I use your laptop?
8. Just stick it in my box.
7. If I have to lick one more, I’ll gag!
6. I want it on my desk, NOW!!!
5. Hmmmmmm. I think it’s out of fluid!
4. My equipment is so old; it takes forever to finish.
3. It’s an entry-level position.
2. When do you think you’ll be getting off today?
And the number 1 thing that sounds dirty in the office but isn’t:
1. It’s not fair… I do all the work while he just sits there!
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.
Note of caution
An efficiency expert concluded his lecture with a note of caution. “You need to be careful about trying these techniques at home. ”
“Why?” asked somebody from the audience.
“I watched my wife’s routine at breakfast for years,” the expert explained. “She made lots of trips between the refrigerator, stove, table and cabinets, often carrying a single item at a time.
One day I told her, ’Honey, why don’t you try carrying several things at once?’”
“Did it save time?” the guy in the audience asked.
“Actually, yes,” replied the expert. “It used to take her 30 minutes to make breakfast. Now I do it in ten.”
