BreakPoint
This is Hooovahh
Hilarious Halloween Hijinks
One year at work we were encouraged to wear out Halloween costumes to work. Most people worked in an office, or in an area of the lab that it wouldn’t be difficult to get the normal work done in. One guy who worked in the lab wore a Greenman costume. It is a skin tight green suite from head to toe including a mask. HR went around taking pictures of everyone in their costumes, and wanted it to be part of the all hands town hall meeting taking place at the end of the day. HR had a program on their computer that they just put all the pictures into, and it would generate a slide presentation where it would zoom in, zoom out, then fade to the next person. Focusing on the center of the picture by default. They put the pictures in and hit generate, and then took the slideshow over to the huge projector for everyone to see.
Since the slideshow focuses on the center of the picture, and HR was taking pictures of people in a portrait mode, it would zoom in on the center of the person. Slide after slide would zoom in on some poor employee’s crotch in a costume, zoom out, then fade to the next employee only to zoom in on them. About half way through people started to notice, and would start snickering and laughing quietly. But then up comes our buddy in the Greenman costume, skin tight and all. Only this time with his hands covering his crotch. The room erupted in laughter.
No one uses this so we are removing it
We are thinking about removing some features from a software package because it seems our users aren’t using it. Here are some examples of features we want to remove…
That’s weird, I use those features and I know other people that do too.
Well when you install our software, there is a thing that asks if you want to participate in sending anonymous data back to use. This helps tell us what features people are using of our software, and our data shows no one uses this.
I’ve never seen that. Is it supported on the platforms I use?
No it isn’t.
Well that would probably explain why you never see anyone using that feature. You are only seeing the statistics on that features usage, on platforms that don’t use it, and on the platforms that do use it, you aren’t getting any data.
Email Doesn’t Work That Way
Program Manager: I need to know the status of this thing. How is it going?
Hooovahh: What is that? I’ve never heard of it.
Program Manager: It’s in an email sent out this morning flagged as important. Why weren’t you copied on it? (very aggressively)
Hooovahh: …I don’t know…you would have to ask the sender why they didn’t send it to me.
Fine I’ll Hire Myself
A friend of mine was working at an engineering place and did really good work. Eventually his boss left and the manager job opened up. He applied for it and was promoted. Because of this he was very familiar with all the work the employees under him did because he was doing it not long ago. He was not just a manager of people but could do all the jobs of the employees he had under him. After getting promoted he got a raise but then realized his new pay was actually less than several of the employees he was a manager of. He didn’t put up much of a stink about it and was just happy to work with the decent pay he was getting.
The problem came about when there were new positions open in the group and he had to write job descriptions and interview people. Everyone interviewed for the job would be starting out making more than him and negotiations trying to hire less experienced engineers for less pay didn’t go well. So he went to his manager and said he applied for the job opening under him, and that he was going to hire himself for more pay, and quit the manager job he had, if he wasn’t given a raise.
Of course upper management saw his value and gave him a large pay raise. But upper management would have been happy never paying him more than the minimum amount to keep him working there, which is on the one hand to be expected, but on the other hand you feel like you aren’t appreciated.
Right but can you be cheaper?
At a company with a production line making widgets. During the proposal phase the customer asks about how much each widget costs, and how much of a discount they get if they want more.
“If we want 1,000 of these widgets what will each piece cost?”
“$100 each.”
“And if we wanted 100,000 what would each piece cost?”
“Probably $50 each.”
“Okay then we will only do it if we get 1,000 at $50 each.”
After some negotiations with the Sales group, the company agreed to that price. Then the customer only orders 100 at $50. <shocked pikachu face>
Software Tools Suite
A company made a bunch of software tools and products. They would show them off at trade shows, and technical seminar presentations. They made a whole suite of their tools and sold it as a bundle too. A friend I knew got a job for the company, and he got close to the team that made the tools. One day he asked about all those cool tools they made and wanted to use them on some projects for the company. The software manager was all like "Oh no one uses that crap, we sell like one license a year and don't support it or update it. It probably doesn't run on modern Windows anymore." He was quite disappointed that from the outside it was marketed and polished and was looking forward to using them.
