George Costanza's Tips for Working Hard II

Use computers to look busy. Any time you use a computer, it looks like "work" to the casual observer. You can send and receive personal e-mail, calculate your finances and generally have a blast without doing anything remotely related to work. These aren't exactly the societal benefits that the proponents of the computer revolution would like to talk about but they're not bad either. When you get caught by your boss -and you *will* get caught - your best defense is to claim you're teaching yourself to use new software, thus saving valuable training dollars.

Airlines Running on Operating Systems

Here are some basic descriptions of what may happen if airplanes had different operating systems running them.

• DOS: Everybody pushes it till it glides, then jumps on and lets it coast till it skids, then jumps off, pushes, jumps back on, etc.
• DOS with QEMM: Same as DOS, but with more leg room for pushing.
• Macintosh: All the flight attendants, captains and baggage handlers look the same, act the same and talk the same. Every time you ask a question, you are told you don't need to know, don't want to know and everything will be done for you without your knowing, so just shut up.
• OS/2: To get on board, you have to have your ticket stamped 10 different times by standing in 10 different lines. Then you fill out a form asking how you want your seating arranged -- with the look and feel of an ocean liner, a passenger train or a bus. If you get on board and off the ground, you will have a wonderful trip, except when the rudder and flaps freeze, in which case you have time to say your prayers before you crash.
• Windows: Colorful airport terminal, friendly flight attendants, easy access to a plane, and an uneventful takeoff. Then, all in a sudden, boom! You blow up without any warning whatsoever.
• NT: The terminal and flight attendants all look like those the Windows plane uses, but the process of checking in and going through security is a nightmare. Once aboard, those passengers with first class tickets can go anywhere they want and arrive in half the time, while the vast majority of passengers with coach tickets can't even get aboard.
• Unix: Everyone brings one piece of the plane. Then they go on the runway and piece it together, all the while arguing about what kind of plane they're building.
• CAIRO: The airplane is distributed among 47 different hangars in 13 airports scattered over 8 states, 4 Canadian provinces, and a remote mountain hideaway in Nicaragua. But you don't need to know where the airplane is or who it belongs to in order to fly it. Actually, you don't fly the airplane itself; you fly a simulation that behaves just like the real thing except that you don't go anywhere. But that's okay, because when the world is at your fingertips you never need to leave home.

Car Brake Trouble

Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Branch Manager were on their way to a meeting. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do? "I know," said the Branch Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way. "No, no," said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way. "Well," said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."