Smart Ass Comments at Work

About a month ago, I was out on a sales training trip with a fellow middle manager and our Business Unit Manager. After the last day’s training sessions, we were having a drink in the hotel bar. The two of them started talking about how our organization has a lot of “complacency” and is very “comfortable” in their jobs (making the little air quotation marks a lot).

Then they start into the whole “we have to start thinking outside of the box” rigamarole, feeding off each other in how we need to have out of the box thinking in order to grow the business and everyone’s still thinking inside of the box and they need to find a way to get outside of the box and so on and so on.

I started to get really bored with them tossing meaningless catchphrases at each other, getting louder and louder as the drinks went down, and eventually I just couldn’t help myself.

BUM: … and we have to find a way to think outside of the box!
(pause)
Me: OK. But does it have to be a box?
BUM: (turns to look directly at me) YES! YES! It HAS to be a box! That’s what I’m saying!
Me: (bewildered) Oh. Alright.
(turns away trying to hide smirk)

Still wondering about that one.

Being the newest and youngest guy in the office (I’m 37) and also the most liberal of the bunch (i.e. I don’t hunt or fish and I didn’t vote for Bush) I have to keep a thick skin around the politically incorrect guys. That usually means coming up with some quick retorts.
Our company recently sent out a memo offering sign-language classes and they were laughing about it as usual :rolleyes:. Then one asked me “Hey (bob), this looks right up your alley. Maybe you could learn the sign-language alphabet.”

I replied, “For this office I’d only need to learn two letters. F and U.”

They appreciated my effort.

I have a couple that I like to trot out every now and then, when I’m fed up with some folk’s inflated sense of entitlement.

  1. “Hey, my widget doesn’t work now. What’s wrong?”

    “Hard to say. Could you hold it up to the phone, so that I can see it better?”

  2. “Did you get my message?”

    “How do you think I knew to call?”

This sounds like a brilliant opportunity to segue into further discussion of what Pirsig actually meant, pointing out that each occasion of the software working straight out of the box is an event, but that the ongoing process of continuing to work could be described either as a quality or as a series of events, depending on your point of view, blah, blah, blah.