When to Negotiate

The banker fell overboard from a friend's sailboat. The friend grabbed a life preserver, held it up, not knowing if the banker could swim, and shouted, "Can you float alone?" "Obviously," the banker replied, "but this is a heck of a time to talk business."

S.H.I.T (Special High Intensity Traning)

MEMORANDUM
TO: All Employees
FROM: Communications Services
SUBJECT: SPECIAL HIGH INTENSITY TRAINING
In order to assure that we continue to produce the highest quality work possible, it will be our policy to keep all employees well-trained through our Special High Intensity Training (S.H.I.T.). We are giving our employees more S.H.I.T. than any other office in town.
If you feel you do not receive your share of S.H.I.T. on the job, please see your supervisor. You will be placed at the top of the S.H.I.T. list for special attention.
All of our supervisors are particularly qualified to see that you get all the S.H.I.T. you can handle at your own speed.
If you think that you have a thorough understanding of the basic S.H.I.T. program, you may wish to participate in Management Of Related Education (M.O.R.E. S.H.I.T.).
If you consider yourself to be trained enough already, you may be interested in helping us train others. We can add you to our Basic Understanding Lecture List (B.U.L.L. S.H.I.T.).
Some of you already display aptitudes that would easily allow you to enter the Director of Intensity Program (D.I.P. S.H.I.T.). Those who do not qualify for this position but are still interested will certainly be referred to the Director Under Management Bureau (D.U.M.B. S.H.I.T.). Those individuals who do not meet the requirements of The Bureau must first complete Special Training Under Personal Individual Discretion, Special High Intensity Training (S.T.U.P.I.D. S.H.I.T.).
If you have any further questions, please address them to our Head Of Training, Special High Intensity Training (H.O.T. S.H.I.T.) program.
Thank You.
Boss in General
SPECIAL HIGH INTENSITY TRAINING
(B.I.G. S.H.I.T)
Copy to: Complete Registered Organized Computerized Knowledge Originating Firsthand; Special High Intensity Training division. (CROCK-OF-SHIT)

Quotes of Companies

Here are some of the submissions of actual comments, notices, and statements coming out of different companies:

• 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.
• What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter.
• How long is this Beta guy going to keep testing our stuff?
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Quote from the boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what 'I' say."
• 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 know that communication is a problem, but the company is not going to discuss it with the employees.
• 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, 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 was told that the executive VP 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, with 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 to my boss, 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 letter by pasting words together from the Sunday paper.