From a Wall Street Journal article on excessive lender processing fees: An application fee? Charges for document preparation? An “administration” fee? They even want you to pay their postage. I’m surprised lenders aren’t charging for in-office backrubs for overworked loan officers. Ho Ho! Actually, the mortgage bank I work with does subsidize 50 percent of the cost of in-office massages . . . Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Work
Wasted Time
There was a profile of Jerry Buss, the owner of the Lakers, on TV the other night . . . Buss spent very little time with his family when his kids were growing up. When he and his wife separated, they didn’t tell the kids, and it was five years before any of them noticed the difference. True story! Clearly, I have not been nearly as ruthless as I could have been at disregarding my family in my pursuit of success. Read more →
Inspired Idiocy
It’s amazing how much havoc a person can wreak in the workplace by applying a certain kind of inspired idiocy to every situation: follow all procedures to the letter, do exactly what you’re told, and respond to all questions exactly as asked. One-word answers are ideal. The latter technique is especially effective via email. Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Working Late
Sometimes when I’m working a little late, my boy calls me at the office . . . Read more →
Life’s Work
The company intranet has profiles of the Six Sigma team members, including their responses to the following fill-in-the-blank question: If I weren’t in banking, I’d be . . . Here are the answers: Read more →
A Pat on the Head
We come to work, have lunch, and go home. We goose-step in and goose-step out, change our partners and wander all about, sashay around for a pat on the head, and promenade home till we all drop dead. — Joseph Heller, Something Happened Read more →
Thoughts on Starting a New Job
I feel like work gives my life the illusion of meaning. On the other hand, it really cuts into my day. Dilemma . . . Read more →
Small Consolations
Who possesses the wherewithal for labor or love without small consolations? Who can live? — Jeredith Merrin, “Downtown Diner” Read more →
A Moron’s Guide to Success
You could easily conclude from reading profiles in OC Metro that there’s not a single businessperson in Orange County with an ounce of wit or self-awareness. Case in point: A profile in the current issue of “surfing banker” John Lynch, executive VP of Secured Funding Corp. in Costa Mesa. The hook is — he’s a banker but he surfs every morning before work, and he says things like “Hey bro,” “We rock,” and “I never took a day of college.” Read more →
Unskilled and Unaware of It
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities. — Justin Kruger and David Dunning,… Read more →
Management 101: How to Demoralize Your Top Performers Into Early Retirement
Sanders quit because Lions weren’t winning — ESPN.com headline Background Barry Sanders, as you may already know, was a running back for the Detroit Lions — one of the best running backs ever. It was shocking news — to the extent that an athlete’s retirement can be considered “shocking” — when Sanders retired in 1998 because, at age 31, he was at the peak of his career, and on the verge of breaking the all-time NFL rushing record. Some Lions fans — to this day — still expect him to change his mind and play again. What Sanders Said Sanders has an “as told to” autobiography coming out, in which he says that he retired, not — as the above headline says — because the Lions weren’t winning (which they weren’t), but because of his realization that the management of the team no longer cared about winning. Big difference. Here’s… Read more →
A Brilliant Waste of Time
A colleague is internationalizing error messages for a login form. He can tell you that your password is wrong in 12 different languages, even though the users of the application all speak English. “This is a brilliant waste of time,” he chortles. “It sure is . . . if by ‘brilliant waste of time,’ you mean ‘waste of time.’” Read more →
Alan Turing
A colleague at work asked me, “Do you know how Alan Turing died?” “He ate a poisoned apple.” “His mom always maintained that he did that by accident.” “Does his mom also maintain that he just never found the right girl?” Read more →
Feet
We have a young woman at work with the most extraordinary feet — beautifully polished toenails, toe rings, and just this week she added three small faux (I assume) diamonds to the big toenail on each foot. Read more →
Great Moments in Hubris
I had lunch with a couple of colleagues today at an Indian buffet. When the time came to divide the check, one of them announced as he tossed in his money, “I don’t tip at buffets.” When this met with silence, he added, “And I had to ask for more water. That indicates a lack of attentiveness. So no tip.” As we were leaving, the “inattentive” busboy came running up and handed Mr. I-Don’t-Tip-At-Buffets not one, but two cell phones, which he’d left behind at the table. Read more →
Management 101
I saw the new Jackie Chan movie today . . . it was pretty bad, but the thing that resonated with me was that the movie, like all movies of this type, had an evil villain, and the villain would gather his evil henchmen and say things like “Which one of you would like to explain this latest failure?” He sounded just like one of the managers I work with . . . Read more →
Undercutting the Offshore Bid
Primate Programming Inc. Read more →
Stuff They Don’t Teach You in School
A client I’m working with is rewarding the top 20 percent of its sales force by flying them to Lake Tahoe for a 3-day weekend. An enterprising competitor might say to himself, “Hmmm . . . what if something were to happen to that plane?” Now there’s something they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School. Read more →
Useless Reports
A client is paying me to streamline its reporting system. Like many companies, they produce a lot of reports, most of them not very useful. So far, my choice for the least useful, or most useless, is one titled “All Sales Data in Database.” Guess what it prints? If you said all the sales data in the database, you’re right! It’s a big report . . . Read more →
Your Résumé is Quite Impressive
Possible responses: It should be. I wrote it. It’s the only thing more impressive than my actual accomplishments. Read more →