Spring 2001

Daddy’s Dating Rules

1. If you pull in my driveway and honk you’d better be delivering a package, because you’re sure not picking anything up.
2. You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her, so long as you do not peer at anything below her neck. If you cannot keep your eyes or hands off of my daughter’s body, I will remove them.
3. I am aware that it is considered fashionable for boys of your age to wear their trousers so loosely that they appear to be falling off their hips. Please don’t take this as an insult, but you and all of your friends are complete idiots. Still, I want to be fair and open minded about this issue, so I propose this compromise: You may come to the door with your underwear showing and your pants ten sizes to big, and I will not object. However, in order to ensure that your clothes do not, in fact come off during the course of you date with my daughter, I will take my electric nail gun and fasten your trousers securely in place to your waist.
4. I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilizing a “Barrier method” of some kind can kill you. Let me elaborate, when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.
5. It is usually understood that in order for us to get to know each other, we should talk about sports, politics, and other issues of the day. Please do not do this. The only information I require from you is an indication of when you expect to have my daughter safely back at my house, and the only word I need from you on this subject is: “early.”
6. I have no doubt you are a popular fellow, with many opportunities to date other girls. This is fine with me as long as it is okay with my daughter. Otherwise, once you have gone out with my little girl, you will continue to date no one but her until she is finished with you. If you make her cry, I will make you cry.
7. As you stand in my front hallway, waiting for my daughter to appear, and more than an hour goes by, do not sigh and fidget. If you want to be on time for the movie, you should not be dating. My daughter is putting on her makeup, a process than can take longer than painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Instead of just standing there, why don’t you do something useful, like changing the oil in my car?
8. The following places are not appropriate for a date with my daughter: Places where there are beds, sofas, or anything softer than a wooden stool, places where there is dancing, holding hands, or happiness. Places where the ambient temperature is warm enough to introduce my daughter to wear shorts, tank tops, midriff T-shirts, or anything other than overalls, a sweater, and a goose down parka - zipped up to her throat. Movies with a strong romantic or sexual theme are to be avoided; movies which features chain saws are okay. Hockey games are okay. Old folks homes are better.
9. Do not lie to me. I may appear to be a potbellied, balding, middle-aged, dim-witted has-been. But on issues relating to my daughter, I am the all-knowing, merciless god of your universe. If I ask you where you are going and with whom, you have one chance to tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I have a shotgun, a shovel, and five acres behind the house. Do not trifle with me.
10. Be afraid, be very afraid. It takes very little for me to mistake the sound of your car in the driveway for a chopper coming in over a rice paddy near Hanoi. When my Agent Orange starts acting up, the voices in my head frequently tell me to clean the guns as I wait for you to bring my daughter home. As soon as you pull into the driveway you should exit the car with both hands in plain sight. Speak the perimeter password, announce in a clear voice that you have brought my daughter home safely and early, then return to your car - there is no need for you to come inside. The camouflaged face at the window is mine.

Guess the Organization

Can you imagine working for a company that has a little more than 500 employees and has the following statistics:

• 29 have been accused of spousal abuse
• 7 have been arrested for fraud
• 19 have been accused of writing bad checks
• 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
• 3 have done time for assault
• 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
• 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
• 8 have been arrested for shoplifting
• 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits
• 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

Can you guess which organization this is?

It’s the 535 members of the United States Congress. The same group of Idiots that crank out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.

Wisdom

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. But in modern business (and education and government and churches), because heavy investment factors are taken into consideration, other strategies are often tried with dead horses, including the following:

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Threatening the horse with termination.
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
• Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
• Reclassifying the dead horse as “living-impaired.”
• Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.
• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
• Declaring that the dead horse carries lower overhead and therefore contributes more to the bottom line than some other horses.
• Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
• Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Useful Female Comebacks

M: Haven’t I seen you some place before? F: Yes, that’s why I don’t go there anymore.

M: Is this seat empty? F: Yes, and this one will be if you sit down.

M: Your place or mine? F: Both. You go to yours and I’ll go mine.

M: So, what do you do for a living. F: I’m a female impersonator.

M: Hey baby, what’s your sign? F: DO NOT ENTER.

M: How do you like your eggs in the morning? F: Unfertilized.

M: Your body’s like a temple. F: Sorry, there are no services today.

M: I would go to the end of the world for you. F: But would you stay there?

M: If I saw you naked, I’d die happy. F: If I saw you naked, I’d die laughing.

New Words for the New Millenium

BLAMESTORMING

Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

SEAGULL MANAGER

A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

CUBE FARM

An office filled with cubicles.

PRAIRIE DOGGING

When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.

MOUSE POTATO

The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.

SITCOMs

(Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage) What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

STARTER MARRIAGE

A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with nokids, no property, and no regrets.

STRESS PUPPY

A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

SWIPED OUT

An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

XEROX SUBSIDY

Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.

ASSMOSIS

The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

IRRITAINMENT

Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J. trials were a prime example. Bill Clinton’s shameful video Grand Jury testimony is another.

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE

The fine art of whacking the heck out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

VULCAN NERVE PINCH

The taxing hand position required to reach all the appropriate keys for certain commands. For instance, the warm reboot for a Mac II computer involves simultaneously pressing the Control Key, the Command Key, the Return Key, and the Power On key.

YUPPIE FOOD STAMPS

The ubiquitous $20 bills spewed out of ATMs everywhere. Often used when trying to split the bill after a meal, “We each owe $8, but all anybody’s got are yuppie food stamps.”

SALMON DAY

The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

ADMINISPHERE

The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

404

Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested document could not be located.”

GENERICA

Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, subdivisions.

OHNOSECOND

That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG mistake.

WOOFYS

Well Off Older Folks.

version:2 date:2/37/02