Corporate Humor

[sarongsong]

Recently got one of those hand-held point-and-shoot temperature sensors (cheap; about $25). Changed the battery today---correctly, apparently:

PE-1...BATTERY REPLACEMENT: ...Please note: It is important to turn the unit off before replacing the battery otherwise the Temp Gun may malfunction. In fact, it could cause a tear in the fabric of the Universe, and all of existence may be erased. You don’t want that...Do not swallow or eat the battery. If you do, you’re a dummy. Or a small child... TempGun

[Strider1974]

I liked this quote from the same page

"Do not leave the PE-1 on or near hot objects, including swimsuit models (note: the PE-1 does not measure “foxiness”). Do not try and measure the temperature of your best friend’s flatulence. That’s just gross." http://www.tempgun.com/PE-1_operatin...tions_1-05.htm

[Delvo]

There was a bank or financial/investment institution that, a few years ago, threw in a goofy option on its automated telephone answering system. There were 8 or 9 options in the menu, and after the first 6, which were normal-sounding options you'd expect to hear, came "To hear a duck quack, press 7", followed by normal-sounding options again after that. If you pressed 7, it would play a recording of a duck quacking a few times, then return you to the menu you were just in.

Neal Boortz called them on his radio show, but bleeped over the company's name so they wouldn't get flooded with callers who were just calling in for the duck alone, so I don't know which it was. And I haven't heard of it again since then so I don't know if they've discontinued the duck.

[Moose]

Oh yeah. That was an insurance company somewhere in the midwest (IIRC) who used a duck for its motto.

I actually called that number (after hours), and sure enough, the woman whose voice was on the menu said "To hear me quack like a duck, press 7." So of course I pressed seven. She goes "QUACK" and the system hangs up.

Man, that was sweet.

[01101001]

To hear a duck quack, press 7
[...]
Neal Boortz called them on his radio show, but bleeped over the company's name so they wouldn't get flooded with callers who were just calling in for the duck alone, so I don't know which it was.

That duck is free range. It escaped.

Public Relations Hall of Fame: National Discount Broker's Duck Quack

Nearly half a million people a day called National Discount Brokers' voice mail just to hear the sound of a duck quacking.

Callers dialed into the toll-free number and heard an automated reception that began with typical corporate prompts such as: "To request a new account kit, press two." But the seventh option piqued the interest of people around the world. "If you would like to hear a duck quack, press seven," the automated attendant said.

At its peak, nearly 500,000 people called the line to hear the sound of the duck, tying up the company's phone system in the process.

NDB has used a mallard as its mascot for more than 60 years, but it never thought option seven would garner so much attention.

[Maksutov]

Here's some unintentional (perhaps) corporate humor.

[Tog]

I saw a flashlight once that had a limited lifetime warranty. The limits: Bear attacks, shark bites, and 5 year old children.

[farmerjumperdon]

There was a list of these going around with some pretty funny stuff on it. I think most of the goofiness was created during translation of directions from some other language into English. A couple I remember:

On bag of nuts handed out on planes:

Instructions: Open bag, eat nuts. Do not eat bag.

Instructions with an iron:

Do not iron clothes while wearing them.

[Matherly]

Two 'legal text' bits of humor.

When he was still sending out his "Dogbert New Ruling Class" newsletter, Scott Adams related a story about how in an End-User Liscensing Agreement (EULA) for a program, there was the standard boilerplate section on countires that it was illegal to export the software too. Stuck in amoung the usual suspects (Cuba, Iran, etc.) was the fictonal 'Dilbert' country of Elbonia.

The other one that springs to mind was in the credits to the movie "Airplane!". During the copyright notice at the very end is the standard statement about how reproduction withou permission isn't allowed, how you have to get permission to public show it, etc. etc. etc.

Followed by "But WE can. HA HA HA"

I always got a kick out of that.

[Sticks]

There is of course the disgruntled soon to be ex-employee who might slip stuff in...

Then there was a case where people ringing a tech support line were told to go away and that the company was not interested in fixing their problems. Apparently a hacker had attacked their voicemail...

A bit out of season, now that the festive season has passed, but here in Newcastle upon Tyne, one recruitment company wrote up the job description for Santa Clause in standard business speak. They then published it in our local evening newspaper. It was so good as a piece that some indurhviduals (Scott Adams influence there) never sussed the gag and sent in resumes

The next year they did "The Three Wise Men" it was a hoot. Then they were stopped as they were not ment to advertise jobs that did not exist.

[farmerjumperdon]

We have actually published incorrect numbers before, and one was to an S&M line. At the time I was part of our telephony team and called it to confirm; otherwise I might not have believed it. Amazing that of all the possible wrong numbers to give, we gave one to a line like that. Equally amazing that the techs and end users did not test, test, and test again to check for the error. Leads me to believe it was sabotage.

