Company/Manager Asinine Comments

Subject: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 09 Apr 01 - 04:21 PM

A magazine recently ran a "Dilbert Quotes" contest. They were looking for people to submit quotes from their real life Dilbert-type managers. Here are the finalists:

1.. "What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter."
(Lykes Lines Shipping)

2.. "E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business."
(Accounting manager, Electric Boat Company)

3.. "This project is so important, we can't let things that are more important interfere with it."
(Advertising/Marketing manager, United Parcel Service)

4.. "Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule."
(No source given)

5.. "No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for months. Now, go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you know when it's time to tell them."
(D supervisor, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing/3M Corp.)

6.. "My boss spent the entire weekend retyping a 25-page proposal that only needed corrections. She claims the disk I gave her was damaged and she couldn't edit it. The disk I gave her was write-protected."
(CIO of Dell Computers)

7.. Quote from the Boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say."
(Marketing executive, Citrix Corporation)

8.. My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday. When I told my Boss, he said she died on purpose so that I would have to miss work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to Friday. He said, "That would be better for me."
(Shipping executive, Florists)

9.. "We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees."
(Switching supervisor, AT&T Long Lines Division)

10.. We recently received a memo from senior management saying: "This is to inform you that a memo will be issued today regarding the memo mentioned above."
(Microsoft, Legal Affairs Division)

11.. One day my Boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He said, "If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask for it!"
(New business manager, Hallmark Greeting Cards.)

12.. As director of communications, I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing our company's training programs and materials. In the body of the memo in one of the sentences I mentioned the "pedagogical approach" used by one of the training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the executive committee, I was called into the HR director's office, and told that the executive vice president wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I asked why, I was told that she wouldn't stand for perverts (pedophiles?) working in her company. Finally, he showed me her copy of the memo, with her demand that I be fired and the word "pedagogical" circled in red. The HR manager was fairly reasonable, and once he looked the word up in his dictionary and made a copy of the definition to send back to her, he told me not to worry. He would take care of it. Two days later, a memo to the entire staff came out directing us that no words which could not be found in the local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos. A month later, I resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation memo by pasting words together from the Sunday paper.
(Taco Bell Corporation)

This is the winning quote:
13.. "As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in two weeks."
(Fred Dales at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, WA.)

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Bert
Date: 09 Apr 01 - 04:51 PM

As a Construction Manager for Aramco in Saudi Arabia I was responsible for 20 construction sites and each site had dozens of engineering drawings.

A new issue of the drawings came out and there were six copies of each, 1 for me, 2 for the subcontractors management company and 3 for the sub contractor.

I was undoing the bundles in my office and sorting them for their respective destinations when the Dilbert Boss walked in and started shouting. "What do you need all these F*^%ing drawings for, get them out of here I don't want to see any drawings in your office."

The pitying look I gave him as my only response, made me an enemy for life.

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: GUEST,Bruce O.
Date: 09 Apr 01 - 05:02 PM

I'll tell it again. We had power go out at NIST one Friday during the summer. No Air conditioning, and we were told to go home. Hot humid air quickly condensed on cool alkali halide crystal optics of laser setups in many labs, and next Monday all the optics holders were empty, and their bases were surrounded by little crystals. Many tens of thouands of dollars were lost, not to mention up to 3 months replacement time on some of them. One administrator looked at how low our electric bill was for that weekend and suggested that power be turned off every weekend.

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Sorcha
Date: 09 Apr 01 - 06:11 PM

ROFLMAO-ing here!! Only the truth can be so funny! My dad was an Installer/Repairman for Southwestern Bell waaaay back before the break up. One of the things he did was repair wet cables. It was called "burning" cable.....you picked a pole connection point as near as could be determined to the trouble source (wet cable) and sent electricity through the cable.

That gave you a clue as to where the electricity was not running correctly, so you climbed down the pole, went a couple blocks, and tried it again.Keep this up until you find the wet spot.........

Dad's boss sent him out one day to "burn this cable". He was on his first pole, and suddenly, several blocks away, all sorts of fire engines, police, etc. were converging in the alley.

