Whatever

It was in kindergarten that I decided that I lacked the personality and the desire to become a truly intimidating person.  I was never destined to be a school bully. Like Ferdinand the bull who refuses to fight, in the eponymous children’s story, my basically cheerful and cooperative nature has also prevented me from becoming a bully at work either.  
 
Lacking the basic ability to intimidate and terrorize, I was, naturally, no one’s idea of management material, and was thus condemned to having my peanut butter sandwiches ripped from my hands in the employee lunchroom, and my rare visits to the executive boardroom spoiled by ‘wedgies’ and ‘nipple twisters’. 

This is also why I now run my own business [plug my business here insert later] it was also to counter my basic lack of punishing demeanor that I decided on an alternative strategy.  

Like the classic Charles Atlas advertising of the 20’s, in which the wimp on the beach transforms himself into a muscleman after having sand kicked in his face, I committed myself 100% to a program of physical fitness.  It was a commitment that lasted a full 2 months at which point I realized that instead of lifting weight, I could be eating it.  
 
And so began my rigorous regime of stuffing myself with canapé’s and chocolate bars.  Thanks to this rigorous program of binging and not purging, I have added sufficient poundage to scare the watercress out of the slimmer-than-thou MBA-clones who occupy most executive suites.  
 
You can worry about cholesterol, friend, but let me tell you, it’s worth a coronary to waddle into a event presentation and know that if you can’t out-argue your competitor, you sure as hell can sit on him.  
 
Imagine my surprise, then, when I looked out over the edge of my triple-cheese double bypass burger to discover an urgent email on how worker bees, like thee and me, can successfully keep weight off despite potential workplace 'hazards’, like the food we are forced to inhale as we rush through events, or the highly caloric buffets we spread out across our desktops as a reward when we loyally decide to work through lunch.

While surfing, the web, not actually surfing, I came across an article on ehow.com on how to lose weight while at work. [http://www.ehow.com/how_2046208_lose-weight-work.html]

I decided there could be something to this business of being thin. The press release was full of so-called “facts” suggesting menacingly that being fat can lead to heart attacks, brain seizures, and major bouts of big-time depression. Since it’s highly depressing to come to work in the first place, I figured I could give up some valuable eating time to review some tips to reduce our waistline, get healthy, and live and work decades longer.  
 
For example:  
 
• Eat before you run out for a client dinner.  
 
The idea here is to “fill your stomach with the right foods to prevent you from eating the wrong foods.” It’s a fine plan, but it never works. You fuel up with healthy soy milk yoghurt and organic smoothies, and then you get to the restaurant, where your client, not quite as enlightened as yourself, orders the triple-thick, 64-ounce Groucho steak, with fries, baked potatoes, and an angiogram on the side.  
 
What are you supposed to do? Order the wheat-grass salad with tofu dressing? You can’t nibble on a breadstick while your client stuffs his or her face, not without being branded a food wimp, so you end up eating not one meal but two.  
 
• Pack your lunch 
 
Yes, bringing your lunch is a good way to control your calories, but be prepared for trouble unless you pack the appropriate food items. If you’re trying to project a power image, skip the egg salad. Rare roast beef is a better choice, especially if so rare the blood drips out over the edges of your healthy rye Bread and pools on your desktop. Now that’s an event manager! 
 
• Keep a food diary 
 
Writing down what you ingest could provide a Stephan King-like shock to your system. It could also help you identify the  approved food groups you may be missing like the chocolate cake group.    
 
my bottom… line that is, is if you lack the discipline to be very fat, thin could work.  After all, the less of you there is, the harder it is to see you. And if they can’t see you, they can’t fire you. 
 

Bovine business by the book?

Don’t like to brag, but nobody is harder on business books than Moi. Those that can’t do, usually write how you can do it better?

Event producer and director by day, business book critic by night.  Business books come off the business bestseller conveyor belt and book by book, we shoot them down…. Spencer Johnson’s ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’, we found it smelly, like good blue cheese, Stephan Covey’s ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?’, we found it highly effective at putting us to seven types of deep sleep.