We have people "fat-finger" telephone numbers all the time. When you key millions of telephone numbers you are bound to have some errors. We were doing a clean-up and got down to a relative few that couldn't be resolved. So a couple of us decided to just call the numbers to see who they were. It was kind of funny. The first couple calls I explained what we were doing. It was so awkward, and somewhat embarassing, that we quit identifying ourselves, and would just say "Sorry, must have dialed the wrong number" after people answered the telephone.

[Tog]

Off topic a bit, but related to wrong numbers and corporate games...
Our store had 4 phone lines. For those that may not know how this works, each line is a different phone number. If I call out on line 3 the called ID shows a different number than if I call out on line 4. If someone calls the number on the phone book and it's busy, it forwards the call to the next number in the chain. The numbers are not required to be sequential.

Our line 4 had was one digit different from an other stores number as listed in the directory. We got about 3 calls a week for them (just that I knew of). It got to the point that if line 4 rang and there were no calls on the other line, we would answer and thank them for calling the other store.

[Captain Kidd]

We have actually published incorrect numbers before, and one was to an S&M line. At the time I was part of our telephony team and called it to confirm; otherwise I might not have believed it. Amazing that of all the possible wrong numbers to give, we gave one to a line like that. Equally amazing that the techs and end users did not test, test, and test again to check for the error. Leads me to believe it was sabotage.

Heh, I did that once, to somebody really high up the food chain. Something, extremely minor, was going south at one of the nuke plants, but it was tied to a Limited Condition of Operation that said shut the plant down in X hours if you don't get it fixed. Oh, yeah, I remember now they cleaned some piping and a HVAC temperature control valve I had done the replacement design work for decided to quit responding.

Anyways, the vendor was, of course, being slow to respond and the shut down time was approaching so one of the big-wigs decided to see if he could throw his weight around. I gave them the number, but I had a dislexic moment and transposed two digits. Those two digits switched it from a valve vendor to an, ah-hem, adult oriented business.

It took weeks for the jokes to go away.

[Larry Jacks]

When developing our space situation awareness enterprise architecture, we routinely slip little things in there to see if anyone is paying attention (or when we're getting a little punchy). For example, buried in a long sequence diagram might be a couple transactions that read, "Got any threes?" "Go fish."

Our last release featured a data class called "ThisIsNotTheEventYouWereLookingFor" in a use case. It got past review.

[Stregone]

There's an r/c battery charger that has a warning (among many real ones) not to connect the battery backwards, as it will cause time to reverse. What made it even funnier was that the rest of the instructions and warnings were very engrish-y.

[Tog]

Some of my favorite "Engrish" labels:

"For indoor or outdoor use ONLY" --Christmas lights.
"Keep out of children" --Steak knives
"Safe and fun. Just like the real thing" --Toy handcuffs

[Swift]

When developing our space situation awareness enterprise architecture, we routinely slip little things in there to see if anyone is paying attention (or when we're getting a little punchy). For example, buried in a long sequence diagram might be a couple transactions that read, "Got any threes?" "Go fish."

Our last release featured a data class called "ThisIsNotTheEventYouWereLookingFor" in a use case. It got past review.

At one company I worked at, I was responsible for posting several graphs each month tracking such things as yield, % of crystals with various defects, and a couple of other quality factors. I was pretty convinced no one ever actually looked at these things, so I started putting tiny little text boxes in them with various messages. One month the message was "First person to tell me they read this, gets $1". After about 3 weeks I was in late one night and the second shift foreman asks "Anyone get the buck yet?" - I pulled out my wallet and handed him the dollar. He was very surprised.

We also had a quarterly meeting with employees and I did a Q&A session for R&D. Since attendance was voluntary, Management asked me to post the Questions and Answers. I would occasionally throw funny ones in there too - never got a response.

[hhEb09'1]

Our line 4 had was one digit different from an other stores number as listed in the directory. We got about 3 calls a week for them (just that I knew of). It got to the point that if line 4 rang and there were no calls on the other line, we would answer and thank them for calling the other store.

Ours were sequential, but unpublished. About the only marketing calls we got were from digit dialers--if the Rocky Mountain News called offering a subscription, I'd answer the next call with "Denver Post, circulation department". They hung up.

[Larry Jacks]

Ours were sequential, but unpublished. About the only marketing calls we got were from digit dialers--if the Rocky Mountain News called offering a subscription, I'd answer the next call with "Denver Post, circulation department". They hung up.