He wondered what was going on, so he climbed down the pole and walked up there. There, on the pole, at the top, was a flaming, gooey mass of melting plastic, lead sleeving and copper wire.........he burnt the cable, all right. There was a dry birds nest in it which caught fire. A 500 pair cable had just burned completely in two. It took 72 hours straight to get it fixed......when the Boss tried to reprimand Dad, he said:

"But boss, you TOLD me to go burn the cable!" No reprimand was put in his file.

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 09 Apr 01 - 06:17 PM

I just wish I had been at a meeting between some of Hotpoint's management and some representatives from a gas company. My manager told me that our N. Wales Managing Director spent the whole meeting trying to sound as if he knew what he was talking about but referring to LPG as Low Pressure Gas.

Jon

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Mary in Kentucky
Date: 09 Apr 01 - 06:35 PM

In one of my downsizings the HR manager was spying on who had talked to various companies about a job (because she had turned away several inquiries by telling them nobody would be looking for a job)...we had great fun feeding her misinfo about the names of companies and what they made. I forget the specifics, but almost any company name can have an acronym which stands for something ridiculous or mysteriously scientific-sounding. I think one was rocket fuel...

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Sorcha
Date: 09 Apr 01 - 06:45 PM

I love Low Pressure Gas!! That is not what spaw has, now is it? He has HPG!!!

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Grab
Date: 10 Apr 01 - 11:58 AM

When I quit my last job at GEC (now Alstom), I went round saying goodbye on my last day and found that none of the managers were in. No-one knew where they were - they'd just not turned up that day. Eventually we found someone who knew. The last employees' questionnaire had come up with the results that no-one thought their managers were keeping them in touch, so the upper management sent all the managers to a course on communication. So they'd duly headed off to this - without communicating it to anyone working for them!

Many other GEC stories, but this one summarises the management better than any other.

Graham.

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: GUEST,petr
Date: 10 Apr 01 - 12:23 PM

when my dad was 15 or so on his first day in a printshop his supervisor told him to go oil the press. So as he was oiling the press quite thoroughly with an oil can his supervisor told him to make sure and oil everything including around the switch. My dad said he didnt want to get to close to the electrical wiring. Nonsense, said the supervisor and grabbed the oilcan and started oiling around the switch whereupon he suddenly froze and got the strange expression on his face, his tongue was sticking out and his eyeballs popped. My dad thought the guy was taking the piss. Sure enough he pulled away and said, "no you dont want to oil there" and walked away. petr

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: gnu
Date: 10 Apr 01 - 03:02 PM

Perhaps not in the vein intended, but.... at one job I had, our Director would have "short staff meetings". It was a way to inject a little humour and take the edge off having to attend yet another meeting. ( No ? Think about it. Hint... our engineering office did have one female, but she was welcome anyway.)

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: catspaw49
Date: 10 Apr 01 - 04:17 PM

Like Bert, there's nothing like making a lifetime enemy. Our sales force had been promised a new updated unit for several years and the damn thing was really hush-hush. The old unit was a beauty....very reliable, although a bit pricey. The customers loved it, our sales people loved it, all of us in Regional and Divisional management loved it.........so of course it had to be replaced. The new "hush-hush" model was the brainchild of a corporate VP and when it finally came out, it was junk. The Veep brought it out to a yearly sales meeting for its intro. I'd seen the puppy and talked to a few engineers and knew how bad it was and what the faults were.

VP goes through his hoopla and a few astute guys start asking questions that he doesn't want to answer. After a bit of this, I decided it was time to expose this thing for what it was. I asked to come up and take a closer look. I then started asking more and more detailed questions finally suggesting that the unit was cheap and looked it.....it wouldn't hold up in the field. Inside knowledge told me that one of the switch mountings was easily broken, so I said, "Hell John, the first time a guy punches this button, it'll go right through the face plate!" I punched it....not really too hard either.....and it went right through!!!

VP is furious and totally loses it screaming (literally), "Well Pat, you're not the one who has to buy it!!!!" Quite calmly I replied, "No John, I am the FIRST one who has to buy it....and all of these guys as well." Big applause. The next 6 months were very tough when I had to deal with him, but on the other hand......that's all the longer he lasted!!!

