No Such Language

A linguistics professor was lecturing his class. "In English," he explained, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However," the professor continued, "there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative." A voice from the back of the room piped up. "Yeah, right."

Word Power

Stressing the importance of a large vocabulary, the English teacher told his class, "Use a word ten times and it will be yours for life." In the back of the room a young girl closed her eyes and was heard chanting under her breath: "Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred."

The Laziest Rookie

The sergeant looked disdainfully at the new recruits. "Men," he shouted, "I have a nice easy job for the laziest rookie here. Will the laziest man step forward?" Instantly, all the men stepped forward - all but one. "Why don't you step up to the front with the others?" demanded the sergeant. "Too much trouble," drawled the rookie.

The Valentine Gift

A woman awoke excitedly on Valentine's Day and announced enthusiastically to her husband, "I just dreamed that you gave me a pearl necklace for Valentine's day! What do you think it means?" With certainty in his voice, the man said, "You'll know tonight." That evening the man came home with a small package and handed it to his wife.
With anxious anticipation the woman quickly opened the package to find a book entitled, "The Meaning of Dreams".

Mark 17

A minister told his congregation, "Next week I plan to preach about the sin of lying. To help you understand my sermon, I want you all to read Mark 17."

The following Sunday, as he prepared to deliver his sermon, the minister asked for a show of hands. He wanted to know how many had read Mark 17. Every hand went up.

The minister smiled and said, "Mark has only sixteen chapters. I will now proceed with my sermon on the sin of lying."

The Hard of Hearing Wife

It seems this old guy decided his old wife was getting hard of hearing. He called her doctor to make an appointment to have her hearing checked.

The doctor said he could see her in two weeks and meanwhile there's a simple, informal test the husband could do to give the doctor some idea of the dimensions of the problem.

"Here's what you do. Start about 40 feet away from her, and speak in a normal conversational tone and see if she hears you. If not, go to 30 feet, 20 feet, and so on until you get a response."

So that evening she's in the kitchen cooking dinner and he's in the living room. He says to himself, "I'm about 40 feet away . . . let's see what happens."

"Honey, what's for supper?" No response. So he moves to the other end of the room, about 30 feet away.

"Honey, what's for supper?" No response. So he moves into the dining room, about 20 feet away.

"Honey, what's for supper?" No response. On to the kitchen door, ten feet away.

"Honey, what's for supper?" STILL no response. So he walks right up behind her.

"Honey, what's for supper?"

"For the fifth time, CHICKEN!!!"

Signs That You've Had Too Much Of The '90s

Okay, this one is actually not a joke, but is nonetheless amusing (and at the same time, sad).

1. You try to enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.

4. You e-mail your buddy who works at the desk next to you to ask:
"Do you wanna go get a beer?" and he replies: "Yeah, give me five
minutes".

5. You chat several times a day with a stranger from South
America, but you haven't spoken to your next door neighbor
yet this year.

6. You buy a computer and a week later it is out of date.

7. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends is that they
do not have e-mail addresses.

8. You consider the U.S. Mail painfully slow and/or call it "snail
mail".

9. Your idea of being organized is multiple colored post-it notes.

10. You hear most of your jokes via email instead of in person.

11. When you go home after a long day at work you still answer the
phone in a business manner.

12. When you make phone calls from home, you accidentally insert a
"9" to get an outside line.

13. You've sat at the same desk for four years and worked for
three different companies.

14. Your company's welcome sign is attached with Velcro.

15. Your resume is on a diskette in your pocket.

16. You really get excited about a 1.7% pay rise.

17. You learn about your redundancy on the 11 o'clock news.

18. Your biggest loss from a system crash was when you lost all of
your best jokes.

19. Your supervisor doesn't have the ability to do your job.

20. Contractors outnumber permanent staff and are more likely to
get long-service awards.

21. Board members salaries are higher than all the Third World
countries annual budgets combined.

22. It's dark when you drive to and from work, even in the summer.

23. You know exactly how many days you've got left until you
retire.

24. Interviewees, despite not having the relevant knowledge or
experience, terminate the interview when told of the starting
salary.

25. You see a good looking, smart person and you know it must be
a visitor.

26. Free food left over from meetings is your staple diet.

27. Your supervisor gets a brand-new state-of-the-art laptop with
all the latest features, while you have time to go for lunch while
yours boots up.

28. Being sick is defined as you can't walk or you're in hospital.

29. You're already late on the assignment you just got.

30. There's no money in the budget for the five permanent staff
your department is short of, but they can afford four full-time
management consultants advising your boss's boss on strategy.

31. Your boss's favorite lines are:
When you've got a few minutes...
Could you fit this in...?
...in your spare time
...when you've got a moment
I know you're busy but...
I have an opportunity for you!

32. Vacation time is something you roll over to next year.

33. Every week another brown collection envelope comes around
because someone you DIDN'T EVEN KNOW WORKED THERE
is leaving.

34. You wonder who's going to be left to put into your 'leaving'
collection.

35. Your relatives and family describe your job as "works with
computers".

36. The only reason you recognize your kids is because their
pictures are on your desk.

37. You only have makeup for fluorescent lighting.

AND THE CLINCHERS ARE

38. You read this entire list, kept nodding and smiling.

39. As you read this list, you think about forwarding it to your
"friends you send jokes to" e-mail group.

40. It crosses your mind that your jokes group may have seen this
list already, but you don't have time to check so you forward it
anyway.

OfficeSpeak For The American Worker

Latest terms to add to your vocabulary in the late 90s office environment:

Blamestorming
Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was missed, or a project failed, and who was responsible.

Seagull Manager
A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, poops over everything and then leaves.

Salmon Day
The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

Chainsaw Consultant
An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee head count, leaving the brass with clean hands.

CLM
Career Limiting Move - Used among microserfs to describe ill-advised activity. Trashing your boss while he or she is within earshot is a serious CLM. (Also known as CLB - Career Limiting Behavior)

Adminisphere
The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

Dilberted
To be exploited and oppressed by your boss. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the geek-in-hell comic strip character. "I've been dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."

Flight Risk
Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning to leave the company or department soon.

404
Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking him . . . he's 404, man."

Ohnosecond
That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

Percussive Maintenance
The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

Prairie Dogging
When someone yells or drops something loudly in a "cube farm" (an office full of cubicles) and everyone's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.