true tales from the dilbert newsletter

A true quote from my sister's phb: "I don't want to throw another monkey at the wrench right now."

A few years ago, as a solar eclipse approached, some planetarium directors in Southern California sent out warnings to the community about the eclipse. Experience shows that daytime darkness leads to accidents among Induhviduals, and also they have been known to stare at the partially eclipsed sun and blind themselves. (Honest. It really happens.) The planetarium received an indignant letter from a local Induhvidual. She said that if an eclipse was so dangerous, they never should have decided to hold one and ought to cancel it.

I once spent two weeks trying to explain to a senior manager of a group of geologists that I couldn't tell him how much an acre of soil weighed. He could not grasp the concept that you need to know the depth to make that calculation. Finally, in desperation, I asked him if a lower and upper bound would do. He agreed. I calculated the weight of an acre that is one molecule deep and another that extended to the center of the Earth.

That didn't convince him that a volume calculation needs three dimensions, but at least he started bothering someone else about it.

I work in the engineering department of a private utility company. In about three weeks we will be celebrating our corporate diversity with a new program called "Many Faces - One Family."

Each of us is being asked to decorate a small paper "brick" with our picture. These bricks will then be assembled into "The Great Wall of Diversity."

We are anxiously awaiting the looks on the faces of the Diversity Committee when they see a wall of 120 white faces smiling back at them from the Great Wall of Stupidity.

A true story of a "Wally"...

One of my co-workers on a web site project got the idea that since porn web sites have the distinction of being the only real moneymaking web sites, they must have the best design and implementation. Therefore, we should research them and incorporate their design into our web site. He spent two days on this (at work) and even told several others about his work. His final analysis was inconclusive.

Here are two recent statements, both from the same Induhvidual, as recorded by a vigilant DNRC member.

• I'm caught between a rock and a stone.

• My son has a huge appetite. He has a bottomless leg.

Here are some more gems, all uttered by another prolific Induhvidual. (I might use some of these myself someday.)

• It's like being a monkey with chickens on your back!

• Are you too blind to remember?

• Anyone could go to that person and say, 'I need a bell on the side of the elephant'.

• He has too many fingers in the dike.

• It's like an engineer falling out of a building.

• I have no idea what that is. Thank goodness we didn't order three!

• The active part is there, the proactive is not.

• Same crap, different fork.

A co-worker got up during a meeting and announced, "We haven't gotten very far collecting data, but since we had this presentation today, we made some assumptions, borrowed some information from another study, applied a cost for power that we know is wrong, and calculated costs anyway. None of the numbers are right but this will show you how it would work if we had real numbers, kind of..."

After explaining that she was going to spend the next half hour talking about what they would do if they had "real" data she slipped the bombshell in, "If these assumptions somehow proved to be correct then the cost of power production losses would be about $200 million... but until we have real numbers we won't really know."

We sat in stunned silence while she asked if there were any questions...