I conceived an idea to find out if a person’s a motherfucking sleaze just by looking under his/her desk. I kinda developed this theory myself - that there should be a correlation between ‘what you find underneath a person’s desk’ versus ‘the magnitude of sleaziness factor in that person’. Don’t ask me how I conceived that but, it just happened. (Maybe I’m a genius…)

To put my theory to test, I checked out Elliot’s desk when he was away for lunch today. And guess what? I did find some scientific evidence which corroborated my perception about Elliot - that he’s a motherfucking sleaze.

I snapped a photo of it for you guys to see for yourselves. Photos after the jump.
(Warning: Proceed at your own risk. I would advice against proceeding if you haven’t already taken your lunch/dinner.)
Read more…

It was one of my colleague’s farewell lunch and we’re at this seafood restaurant. About 10 minutes after we seated, I felt a soft poke on my shoulder. I looked over, it was an old lady with disheveled white hair… showing me a small piece of torn out paper. Written on it, were 4 digits of number. Forgot what the number was, but let’s just put it as 5349.

“….. ….. ….. ….. 5349 ….. …..?”

That was all I could make out from what she was trying to say to me. Only the 4-digit number. As you may have noticed, it ended with a question mark. She was actually asking me a question and I have no idea what was it all about. From the way her expression goes, it was as if I’m gonna fucking regret for the rest of my life if I don’t copy down that lucky 4 digit number from her… for a small fee maybe.

Not quite interested in what she has to offer, I did what I usually do best - I flashed her a friendly smile and said “No thanks”, and turned my attention back to the table. But it didn’t quite end there, for the old lady was still standing right behind me. Again, she asked

“….. ….. ….. ….. 5349 ….. …..?”

Freakish.

I was thinking of maybe to pay her off so that she would leave me alone but, I was also worried that it might make her feel the rush of being bold… you know, like I’m fucking scared of her… which she might then climb up on me and give my ear a blowjob or something. So I decided to be honest with her and see how the situation develops…

“Errmmm, I’m sorry… but I’m not into 4D gambling, alright?”

She didn’t budge a bit. She just stood there looking at me like she’s expecting something from me. I didn’t know what else to do, and decided to ignore her for good, at the same time hoping that she wouldn’t turn hostile on me.

One of my colleague however, sensed that something was wrong about the whole thing, and decided to investigate further. He kinda listened to the 4D old lady for a couple more times and asked some questions… and after a whole deal lot of understanding later, he found out that she was actually asking if anyone of us on the table owned a car with the registration number ‘5349′ (which to my embarrassment, was completely not about 4D at all). Apparently, that ‘5349′ car was blocking some traffic out there and she wanted the owner to remove it pronto.

Man, I was like, beet fucking red about the whole misunderstanding thing… and I suddenly felt like

a) a jerk
b) putting my head into the toilet bowl and flush (also called a swirlie, by the way…)

I was lucky that the old lady wasn’t some kind of a bad tempered hag or the like of it. She could have yelled “MOVE YOUR FUCKING CAR!!!”, but she chose not to… Instead, she asked softly and politely and got her own ass mistaken as a mad woman trying to solicit 4D lottery number. What an injustice that I had done to her. *repeatedly smacks myself stupid*

Maybe it would have been better for her to yell like she had lost her mind… vandalize the car maybe… (that ‘5349′ car turned out to be my boss’ car…)

I came to know about this ‘Hawthorne Effect’ a couple days ago. It says, productivity usually increases by itself… even without doing anything… when the boss or somebody with authority is watching.

Not sure if it’s true for ALL cases but, I kinda shuddered when I thought of it the other way round.

You see, everytime when I services my car, I kinda hang around the area to check out what the mechanic does to my car. Normally, they’d do a good job (at least for the workshop that I frequently visit). That’s probably ‘Hawthorne Effect’ at play.

So what happens if I were to leave my car there and be somewhere else? Are they going to do a good job like usual? Or are they simply going to do a half assed work and tell me that they’ve done everything?

How bout my workdesk when I’m away (say… like this week when I’m off the whole week for training)? Is Elliot going to masturbate into my DVD drive? Or is he going to stuff some of his pubic hairs into my USB port? Sheesh…

THis fucking Hawthorne thing makes me feel worried about stuffs that I shouldn’t worry… (Fuck, I should be linking my work stuffs to this… not my mechanic or Elliot…)

I’d be even busier for the rest of the week…

*this post requires a great deal of reading, comprehension and imagination. Please be informed.

