sounds like a plan

like animal farm, but with fluorescents

Hey, it always worked for me. From the relatively insane Rum & Monkey, we present:

20 Indicators that Weeping at Work
May Be a Viable Plan Going Forward

Chair has become one with Nestene consciousness and keeps trying to nibble on bum.

Utopian vision for global democracy dashed by gel-haired colleague’s Daily Mail worldview.

Zombie army escaped again and appears to want IT support.

Oh noes, someone took two donuts.

Microsoft Office has become otherworldly sentient intelligence and still just wants to know if you’re writing a letter.

and so on…ah, the year I put in at the cubicle farm. Good times, good times. Okay, I confess: it was me who freed the zombie army and gave them your pager number.

So we know who I am: the question now becomes, who are you? Take the Office Moron quiz!

Which Office Moron Are You?

I'm great. Like gold.

Which Office Moron Are You?
Rum and Monkey: jamming your photocopier one tray at a time.
Congratulations, fool! You’re the incompetent egotist.

Every office has one. You stride in on your first day with no useful skills, an inane smile on your face, and plans for a variety of team-building exercises, meetings, extra-curricular activities and staff days out, all designed to win you favour with the boss.

The problem is, everyone else hates you. You’re loud, you’re arrogant, you’re dumber than management, and you insist on wearing really loud shirts to make yourself seem interesting. Even the IT manager is more socially aware – and the depressing thing is, you’ll probably run the company in ten years.

If you don’t get a pickaxe through your head first.

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size matters: real estate and roi

McMansionAccording to this veddy interesting article in Slate, the size of a CEO’s house may bear an inverse relationship to the performance of the company’s stock on his watch. If this proves to be true over the entire CEO sector, you can expect hysterical investors to drive Zillow to the top of the web, and Architectural Digest to become a hollow shell of its former self.

And George W. Bush to propose real estate offsets, wherein CEOs in monster McMansions get tax breaks for paying destitute Third Worlders to live eighteen to a room.

In a working paper titled “Where are the Shareholders’ Mansions?David Yermack of New York University and Crocker Liu of Arizona State wonder whether there is a relationship between CEO home-buying behavior and stock performance. (The title is a riff on the classic 1940 investment book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?.) In doing so, the two academics are invading one of the last preserves of executive privacy, and we should all be very grateful! …

Yermack and Liu insist there’s a solid academic reason to look through the keyholes. They want to figure out if a mansion purchase signals commitment or cashing out. A CEO who buys a 12,000-square-foot mansion could be showing his intent to stay for the long haul and to bust his butt so that he’ll have the cash to pay off the huge mortgage. In which case, you’d expect stocks of the companies where the CEO just bought an obscenely large house to thrive. Buy!

Or the purchase of an absurdly large house could signal entrenchment: The CEO is too comfortable with his position and his personal finances. He has made so much money that he can’t really be bothered with running the company. And the willingness to spend gazillions on a house—not to mention the furnishings, artwork, and baubles to fill it—betokens a general inattentiveness to costs. In which case, you’d expect stocks of the companies where the CEO just bought an obscenely large house to fare poorly. Sell!

Especially if, like me, you know that those CEOs often bought those houses with company-financed and company-guaranteed loans that are contractually obligated to be company-forgiven when the CEO leaves said company for whatever reason including stunning incompetence, mendacity, or criminality.

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Fame, Glory, Sex and Money through Blogging: what it takes to beat the squirrel babies

Jedi Squirrels unite! 

Fame. Glory. Sex. Money. You want it all. You want it now.

And you want to get it by blogging.

I hear you, baby. I know how you feel. I’m one of you.

I’m about to give you some bad news

The Fame? That comes fast, as long as you define “fame” as “slightly known, in that they can kindasorta recognize my header but have no idea what I look like way, to people who already read blogs.” This is a smaller group than you currently imagine, and even your late-night entreaties of the retired longshoremen on the rail at your local watering hole are not likely to change it on a measurable scale.

If you want to be famous to politicians’ research staffers, WoW-playing slackers, or sysadmins, however, you’ve got it made.

The Glory? See above, plus your mother will be proud of you once you spend three consecutive holidays explaining to her what blogging is and showing her how to put YOUR blog in HER email signature. Unless you’re a porn blogger, and then we don’t want to know about your relationship with your mother.

The Sex? You mean with other people? What would I know about that? Ask the porn bloggers if you must.

The Money?Ah, the money. Now we come to it; you figured that if you stuck Adsense on your cat blog that you could just sit back and watch the millions roll in, didn’t you? You’ve taken a couple of overpriced SEO seminars and can’t understand why you aren’t able to quit your day job just yet.

In point of fact, there are three ways to earn six figures from blogging.

  1. Be Robert Scoble.
  2. The engtech method
  3. The Manolo method

Of these three, we at the ol’ raincoaster blog favour #3, for lo, we are in truth and in fact not Robert Scoble and yea verily we can hardly understand what engtech says half the time (and could only get a six-figure job if you left out the decimal entirely), so that leaves only one option.

Fortunately, the Magnanimous Manolo has laid out a simple yet superfantastic planenabling you to scale the heights of the six-figure-blogo-strato-sphere. Or, as he puts it, “to beat the squirrel babies.”

You may think, Mr. Arturo G. Bloggerman, that your grand mission is to enlighten the unwashed masses, to whom you declaim the unpleasant truth from your exalted perch at declaimingloudly.blogspot.com. But in the point of fact, if the unwashed masses do not find your loud declamations entertaining they will quickly move down the street to the Cuteoverload to look at the pictures of the squirrel babies.

So, what must you do to compete with the squirrel babies?

Read the rest of the articleto learn the superfantastic surefire secret to six-figure success!
(sorry, been reading a lot of marketing faff lately)

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world’s worst commute?

World's worst commute?

via BoingBoing

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the Right Honourable Dr Gordon Brown MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, picks his nose and eats it

That’s basically it. Gordon Brown, Chancellor (=Finance Minister), sits on-camera behind Tony Blair on the day he is to present his new budget and slowly and methodically picks his nose and eats it, over a period of two excruciatingly long minutes. Quite frankly, I couldn’t make it all the way to the end; I thought he was going to break through to his brain case any second. Maybe he thinks it comes under “recycling” and is a new green initiative?

Hat tip to Guido, who put the creative choice of soundtrack to it and who’s been up to much interesting stuff while I’ve been quietly starving from lack of Internet and fattening foods.

Note to self: juice fasts make me homicidally enraged. Remember to fast before confronting enemies; also, can hide the bodies in my now-baggy clothes.

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