After a long hiatus, I will begin contributing to this blog again. I am very excited to continue sharing my workplace experience and “wisdom”. To begin I’d like to share three pieces I recently read in The Onion. For those of you not familiar with The Onion, it is a mock news site which parodies mainstream media and current events. These three all have to do with work and they cracked me up.

Company’s Employees Spend Entire Day Touching Base

I liked this one because it is full of ridiculous buzz words that I typically hate. It also echoes my frustrations with co-workers who want to have meetings to discuss meetings.

‘I Make My Own Hours,’ Says Man About To Get Fired

I found this one funny because of the inherent irony. Here the person feels they can do whatever they want and in the end he is going to be fired. The humor comes from two places. The first is that we all know people who behave like this and should/someday will be fired. The second reason is because this man is abusing a system that should make work/life balance easier for everyone else. I’ve always said, “I can do pretty much whatever I want at work, because I don’t do whatever I want at work.” No one questions when I come in and when I leave or if I need to take a long lunch because I get in on time (or early) leave on time (or late) or skip lunch on most days.  If everyone behaved this way we’d all be able to “make our own hours” without any repercussions. But poor behavior by some causes managers and companies to be too strict on hours.

At My Age, I Just Can’t Compete With The Younger, Competent Guys I Work With

I could write an entire blog post on this one (and probably will eventually). I keep hearing age discrimination is causing baby-boomers to have a hard time getting jobs when they are laid off. Well this may be the case for some people, but isn’t it just as likely that they are having a hard time finding a job because 1) their skills aren’t up-to-date 2) they aren’t willing to put in long hours like younger people 3) they are set in their ways and aren’t coming up with creative ideas 4) they don’t know how to or refuse to use tools that are now common place in business…? The list goes on.

What do you think of these articles? Do you see any truth to the sarcasm or do you think they are unfair?

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