Dilbert quote contest
A magazine recently ran a "Dilbert quotes" contest. They were
looking for people to submit quotes from real life managers resembling
those portrayed in the Dilbert comic strip. Here are some of the
submittals...
- "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 Charles Hurst at Sun Microsystems)
- "What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will
encounter."
- "E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It
should be used only for company business."
- "This project is so important, we can't let things that are more
important interfere with it."
- "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what 'I' say."
- "We know that communication is a problem, but the company is not
going to discuss it with the employees."
- SCENARIO: 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."
- 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."
- 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!"
- As Director of Communications for a medium-sized company, 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.
- This gem is the closing paragraph of a nationally-circulated memo
from a large communications company:
"(Company name) 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!"