But once every blue moon along comes a business book with a philosophy so twisted and an attitude so subversive, we have no choice but to go completely WHAT?! and embrace it completely.  This is the case with the latest from the razor-sharp quill of Stanley Bing, ‘100 Bullsh*t Jobs and How To Get Them.’

Bing’s book begins with a quotation from Aristotle “All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” Undeniably true, you will agree, and also undeniably depressing. If being a Greek philosopher was a crummy job, way back in 384 BC, what chance do the rest of us have, especially considering that Aristotle never had to worry about expense reports, or whether hot pants could substitute for those little short Grecian skirts on casual Fridays.

Bing begins his book with a lengthy exegesis on the nature of a bullsh*t job, most of which will probably be unnecessary to those of us who have been in the workforce for more than, say, 5 minutes. Basically, to Bing, bullsh*t is the “high-octane, lucrative, completely insubstantial charade” that represents from zero to 200% of any job description.

In short, bullsh*t work is not productive and does not move the ball ahead. It’s work that could disappear completely without any harm to the company or its prospects. Yet it remains the most important part of our day, since it gets us performance bonuses, and perks, and if we do it well enough and often enough, gets us promoted to positions where other people have to spend all their days bullsh*tt*ng us.

Bing’s thesis is that we should attempt to get positions that offer the highest BS quotient, since those are the jobs that require the minimum amount of work and return the maximum amount of compensation. He further posits that the amount of BS required in any position can be quantified. His theory, which I trust will be duly noted and considered by the Nobel Prize committee—calculates the amount of bullshit by multiplying the amount of abuse an employee must endure (A), multiplied by the amount of perks one enjoys (P) times salary ($), all divided by the number of hours (H) one must work to achieve all the above. Or, back to the Greek, ß = AP$/H. [Bing multiples the whole calculus shebang by G, the growth of your firm, but let’s face, the only growth in our jobs is seen around our expanding waistbands.]

The majority of Bing’s book is occupied with a listing of 100 specific BS jobs. In my one criticism to this important publication, the jobs are listed alphabetically, rather than by their BS quotient. As result, when flipping through the pages, you might decide to direct your career course to becoming #23, a Closet Organizer. With a ß of 99, you may decide that spending your days helping rich, disorganized people systematize their socks, or separate their Gucci from their Prada, represents a pretty sweet gig. But then you flip a few pages, and discover the even better BS position of #70, Pet Psychic, a job where the ß is twice as high, but the perks are even more juicy, like the opportunity to relate to clients like Drew Barrymore who Bing quotes as saying, “If I die before my cat, I want a little of my ashes put in his food so I can live inside him.”

Funny, I feel the same way about my boss. Except I want his ashes in my cat box.

The ultimate BS job, according to Bing, is #11, Being Donald Trump. The bullshit level of this job is 200—the maximum possible. As in all the job descriptions, Bing top lines the skills required (swaggering, primping) and the duties (break a lot of wind), as well as the next step in your career path—in Trump’s case, The Bosley Institute.

I might go after this position myself, but frankly, I’ve got an even better bullshit job—workplace humor Blogger and schmoozer to the gods who party above the clouds at No.1. It pays like crazy, is very easy, and the best part is, no one ever makes fun of my hair!

Accountancy firm Ernst & Young also courted controversy last November when it sent 400 female employees on a course to learn how to dress. Today's work environment has changed since the heyday of men in hats and gray pin stripped suits. In those day's it appears as though those white plastic pocket protectors that came with some companies advertising on it was part of the dress code. Kind of odd since accountants don't rely on pens as heavily as they rely on pencils. Also, in past times if you were an accountant and wore glasses then you had to wear those thick black framed Buddy Holly glasses, unless you were a woman and then they had to be horn rimmed glasses.

Only you, Elton, only You