Spaw

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Troll
Date: 10 Apr 01 - 05:06 PM

Our plant supervisor would allow only routine daily maintainence on the letter sorting machines in the post office that I worked in. Weekly and monthly was out. It took too much time and cost too much in personnel; he would have had to hire four more techs.
His rule was to run it until it broke and then fix it.
So int he middle of a run, a belt would break or a bearing (that had been squealing for days) would freeze up and the machine would be out of action until the problem could be fixed.
Sometimes it took five minutes and sometimes two days.
In the meantime he would be running around screaming (sometimes literally) about the time it was taking and the ineffeciency of the maintenance crew and the amount of overtime it was costing.
We always notified the maintainence people about potential problems and they always logged them in so we were all covered but the situation is still the same as when I left over a year and a half ago.

troll

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: mkebenn
Date: 11 Apr 01 - 07:46 AM

After a rash of bad checks from a sector of our clientel the company's owner sent a memo out sayig "We will no longer take checks from black people" Trying to keep a straight face, I told him that I didn't think that was a good idea. Next day, new memo.."We will no longer take checks from Afro-Americans" Mike

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 11 Apr 01 - 10:56 AM

When I worked for Kemira near Ellesmere Port I was hauled over the coals because an ad, containing my email address, appeared on a public web site. I was off ill with depression at the time and the disciplinary letter did nothing to help at first.

However when I re-read it and noticed a few things like "An advertisment for Swinton Folk Fetival has appeared on Kemira's World Wide Web" and saw an obvious total lack of understanding of the Internet I was cheered up no end.

I Decided to fight my corner and pointed out that the site was nothing whatsoever to do with Kemira, me or any of my collegues. My email address (which was an invalid one btw) had been harvested elsewhere and used in good faith on a third party folk site. Had a letter from the site owner to prove it as well.

End result? Major egg on the face of Kemira management, and a big pay off for me followed by a lucrative contract in Europe with a sensible company!

Wouldn't you think people in power would learn to keep their mouths shut until they knew what they were talking about?

Then again....

In fairness I know that the manager in question has now resigned and has been replaced by someone far more knowledgeable. But it just goes to show that a lack of common sense and simple courtesy can be a dangerous thing!

Cheers

Dave the Gnome

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Kim C
Date: 12 Apr 01 - 09:51 AM

My boss went to New York for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. She called back to Nashville, saying, I left the parade route directions there... could you get it for me off the internet and fax it to me?

I said, you mean to say the hotel in NEW YORK doesn't have any information about the parade?

I don't know, she said.

So I faxed it to her. We wasted two long distance calls on something she could have had her kid go down to the lobby and find out.

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Gary T
Date: 12 Apr 01 - 09:57 AM

Well, sure, Kim, but those New York folks aren't her employees. Next you'll want her to do her own thinking.

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Kim C
Date: 12 Apr 01 - 03:07 PM

Oh, how silly of me. ;-)

Subject: RE: Company/Manager Asinine Comments
From: Dave Swan
Date: 13 Apr 01 - 03:24 PM

I worked for an evil idiot who never really understood the world as others do. He often managed by magazine article, and you could always tell when his subscription had arrived.

"You know what a paradigm is don't you? It's a box!!! and boxes are bad, you've got to think outside them."

"Really, Chief, I thought it was a model, an exemplar. Maybe I'll put a paradigm in a box and deliver it to the next staff meeting."

"GET OUT OF MY OFFICE"

Having suffered through years of knee jerk decisions, memos which appeared to have been poorly translated from an ancient language, and lectures on the way the world ought to be, I lost it in a meeting in which the idiot looked at me and said "You just don't understand the subtle, nuancal, differences."

Nuancal? What the hell is that? Hoist the nuancal, and be smart about it! Im sorry, you have nuancal tunnel syndrome, and there's nothing we can do. I'd like the Nuancal '48, please, with the fish course.

What a boob.

We won though. He cracked up and left the service.