In its desperate bid to cut down spending and improve the financial status, Company X mandated that all the engineers in my department need to lead at least one cost reduction project in 2007 - else, we can all forget about any possibility for promotion. That’s why I am attending a whole week training about quality improvement this week. (It’s hard to earn an honest buck nowadays.)

Amongst the interesting topics that I’ve learnt today was - ‘LEAN’. ‘Lean’ manufacturing. ‘Lean’ process. ‘Lean’ shit.

‘Lean’ is about identifying and reducing wastage. It is a topic that requires some 12 full days training, and due to time constraint, we’re only allowed to skim the surface of it. There was also a mention by the trainer that ‘lean’ benefits the learner not only in his work life, but also in his everyday life - as its ideologies are applicable to virtually anything that one can think of. Which, made me ponder a little bit further about this ‘lean’ thing…

Now when I try to think ‘lean’ and associate it with our everyday activities, for some reasons unknown to me, I think about dogs. Dogs, when they eat, they fucking spill their food everywhere. Usually, 20 - 30% of them. And they always eat more than they should. Those are all wastage to me.

Maybe you don’t see it as critical as I do, but if you were to put this in cents, you’re talking about pouring your hard earned moolah into the garbage bin. Really. Having your dog spilling 30% of its food is akin to paying 100% for only 70% of the content. That’s bad karma people. There are literally millions of people struck by famine and poverty everyday, and you’re letting your dog do injustice to mankind by eating like a … dog. That’s fucked up man…

If you’re thinking ‘lean’, you wouldn’t let that happen in the first place. You’d either kill your dog, or you can use the ‘X machine’ - an innovation courtesy of my wandering mind during the lecture. Read on to find out what it is all about…

You see, we can actually design a machine that feeds our dog automatically without wastage. Here’s roughly how it should work. I’m gonna do this in point form for my convenience’ sake :

- Machine consists of a tube big enough to fit a domestic dog.
- One end of tube act as the entrance for dog to walk in, the other, was a ’special food bowl’ hooked to a microprocessor controlled food dispenser.
- An electronic weighing scale will also be placed under the tube to measure dog’s net weight.
- A 3D object scanner will be installed inside the tube to scan dog and data fed into a NURBs modelling program.
- When the 3D model of the dog plotted against the scale of tube, you’d get the average distribution of the size of the dog.
- Through some programming algorithm, you’d be able to easily convert the size and weight of dog into BMI (Body Mass Index).
- With appropriate reference to correlate a canine diet against its BMI, food will be dispensed accordingly to the ’special food bowl’.

Now we have sort of eliminated problem number 2 - dogs eating more than what they should. They will not get more, but just enough and essential to keep them healthy.

To curb wastage caused by spill,

- a larger funnel will be placed under the bowl, streaming the spilled food into a, again… ‘microprocessor controlled’ high speed blender. (everything’s microprocessor controlled nowadays… so get used to it already)
- spilled food will fall into blender through funnel, and the blender will automatically mix spilled food with 3 parts of water.
- the mixture will then be pumped into a giant syringe and jabbed into the subject canine’s ass.

So, you see what wonders can this machine do already? Food will be dispensed according to dog’s BMI… and spilled food will be processed into liquid form and jabbed into the dog’s ass. If you have a sound general knowledge, you should know that the dog will learn its lesson through the jab (Pavlov’s theory - go read about it) and next time, the darn dog realize that spilled food means painful ass. (and at the same time, we directly ‘inject back’ the spilled food into the dog without actually wasting them… how cool is that?)

Of course, there could be problems like the dog potentially damaging the machine when it shoots out from the tube (when needle stings its butt)… but that problem can be easily resolved by an automatic restraining claw. Eg. When syringe jabs the dog, a mechanical claw automatically pops up simultaneously to grab dog’s balls. Through Pavlov’s theory again, dog will know that dashing out of the tube is a BAD IDEA. *For female dogs (bitches), I’ll leave it for you guys to imagine yourself.

The whole thing may sound ridiculous but it’s actually all possible. We already have the technology and the ability to do it. It’s just, nobody gave a thought about it yet… until I was graced by the almighty God of all ‘lean’ thinking. (aren’t you guys feeling blessed already?)

You know, I am beginning to like this management training already…

(you guys let me know if you need any clarification… as I typed this whole thing with a foggy mind… Initially wanted to make an illustration for the machine, but I was too lazy to do it…)

We took heed some of you girls’ advices. We got Regine’s hair clipped. Clipping her hair was quite a challenge, as she’s very interested in that little white teddy bear on the hairclip. After tussling for about 5 minutes, we managed to get the clip to stay on her hair… at least long enough for me to snap a picture of her without her funny face.