My favorite telemarketer story happened one morning in 1990. I was stationed at Shemya AFB, Alaska near the very end of the Aleutian Island chain (Base motto: "It's not the end of the world but you can see it from here.") It was the kind of place that if God ever decided to give the Earth an enema, Shemya is where he'd stick the hose. As a crew commander, I had a phone in my room. That morning, I was awakened following a mid shift. It was an MCI telemarketer wanting to sell me long distance service. It was obvious the caller didn't have any idea where on Earth I was. Since I got to call home free every night, I declined his offer.

Three years later, I worked for MCI. Life is wierd sometimes.

[Delvo]

I once worked for the USGS, running a website and doing GIS (geographic information systems; essentially, computerized mapping with nifty databse integration for manipulating data about the land and integrating it with the land features' geometric traits). I was in a meeting where my boss was showing some people from another agency a set of interactive maps I'd put up on our website, and I pointed out a little question mark button in a corner of it, which would open a pop-up text box filled with whatever text the map maker wants to write about that spot or that map. We didn't have relevant text to put in there yet, but I wanted to demonstrate what could be done, so, just to show the feature, I had put in some aribitrary text ahead of time for a certain county in one of the Dakotas: "Here, there be dragons."

Nobody got it. Their confusion about it and need to have it explained even distracted from and got more attention than the feature itself.

So here's a much better one that wasn't even intentional. A friend of mine ran into someone she hadn't seen in several years (since high school) while on a lunch break from work. They both work for the state government, so he was able to look up her email address in the state employee email directory, and soon after they had run into each other, he sent her a message asking her out. She thought something about it seemed weird and creepy, and forwarded it to me, asking if it seemed that way to me, and if all guys were like this (reading something into a casual conversation that's not there); her own first words after quoting his message were "Is this what I get just for trying to be nice?". Just one little catch: instead of the "Forward" button, she hit the "Reply" button.

[Josh]

I just passed a shop whilst out buying lunch. The store sells sound equipment, etc for DJs. A notice in the window says "Please ensure you are wearing a pleasant smelling deoderant before entering this store".

[Tog]

I saw a sign in a shop that sold greeting cards among other things. The tag under the cards read "Test your IQ, see if you can put it back where you found it".

One I always thought was odd was the bathroom in a local restaurants chain. The sign on the door reads "Please inform the management if this bathroom does not meet your standards for cleanliness". That puts a lot of pressure on a person. Sure, I don't have gobs of wet paper towel stuck to the mirror at home, but now, if I don't report it, they think I'm okay with it, and if I do report it will the person that will be bringing my food that will have to clean it. And that's not good.

[Moose]

and if I do report it will the person that will be bringing my food that will have to clean it. And that's not good.

Heh. Easy solution. Wait till you've got your order in hand, then inform management.

[Larry Jacks]

Over Christmas, someone sent a photo of a sign in a store that read, "Warning, unattended children will be given an expresso and a free puppy."

I don't know if that was a real sign or a Photoshop, but it was funny.

[hhEb09'1]

Over Christmas, someone sent a photo of a sign in a store that read, "Warning, unattended children will be given an expresso and a free puppy."

I don't know if that was a real sign or a Photoshop, but it was funny.

Expresso? gotta be real

[Swift]

Over Christmas, someone sent a photo of a sign in a store that read, "Warning, unattended children will be given an expresso and a free puppy."

I don't know if that was a real sign or a Photoshop, but it was funny.

What! No drumset?!

[Stregone]

Over Christmas, someone sent a photo of a sign in a store that read, "Warning, unattended children will be given an expresso and a free puppy."

I don't know if that was a real sign or a Photoshop, but it was funny.

The vet clinic near me has that sign.

[Jim]

When I was still in junior high, a good friend of ours stopped by for a visit. We were all seated at the kitchen table when the wall phone rang. As she was sitting nearest, the friend answered it.

"Hello? No, this is not Striplings. You dialed the number wrong." (Our number was one off the department store's.) She hung up.

Riiing. "Hello? No, I told you, this is not Striplings. Please dial more carefully."

Riiiing. "Striplings. Yes, we have those in stock. What's your address? I'll send one right over. Goodbye."

[Jim]

Some quickees...

Label on a dishwasher: Do not allow children to play in the dishwasher

Label on a salt container: Contents - Salt. Warning - High in Sodium.

Sign in a Barcelona hotel room: Management does not hold its elf responsible for items left in rooms. (Van Rijn will be relieved.)

Sign in a Philadelphia hotel room: His is a nonsmoking room. (I noticed this during a business meeting and commented on it. Later I found that someone had put the sign in my briefcase. I still have it.)

[Swift]

Label on a salt container: Contents - Salt. Warning - High in Sodium.

Well that's false advertising; it is also high in chlorine!