Party Time!

Parties and drinking are great sources for one-liners.
Cruelty vs. meanness: Me: (extremely insulting remark about someone else deleted)
He (observing): “Gads that was cruel.”
Me (correcting): “No, it was mean. Cruelty is meanness to the undeserving.”
Simmons’ Law Of Alcoholic Expectations:
  • The best stuff always happens after the meeting, when everyone goes to the bar.
  • Corrolary: Any meeting which doesn't adjourn to the bar isn't worth going to.
Unknown guests at a party:

“Set phasers on ‘humiliate’!”
“What does that do, Cap'n?”
“Their pants disappear and their penises become 7/8" long.”

Party conversation with a woman:

She (astonished): “I'm so drunk I can't feel my knee!”
Me (reasurringly): “I can feel your knee.”
She (interested): “I'm so drunk I can't feel my thigh!”

There's a followup to this one. A few months later I was chatting with the woman above. She said “I saw the thing you posted about being someone being so drunk she couldn't feel her knee. Did that really happen?”

I assured her it did.

“That's so funny!” she said. “Who was it?”

Technology vs. People

It's not naturally funny, but sometimes you've just got to laugh.

After sending detailed directions on how to get to a meeting, including descriptions of the signage, I received the question ‘Will there be signs?’ This was my reply:

“Yea, the heavens shall open and the NP-complete solution given forth. ATT executives shall give birth to two-headed operating systems, and copyrights shall be expunged. The voice of the GNU shall be heard, but the faithless will be without transceivers.”

“There will be signs.”
Email sent to a friend:

“I tracked down why mail to you wasn't getting through. When it comes to getting someone to fix something, often it's not what you know, or who you know, but who you just might embarrass in front of their customers.”

“It's now fixed.”
“The skills needed for dealing with a computer are not simply irrelevant to those needed for dealing with people; they are actually a negative. You cannot reboot, reinstall, or power cycle a human being no matter how desperately they need it.”
From the late 80s:

“It's really amazing how many projects that consist of ‘gathering all the data in one place’ have been made obsolete by AltaVista.”

Now we have Google, but they still can't do as well as an expert could with AltaVista's boolean query language.
On viewing a web page that had the same phrase misspelled many times:

Me: “Cut and paste is not always your friend.”
He: “You mean, ‘Cut and paste is not always your friend your friend.’”

Business and Management

Culled from various longer writings. See also Life, below:

“There are a lot of problems in business these days. If you don't think business should be conducted with the same integrity, thoroughness, and love of doing right that one should be bringing to ones day to day life, you're a part of the problem.”
“You do not attract and retain top-level staff by paying them industry standard wages, supplying them industry standard benefits, and putting them on death-march projects (no matter how interesting). You must change at least one, and probably two of those three.”
“What we [as managers] want to get to is a situation where people are motivated not by authority or fear, but by understanding of the necessity of their job and desire to do it well. If a person knows why his job is important, then he becomes important by doing it well.”
“A legacy of internal corporate mistrust is almost impossible to fix. With trust, one forgives the human errors of employees, management and peers. Without it, even honest mistakes are interpreted as anything from incompetence to political machination. The end result is a death spiral of paranoia where the most innocent mistake becomes one more proof of a massive web of deceit, conspiracy, and gamesmanship.”
“When a client starts treating you as an employee rather than as a consultant, it's time to move on.”

Life

“Life is a journey, not an arrival. Hence a goal is not a place to be arrived at. It is a distant but visible marker that you use to set your direction. Any goal that is near is no longer a goal, it's just a milestone on the road you're travelling. It's OK to feel accomplishment at having reached it, and to celebrate that accomplishment as a job well done. But the next morning the road is still there, and you will need to take the next steps on your journey.”

“Individual milestones are useful, as they give us ways of measuring progress. But if in reaching a milestone you veer off the right path, or if you to do bad things in its pursuit, it's time to reset - this is a bad milestone. Reaching goals isn't important; they only measure where you've been. What's important is the direction taken and your conduct along the way.”

“Once one understands that the ends and the means are indistinguishable, many difficult questions turn out not have been questions at all, merely confusion on the part of the questioner.”

“Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.”

“Have faith in the future. Plant oaks.”

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Last modified: Dec. 13, 2011