The manager sends the team the following email:
Subject: Working from home in AM tomorrow
I have an Orthodontist appointment for my daughter at 10:30, she is getting new braces so about a 2 hr appt. I will be working from home in the morning and will be back in the office around 1:00.
The production guy responds:
Woo hooo. I’m bringing the keg!!!
The manager responds:
Hum! I’m still here and have not signed off yet.
The manager’s admin. assistant finishes the conversation:
LOL!!
Shortly after I started dating Maggie, we went swimming in a lake not far from her place.
After our swim we walked over to her car in the parking lot.
While I was getting in on the passenger side, Maggie—standing between the open driver side door and the driver seat—reached under her billowy, floral-print cotton summer dress and removed her panties, placing them in one of the pockets on the front of the dress.
In that brief 12 seconds, Maggie telegraphed that my life would never be the same again.
I’ve been an Amazon customer for years and have spent thousands of dollars on your website. Until this past week, I’ve been completely satisfied; that is, until I encountered one of your customer service drones who could nothing more than strictly adhere to her script. Her lack of common sense cost Amazon about a $1000.
Here’s the story, and I encourage you to incorporate it into your staff training program.
I ordered a MacBook at a price of $994. The day it shipped I saw on your website that the price had dropped to $979. Since I could find nothing on your website about a price guarantee policy, I Googled “Amazon price guarantee” and learned that, even though it’s one of your dirty little secrets, it does exist and it extends for 30 days from the date of purchase.
I called the appropriate number and requested that the $15 be credited to my account. The drone told me that couldn’t be done, as the item had already shipped. I asked her why the policy is called a “30-day price guarantee.” This is what’s referred to as “talking to a wall.”
So here’s the bottom line. I returned the item to Amazon and ordered it from Apple for $999—a slightly higher price but a much better feeling.
I’m sure you know the expression that begins, “For want of a nail . . .” Well, one of your customer service reps just lost you the battle.
A Complicated Relationship with Reality
She occupies space
But without self-awareness
Still, she threatens us
I was a Good Humor man in the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college.
As you probably remember, the ringing bells on the Good Humor truck signal for the waiting customers the arrival of their daily treat to the neighborhood.
One of the towns on my route, Fairlawn, New Jersey, had at that time a noise ordinance that prohibited the ringing of my bells.
The impact of that prohibition should be fairly obvious.
Also, Fairlawn was a suburban community, fairly well off, where a large portion of the middle to upper-middle-class kids went away to summer camp.
Again, the impact.
I’ve had countless jobs since the summer of ’63, many of which reflect the then unseen writing on the walls of Fairlawn: Welcome aboard. Bend over so we can screw you and move on.
WASHINGTON, April 30 (Geuters) — People experienced in the use of the “search and replace” function in word processing software understand that, even though it’s a valuable tool, it’s also a potential minefield.
Editors in particular understand this. Copy Editor Ruud Ozkapici at Pew Research, however, evidently had a mental lapse in running a search and replace and has been fired for the results.
The following is part of the result of Ozkapici’s search and replace, in which he inadvertently searched for “religion/religious” and replaced it with “underwear” rather than “religious affiliation.”
Underwear Changes in the U.S. in Flux
April 27, 2009, Executive Summary
Americans change their underwear early and often. In total, about half of American adults have changed underwear at least once during their lives. Most people who change their underwear leave their childhood underwear before age 24, and many of those who change underwear do so more than once. These are among the key findings of a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. The survey documents the fluidity of underwear in the U.S. and describes in detail the patterns and reasons for change.
The reasons people give for changing their underwear – or leaving underwear altogether – differ widely depending on the origin and destination of the convert. The group that has grown the most in recent years due to underwear change is the unaffiliated population. Two-thirds of former Catholics who have become unaffiliated and half of former Protestants who have become unaffiliated say they left their childhood underwear because they stopped believing in its teachings, and roughly four-in-ten say they became unaffiliated because they do not believe in God or the teachings of most underwear. Additionally, many people who left underwear to become unaffiliated say they did so in part because they think of underwear people as hypocritical or judgmental, because underwear organizations focus too much on rules or because underwear leaders are too focused on power and money. Far fewer say they became unaffiliated because they believe that modern science proves that underwear is just superstition.
