Customers Play Ring Around The Rosie

Back to the Customer Abuse Zone. We take such good care of our customers and they act like they own us, which they do. But sometimes they really get on my nerves.

In this case they were sending back perfectly good product. Someone in their Quality Assurance (fancy name for reject heaven) department was trying to get noticed by increasing his rejection rates. They were also having some problems at their test sites with false failures so they just sent all our parts back.

Twinkles came in with a few of these good parts and says: "What kind of games are they playing at the customer?"

"Same as always," I told him.
Poor Twink raises his eyebrows; "You know about this?"
"Sure," I said, "It's Ring Around The Rosie. Only our little angels call it Ring Around The Returns."

Everyone withing earshot died laughing.

Check it out in the Customer Abuse Zone

Team Building Captain Is An Anchor

It was a long time ago, I had a boss whose was a real low flying type who liked the glory but not the work. He went for all the flashy things and there was a new team building exercise on a boat so he signed us all up.

Well, he followed the script and had us do all the dumb things to get us mingling and concentating. He was a real "prig in the gig" so we got kind of sick of him strutting around giving orders.

Of course, when the going got tough we pushed him out of the way and met our goals and had a great time of it. The memorable line was when we were just finishing up and the boss was not around. There were several seagull comments about his style and then we came to the part where we had to drop the anchor and finish. We had built some good rapport with each other and were feeling pretty good about the team. Someone said, "Instead of the anchor, lets drop our captain."

Then Twinkles added: "Yeah, he's more like an anchor anyway."

After that we added anchor jokes to our seagull jokes.

See the toon at Team Building Cartoon

Toad Cartoon

I should probably just appologize for ever putting this one in. It is an original joke, kind of a premutation on the old: "what's black and white and red all over..." joke.

Told in the right sequence of elephant jokes this can be funny too. I hop you think it is. It's a clean joke, anyway. Not the kind a manager would tell at lunch.

Toad's Green And White & Hops Cartoon

Layoff or Lay Off, It Never Makes Sense

Management says it makes cents. Having been through many layoffs, it seemed that in 3 or 4 months we were out looking for more people. I know, cause I was in recruiting and they pulled all openings at a layoff announcement, then didn't fill them but laid off a few people, then we started looking again real soon.

Ugh, lets not get stuck on the negatives. I recall a woman from AT&T did a paper in grad school about how not to do a layoff. She was kept on and if she is still there is now part of SBC AT&T and probably worried about it again.

The first cartoon at Layoff Cartoons is about management not getting laid off. It seems like it was not usually management that got hit, just the workers. And they lost so much productivity worrying about the layoff, then they could justify hiring more managers. Obviously they needed more leadership so they wouldn't have to do another layoff.

With over 1000 VP's making a minimum of 1/4 mil per year, you wonder why they don't start at the top!!!!!!

Then there was once they announced a cut-back in management only. Everyone thought that was an amazingly great idea. It was. It made us very happy. Of course, they only dumped a couple of people whou couldnt manager their way out a paper sack, and then they replaced them later. It was just fluff.

This could go on forever. But not on this blog...

Mother's Day Cartoon

I never know whether to do a holiday cartoon dedicated srtictly to the holiday, or to try and mix the office perspective. Sometimes I do one, sometimes the other.

I was working on the fowl mouth thing a few weeks back and decided it would work for Mother's Day. My mother thought it was a funny approach so I went ahead and developed it.

I have found that when language gets fowl (I know; "foul" is correct spelling here, but "fowl" at Work R Fun has special meaning.) it is best not to complain. However, a few choice complements about a person's vocabulary always get the language to tone down.

I have used a few, like:

"Your mother would be proud of your extensive vocabulary."

"Were you a sailor in your former life?" "No, why?" "You have a sailor's knack with words."

"Could you teach me how to talk so effectively?"

"If you talk like that when the boss comes by I'm sure she'll be impressed."

Toads mostly just use ribets! But ribets are not fowl or foul.

Hooray!!!!!!

See Toady's contribution to Mother's Day 2006 at Mother's Day Cartoon