All Work and No Play...
by Darren Ashby

The Internet is an amazing tool. Quick worldwide communication is now possible. I have met people from all over the world with similar interests and ideas. But I have a bone to pick. Email is overwhelming me. And I am not talking about spam. This is from legitimate sources. My mother-in-law for example sends me stuff all the time that I’m not particularly interested in. (Try un-subscribing from that source!) To top that off, email has become this century’s tool for CYA. When giving someone a copy of what you did simply takes typing in their name, it is just too easy to do it. It is true that today’s manager can be better informed about the day to day operation of the team, but there is such a thing as information overload. What it amounts to, in my case, is over 150 emails a day. I usually pare that down to about half a dozen items in a day that need response or action. (In case you were wondering, shift-delete will save you from overflowing your deleted items box as often.) But if I fall behind 6 items per day I calculate that in 5 years, I’ll have over 10,000 things that need to be done!

There is repose however, because in this deluge of information, there are occasional quips, quotes, and some downright funny stuff that get sent your way. While I try to get off of email lists everywhere, I enjoy the funny stuff. I think it is some type of compensating mechanism, it allows safe outlet to the sky-high pressure in today’s working world.

In the interest of (cough, cough) a scientific experiment, I thought I might post a couple of my favorite emails and see if you have received them. Please email me, no, on second thought just smile to yourself, copy, paste, and send them to your friends if they are new to you.

Have you ever wondered why old people don’t buy into today’s technology? Maybe it isn’t lack of comprehension, it might be some type of ancient wisdom like this:

Dead Horse Theorem

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. But in modern business (and education and government) because heavy investment factors are taken into consideration, other strategies are often tried with dead horses, including the following:

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Threatening the horse with termination.
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
• Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
• Reclassifying the dead horse as "living-impaired."
• Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.
• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
• Declaring that the dead horse carries lower overhead and therefore contributes more to the bottom line than some other horses.
• Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
• Promoting the dead horse to a management

Are stories you get via email true? Rarely if at all, but if it makes for a good chuckle I don’t much care, this one made me chuckle...

AN UNUSUAL TELEPHONE SERVICE CALL

This story was related by Pat Routledge of Winnepeg, ONT about an unusual telephone service call he handled while living in England.

It is common practice in England to signal a telephone subscriber by signaling with 90 volts across one side of the two-wire circuit and ground (earth in England). When the subscriber answers the phone, it switches to the two-wire circuit for the conversation.

This method allows two parties on the same line to be signaled without disturbing each other.

This particular subscriber, an elderly lady with several pets called to say that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called and that on the few occasions when it did manage to ring her dog always barked first. Torn between curiosity to see this psychic dog and a realization that standard service techniques might not suffice in this case, Pat proceeded to the scene. Climbing a nearby telephone pole and hooking in his test set, he dialed the subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring. He tried again. The dog barked loudly, followed by a ringing telephone.

Climbing down from the pole, Pat found:

a. Dog was tied to the telephone system's ground post via an iron chain and collar.

b. Dog was receiving 90 volts of signaling current.

c. After several jolts, the dog was urinating on ground and barking.

d. Wet ground now conducted and phone rang.

Which goes to prove that some ground loops can be extremely funny!

You don’t learn everything in school. Actually you don’t really learn all that much. Here are some of the things that could really use their own course...

TOP TEN THINGS ENGINEERING SCHOOL DIDN'T TEACH YOU

10. There are at least 10 types of capacitors.
9. Theory tells you how a circuit works, not why it does not work
8. Not everything works according to the specs in the data-book.
7. Anything practical you learn will be obsolete before you use it, except the complex math, which you will never use.
6. Always try to fix the hardware with software.
5. Engineering is like having an 8 a.m. class and a late afternoon lab every day for the rest of your life.
4. Overtime pay? What overtime pay?
3. Managers, not engineers, rule the world.
2. If you like junk food, caffeine and all-nighters, go into software.

And the number one thing engineering school didn't teach you...

1. Dilbert is not a comic strip. It's a documentary.

The following list clearly describes me. The only thing that didn’t apply was the second to last item, but that changed right after I read it. I think it is simply further proof...

YOU MIGHT BE AN ENGINEER IF...

• The only jokes you receive are through e-mail.
• At Christmas, it goes without saying that you will be the one to find the burnt-out bulb in the string.
• Buying flowers for your girlfriend or spending the money to upgrade your RAM is a moral dilemma.
• Everyone else on the Alaskan cruise is on deck peering at the scenery, and you are still on a personal tour of the engine room.
• In college you thought Spring Break was a metal fatigue failure.
• The salespeople at Circuit City can't answer any of your questions.
• You are always late to meetings.
• You are at an air show and know how fast the skydivers are falling.
• You bought your wife a new CD ROM for her birthday.
• You can quote scenes from any Monty Python movie.
• You can type 70 words a minute but can't read your own handwriting.
• You can't write unless the paper has both horizontal and vertical lines.
• You comment to your wife that her straight hair is nice and parallel.
• You forgot to get a haircut ... for 6 months.
• You go on the rides at Disneyland and sit backwards in the chairs to see how they do the special effects.
• You have Dilbert comics displayed anywhere in your work area.
• You have ever saved the power cord from a broken appliance.
• You have more friends on the Internet than in real life.
• You have never bought any new underwear or socks for yourself since you got married.
• You have used coat hangers and duct tape for something other than hanging coats and taping ducts.
• You know what http:// actually stands for.
• You look forward to Christmas only to put together the kids' toys.
• You own one or more white short-sleeve dress shirts.
• You see a good design and still have to change it.
• You spent more on your calculator than on your wedding ring.
• You still own a slide rule and you know how to work it.
• You think that when people around you yawn, it's because they didn't get enough sleep.
• You wear black socks with white tennis shoes (or vice versa).
• You window shop at Radio Shack.
• You're in the back seat of your car, she's looking wistfully at the moon, and you're trying to locate a geosynchronous satellite.
• You know what the geosynchronous satellite function is.
• Your checkbook always balances.
• Your laptop computer costs more than your car.
• Your wife hasn't the foggiest idea what you do at work.
• Your wrist watch has more computing power than a 300Mhz Pentium.
• You've already calculated how much you make per second.
• You've ever tried to repair a $5 radio.

Hopefully these pearls of wisdom were new to you and they blew off a little of the steam that has been building up. Go ahead and email me if you like this type of article. I’ll do more if you do. And I promise that email from ChipCenter feedback gets a least a 20 second glance before my finger gets anywhere near the delete key!

If your boss is wondering what you do all day on ChipCenter, remember this final piece of wisdom: All work and no play...

Makes Jack a dull boy!

Disclaimer: I’d credit the sources of these great gigglers, but email is notorious for deleting that particular information before it gets forwarded on. Please note that some items have been edited for spelling, format and occasionally funniness (it's a word, look it up!). If you legitimately wrote any of this, let me know and I will be sure to give you credit.

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