Friday Hodgepodge

Four Foolish Things

Image by Dmitriy Frantsev, via Unsplash, license.

1. Over at Ask a Manager is a collection of indelible first impressions by new employees, including one who tossed an axe towards another employee who said he needed it.

Said axe-tosser was dismissed that day, with the following parting words: "Look, we know you didn't mean it, but you're so stupid you're dangerous."

2. With the Senate's recent unanimous passage of permanent daylight savings came the usual calls from the peanut gallery to abolish time zones altogether. I love the extended thought experiment on getting rid of time zones at a blog called Things of Interest. Here is just a sample:

But there's another dangerous word: "today". You can't say "it's Saturday today" anymore. It's more correct to say that "it's Saturday right now". The term "today" usually means "the current solar day" but "Saturday" is no longer a "day" in that sense - it no longer corresponds unambiguously to a single solar day.

Instead, solar days are now formally given hybrid names, as in "it's Friday/Saturday today"...

Shortly after comes a humorous listing of business hours under the new timekeeping regime.

All of this follows from the simple problem of when the author should call his uncle on the other side of the world.

Bravo!

3. The next time you hear someone complain about a joke being old, you can refer that person to this list of actual Roman jokes. Here's my favorite:

A provincial man has come to Rome, and walking on the streets was drawing everyone's attention, as he was a real double of the emperor Augustus. The emperor, having brought him to the palace, looks at him and then asks: "Tell me, young man, did your mother come to Rome anytime?" The reply was: "She never did. But my father frequently was here."

It's interesting that lots of these jokes have "an intellectual" as the butt of the joke -- but that modern-day America doesn't, despite our intellectuals largely deserving it.

4. Suzanne Lucas, one of my favorite business writers, has decided to change her nom de plume from Evil HR Lady to Angel HR Lady, with all the positive vibes that necessarily entails:

Starting today we will have positive affirmations. This is today's official positive affirmation thread. Please write your positive affirmation on this post. Failure to do so will result in one-to-one coaching until you can learn to see things through rose-colored glasses.

On second thought, I think I prefer the devil I knew...

-- CAV