Twice Weekly Toon - Free to Your Site

Would you like a cartoon on your site? One that changed constantly and gave viewers a chuckle?

This one can be had by going to Free Site Cartoon.

Fast Car Passes Gas Stations -NOT

'Toon shows me with a new car which isn't happy that it can pass everything on the road except the gas stations.

That's not quite how it happened...
Twinkles was talking to some big-buck manager one day. The bird had just purchased a new hot rod which was absolutely the type of car young boys dream of having. It was everything. Fast and sleek and hot. They went out to the reserved parking place and the manager commented that it would pass everything on the road.

The punch line came when Twinkles told me about passing everything on the road. I said: "I bet it doesn't pass the gas stations." Everyone thought that was a funny one for our high rolling management friend. When it was repeated to him he didn't even crack a smile. He said it hit close to home.

Fast Car Passes (no) Gas * May not still be in the archives.

Circular File Method Of Management

This 'toon shows our me, Toady, seated in front of a big seagull who is at his desk with some stacks of paper in front of him. It seems that Toady had given him a project which the bird can't find. Toady knows the guy threw it away because he uses the "circular file" method.

This is based on stark bureau-crazy reality. The bird is a VP and one of the better ones I ever associated with. People used to get so frustrated because they would track things to him but he would not have them and not recall them. What we figured out is that he put everything in one of three stacks on his desk. Each day the stacks moved to the left and the oldest went straight into the garbage. If no one came by to follow-up on a given piece of paper it simply disappeared. Anything routed for a series of signitures was particularly vulnerable. Of course, he just gave you the dumb/lost look if you asked him about something.

Kind of makes you want to scream!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Circular File Method * This toon may not be found in the archives.

Too Tense? It could be worse...

It was Ms. Liz who one day uttered: "I'm just too tense today."

I popped over the cube wall: "Are you going to be 3 wigwams tomorrow?"

In case you still don't get it, tense/tents are like tepees. Technically there are major differences and I must beg license from my distant Native American ancestors for comparing the two, but it made a great joke.

Liz was able to laugh and loosen up. Slider didn't get it until someone explained it to him and he was so disgusted he took an extra smoking break. (Sent some smoke signals I suppose.)

Two Tents Today It may not appear in the archives.

BRAINS? Scrambled, Fried, or Just MIA

You never know. Is it one of those days when you just can't put two good thoughts together ( like trying to write something that makes sense right now!) Or is your brain really fired up and in full scale production of what might be good thoughts, only to find out you were on the wrong track.

Life is tough when you're a toad!

Brain Scramble Not in archives...

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

Babysitting Your Boss

One of the engineers, Deano, was very frustrated: "All I do is follow my boss around and clean up his mistakes! Babysitting is not part of my job description!"

It was about 4:00 in the afternoon and my sweetheart called to see if I would stop at the store on the way home. "Please pick up some diapers and wipes for the baby," she said.

So I asked Deano if he would like me to pick some up for his boss. He was delighted.

See the cartoon version at
Babysitting The Boss Cartoon

One Face To The Customer?

Yes, we actually paid some bright bureaucrat at corporate headquarters to put together a whole class on "One Face To The Customer." At least it was interesting and well presented.

We wondered about educating 500 people for 4 hours each on a concept that seemed rather straight forward, but training folk need jobs too. If the cost was 50$ per hour or $200 each, that's only $100K. Now if you consider the plant produced $1M per day and we took out 1/2 day of productivity it gets a little more expensive, but a little extra work will make up for that, and management doesn't have to sweat our extra hours.

So enough rambling...

When we were discussing the course among ourselves I asked Twinkles what the customer might think if their "one face" was that of our boss. He agreed that might be a problem, but said it would depend on which of his many faces they saw. Slider was there and he pulled the ugliest face he could make (pretty ugly) and said he likes to keep his "one face" face for the boss. I told him it was better than what the customer usually sees when they face our birds.

Sad but true...

See the cartoon at: One Face To Customer Cartoon