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 some of the submittals...

1. 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.

** (This was the winning quote from Fred Dales at Microsoft
Corporation in Redmond, Washington.) **

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

3. How long is this Beta guy going to keep testing our stuff?
(Programming intern, Microsoft IIS development team)

4. 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)

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

6. Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule. 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.
(R&D supervisor, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing/3M Corp.)

7. 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)

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

9. "How About Friday?" My sister passed away and her funeral was
scheduled for Monday. When I told my Boss, he said she died 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, FTD Florists)

10. "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)

11. We recently received a memo from senior management saying:

"This is to inform you that a memo will be issued today regarding the
subject mentioned above."
(Microsoft, Legal Affairs Division)

12. 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.)

13. Speaking the Same Language: 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 one of the sentences 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"
(pedophilia?) 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)

14. I am not making this up. This gem is the closing paragraph of a
nationally-circulated memo from a large communications company: "Lucent
Technologies is endeavorily determined to promote constant attention on
current procedures of transacting business focusing emphasis on innovative
ways to better, if not supersede, the expectations of quality!"
(Lucent Technologies)

 

Two engineering students were walking across campus when one said, "Where did you get such a great bike?"

The second engineer replied, "Well, I was
walking along yesterday minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, "Take what you want."

The second engineer nodded approvingly,
"Good choice; the clothes probably wouldn't have fit."

 

: )