by Mumpy

1. My boss stood over my shoulder while I was sitting down working on my computer. All of a sudden I realized that there was a buzzing sound coming from his trousers. I looked up at him puzzled but he, however, continued looking at the computer screen oblivious to the noise. I was not sure what the social etiquette was in this situation but I thought if I kept quiet for a bit, he was bound to notice. After three very long minutes of buzzing, I threw sexual harassment lawsuits to the wind and asked if he knew that his trousers were making a funny noise. In a spate of added irony, it turned out to be his pelephone vibrating to let him know that had a meeting with me to discuss Documentation in the Product Release Flow. As my new technical writer pointed out, the fact that he ignored the meeting call was a bad portent of things to come.
2. Me and my new technical writer (“my technical writer and I” is just so passé) spent a long time this morning planning our strategy and techniques for the Documentation in the Product Release Flow meeting – which I had called in order to protest the miserable status of Documentation within the backend office. We went into the meeting-room, armed with our demands and logical, rational justifications and emerged an hour later white and pasty-faced with none of our requests met. As we walked slowly back to our desks, my sweet, naïve, fresh-faced technical writer turned to me and said thoughtfully, “Now where did we go wrong?”
3. One of my colleagues printed out a photo of himself and put it up on his notice board. When I asked why, he said he liked the photo. “Ahhh” I said, nodding politely and concealing thoughts to myself along the lines of “dear lord, that man has a bigger ego than Borat”. The next morning I walked in and saw to my utmost delight that somebody had scribbled in a fake moustache and beard on the photo. I’ve been smirking all day.
4. My boss asked me to convert a Word file containing 20 Visio drawings to PDF. When I asked him what the priority was, he said to do it now as it will only take 15 minutes. I have been working on it for about two days now as both me and boss are trying every workaround possible to get the smallest file with the best graphic quality. After 48 hours, it transpired that the only thing we needed to was to use a bold font on the Visio drawings. This has been the longest “15 minutes” of my life. Laugh? I nearly did.

Link to all episodes

What? You didn't participate in the Salary Survey?

Have you read Jonathan's Bar & Grill or The Why of Style?