In his unsuccessful defense (following discovery of his error just prior to publication), Ozkapici said he was preoccupied with “underwear” when he was editing the report. “I had ruined many of my wife’s panties when I did the laundry,” he said, “and I promised to pick up new ones for her that day.”
There was a slip in my mailbox indicating that I had received a package. I went to the front desk in the lobby of my apartment building to pick it up.
There, I dealt with one of the building staff, a man about 75 years old.
I gave him the slip. He retrieved my package.
When I went up to my apartment, there was a UPS receipt stuck to my door showing that a package had been delivered for me today. (My building used to put those receipts in our mailboxes to save us a trip back down to the lobby, a much more tenant-friendly way to do things.)
Packages awaiting retrieval, obviously, are arranged by apartment unit—with the apartment number written and circled with a black marker—in a room next to the front desk. So, the Asshole of the Day could easily have given me both packages at once.
Sean the Shrink: So, how goes your research study?
Sinead the Shrink: It’s been a long five years, but we’re pretty close to submitting it for peer review. We hope to present our findings to the annual convention in November and have it published in the journal in January.
Sean: How many patient profiles did you end up completing?
Sinead: With help from our colleagues in Canada and the UK, we have about five thousand.
Sean: So you proved your hypothesis after all?
Sinead: Without a doubt. The forward and back buttons that control a car’s sound system from the steering wheel are a reliable predictor of success or failure in a patient’s therapy experience.
Sean: Well, Sinead, as you know I was somewhat skeptical when you first told me about your ideas. But sure enough, I recently asked my kids to survey their fellow classmates in Advanced Placement about which button they pushed more often. Seventy-five percent are go-forwarders.
Sinead: That just about matches our results, Sean. The Forwards are future oriented, proactive, risk takers, change agents, open to new experiences, and explorers. The Backs live in the past, are passive, are arrested developmentally, and just can’t see beyond their present reality.
Sean: Maybe you ought to recommend that automakers remove the back button from their new models altogether. You know what we say, first the action and change in behavior, then the change in attitude.
Sinead: Yep, the mind will always follow the body.
WASHINGTON (Royters) — So-called mental health days cost American companies a staggering $61 billion a year, according to a recent report by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Employees (NCMEE).
The report, “American Workers Under Attack,” represents the first in-depth analysis of a previously unreported cost to American businesses. It summarizes findings from more than a million survey responses elicited over the past three years from U.S. employees working in all sectors of the economy except for farms and the public sector.
Radoslaw Rakocevic, NCMEE executive director and the principal author of the report, said, “Our report refutes the long-held conventional wisdom that physical ailments are the #1 cause of employee absenteeism. Taking time off for the sake of one’s mental health easily eclipses reasons such as back pain, migraine headaches, and sick kids.”
The survey protocol, according to Rakocevic, “drilled down to identify the subsets under ‘mental health day.’” He said the overwhelming [73%] leader within the set was stated by respondents as “days to recover from mistreatment by incompetent managers and supervisors.”
So how did NCMEE arrive at a figure of $61 billion? Rakocevic said the Center, with support from the Harvard Business School, used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Employment Situation Summary: Q3 2008” (dated October 8, 2008).
According to the BLS summary, (1) there are 146 million U.S. workers in the civilian labor force (non-farm), (2) the average rate of pay (private sector) is $17.64/hour, and (3) the average number of hours worked per week is 37.35.
Using these figures and the reported average of three mental health days per year per employee, the annual cost to American companies is $61,810,560,000, according to the NCMEE report.
Rakocevic added, “As disturbing as our findings are, we shudder to think about how current and anticipated economic conditions—and specifically the jobs picture—will drive the cost of worker abuse to new highs.”
