Well, that sucks! [The Gripe Thread aka I Hate Mondays]

trichy wrote:

Having a senior member of our company who falls in love with whatever business meme or parable hoves its way into her field of vision. Today, we were treated to an hour long lecture about how if you take the number of each letter (a=1, b=2, etc), hard work only equaled 98, but attitude equals 100, so clearly that's more important. I think she honestly expects us to respond to this two bit, vending machine business doublespeak bullsh*t by climbing up on our tables, crying out, "Oh captain my captain!"

An hour? Was she just reading it reallllllllly slowly?

Chumpy_McChump wrote:
trichy wrote:

Having a senior member of our company who falls in love with whatever business meme or parable hoves its way into her field of vision. Today, we were treated to an hour long lecture about how if you take the number of each letter (a=1, b=2, etc), hard work only equaled 98, but attitude equals 100, so clearly that's more important. I think she honestly expects us to respond to this two bit, vending machine business doublespeak bullsh*t by climbing up on our tables, crying out, "Oh captain my captain!"

An hour? Was she just reading it reallllllllly slowly?

I imagine it more along the line of everyone participating.

Give me a H
Give me an A
Give me an R
Give me a D
Give me a W
Give me an O
Give me an R
Give me a K

What's that spell?

((Complete silence as people try to figure out what the hell just happened))

Zietgeist is 120.

trichy wrote:

Having a senior member of our company who falls in love with whatever business meme or parable hoves its way into her field of vision. Today, we were treated to an hour long lecture about how if you take the number of each letter (a=1, b=2, etc), hard work only equaled 98, but attitude equals 100, so clearly that's more important. I think she honestly expects us to respond to this two bit, vending machine business doublespeak bullsh*t by climbing up on our tables, crying out, "Oh captain my captain!"

You should have pointed out that bullsh*t is 103.

I did a search of /usr/share/dict/words to see what else has a score of 100, and..... there's a lot. 1107 words, and that's not even the big version of the dictionary.

Clearly, any REPROBATE pushing this as a serious idea needs to be STRANGLED and SUFFOCATED.

jdzappa wrote:

I remember working at a crap customer service job where the HR director came up with the Fish motivational technique based on what the fish workers at Pike Place Market do to have fun on the job. Instead of throwing real fish (which lets face it would be totally awesome) we were expected to throw little plastic fish to each other as a morale booster. Meanwhile, our medical benefits and hours were totally cut. I just wonder if this kind of stuff just helps abusive management sleep better at night.

Roughly 12 years ago my manager at the time invested in the licensed Fish! motivational stuff, including a stuffed fish for throwing. I think I still have it.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:
Jonman wrote:
Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

Gripe that didn't reach "loathe" level.

Why is it that:

When I think of something I should/need to do; I'm never in a position to do said thing, but when I have plenty of opportunity to do the thing, I never think of it?

Easy and trite answer: because you don't tell Siri "Remind me to do X at Y o'clock/when I get to location Z."

Which is to say, I have the exact same problem, and Siri is a godsend for fixing it. :)

Supplemental gripe: BlackBerry :(

This is the kind of thing Getting Things Done aims to solve. I was turned on to it by Merlin Mann (something of a hero of mine) on his no-longer-updated-but-still-operable blog 43Folders (named after the number of folders needed for David Allen's "tickler file" system (one for each month and one for each day in a month (allowing for the longer months obviously))). The conceit: we need a trusted system that is purpose-built for storing the stuff we need or want to do and which makes it available with minimal friction. As David Allen says, "Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them."

I still have yet to finish the book and ran aground of some existential cruft that made it hard to care enough about doing things that I needed a system to manage my work. The book could stand to be updated a bit as the culture it reflects is of legal pads and "personal digital assistants", but there's a really solid and well-articulated framework in there. I think it's been distilled further by...someone. Also, I recall clover was once pretty deep into it but has since moved on to another system.

You might well know everything about this system and I'm pontificating needlessly. Alas, that's my schtick.

Bruce wrote:

Zietgeist is 120.

And now we're just playing Words with Friends.