Beware, Idiots At Work!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

This is a short selection of stories taken from the internet. I have no idea whether they are true or not, but they are amusing, and as we know, stranger things have happened.

Enjoy.

We had to have the garage door repaired. The Sears repairman told us that one of our problems was that we did not have a 'large' enough motor on the opener.

I thought for a minute, and said that we had the largest one Sears made at that time, a 1/2 horsepower.

He shook his head and said, 'Lady, you need a 1/4 horsepower.'

I responded that 1/2 was larger than 1/4.

He said, 'NO, it's not. Four is larger than two...'

We haven't used Sears repair since.

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My daughter and I went through the McDonald's take-out window and I gave the clerk a $5 bill. Our total was $4.25, so I also handed her a quarter.

She said, 'You gave me too much money.'

I said, 'Yes I know, but this way you can just give me a dollar bill back.'

She sighed and went to get the manager who asked me to repeat my request.

I did so, and he handed me back the quarter, and said 'We're sorry but we cannot do that kind of thing.'

The clerk then proceeded to give me back $1 and 75 cents in change..

Do not confuse the clerks at McD's.

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I live in a semi rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call the local township administrative office to request the removal of the DEER CROSSING sign on our road.

The reason: 'Too many deer are being hit by cars out here! I don't think this is a good place for them to be crossing anymore.'

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My daughter went to a local Taco Bell and ordered a taco. She asked the person behind the counter for 'minimal lettuce.'

He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg lettuce.

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I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, 'Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?'

To which I replied, 'If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?'

He smiled knowingly and nodded, 'That's why we ask.'

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The stoplight on the corner buzzes when it's safe to cross the street. I was crossing with an intellectually challenged coworker of mine.

She asked if I knew what the buzzer was for.

I explained that it signals blind people when the light is red.

Appalled, she responded, 'What on earth are blind people doing driving?!'

She was a probation officer in Wichita , KS

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At a good-bye luncheon for an old and dear coworker. She was leaving the company due to 'downsizing.'

Our manager commented cheerfully, 'This is fun. We should do this more often.'

Not another word was spoken. We all just looked at each other with that deer-in-the- headlights stare.

This was a lunch at Texas Instruments.

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I work with an individual who plugged her power strip back into itself and for the sake of her life, couldn't understand why her system would not turn on.

A deputy with the Dallas County Sheriffs office, no less.

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When my husband and I arrived at an automobile dealership to pick up our car, we were told the keys had been locked in it.

We went to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the driver side door.

As I watched from the passenger side, I instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked.

'Hey,' I announced to the technician, 'Its open!'

His reply, 'I know. I already got that side.'

This was at the Ford dealership in Canton , MS.

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And finally!!

When I left Hawaii and was transferred to Florida I still had the Hawaiian plates on my car, as my car was shipped from Hawaii .

I was parking somewhere (I can't remember) and a guy asked me "Wow, you drove from Hawaii to here?"

I looked at him and quickly said "Yep. I took the Hawaii/San Francisco Bridge".

He nodded his head and said "Cool!"

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London 2012, Proof That When You Give Bureaucrats An Olympian Sized Task, They Will Make An Olympian Sized Mess Of It!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

The London Olympic Games 2012 will finish later today. I'm interested to see what they have in store for the closing ceremony, bearing in mind that the opening ceremony was good in parts, but confusing in others. 

As for the games themselves, after a shaky start I think you could say they were successful and very enjoyable for the public at large. I certainly enjoyed what I saw of them. 

But what the whole show did illustrate very well was the sheer stupidity and incompetence of the politicians and the bureaucrats. They took a large, but relatively simple event, and made a laughing stock out of themselves.

Why?

Simply because the politicians and bureaucrats thought they could run everything better than people who know about staging events like these. They can't! 

Right from the start the inefficiency was evident in the vast rows of empty seats at the various venues. 

It got a little better as the Games went on, but a friend of mine who was there on Thursday evening told me that even for the much heralded Men's 200 meters showdown featuring the extremely popular Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, there were at least 500 vacant seats in the stadium.

The problem was twofold.

First, a lot of tickets had been allocated to the corporate sector, far more than was necessary.

Second, for the rest of the people there was only one practical way to buy Olympic tickets, and that was through the 'official' government/bureaucrat controlled office.

These morons even tried to destroy normal commercial activity by making it a criminal offense for individuals to resell Olympic tickets.

But when you logged on to the government's official website to try to buy tickets legally, bewildered visitors quickly found out that they had to jump through all sorts of ridiculous hoops to get them.

A bit like an airport arrivals lounge, UK residents were directed to follow one set of procedures; residents of the EU, but not of the UK, had another set of rules; and residents of other countries, yet another set.

Of course, you couldn't just buy the tickets. First you had to set up an online profile, revealing all sorts of details about yourself that had not the slightest relevance to buying a ticket for the Games.

And when you'd finished all that you could print out your ticket, just like an electronic airline ticket or boarding pass.

Don't be daft, of course you couldn't. That would be far too efficient and sensible.

The bureaucrat way, despite the fact that they were directing everyone to use the online system, was to mail your tickets to you  -  hold on, let me repeat that  -  mail as in M-A-I-L, as in snail-mail NOT email - and they could only do that to the legal residency address you gave them in your profile.

Tough luck on "Johnny Foreigner" whose legal residency could have been on the other side of the world, in China, Australia, or New Zealand for example.

There was an alternative, if you could call it that. You could waste a few hours of your life going to one of the ticket offices, the locations of which the bureaucrats had ensured were in the most inconvenient places possible.

And when you eventually made it to the front of the queue you were confronted by a poorly trained and ever more poorly informed individual who had little idea what tickets were available at any given time.

The inefficiency of the availability of information was so staggering that an event that had been deemed 'sold out' at 10am, could turn out to have hundreds of seats available an hour or two later.

That was why there were thousands of empty seats. The bungling bureaucrats hadn't even the wit to assign them to the soldiers who had been drafted in at the last minute because of another foul-up in employing a private security firm who had not the manpower to do the job.

So could you get tickets by other "illegal" means?

Well, of course you could. The bureaucrats desire for total control is as inefficient as everything else they do. The ticket touts were doing business as usual, but as usual they were charging two or three times the face value of the tickets. Whether that practice is right or wrong is a question for another time. But they couldn't have done it had the idiots in charge not made such a hash of the whole thing.

I’m looking forward to see how they cope in Rio in 2016. My feeling is they should study what happened in London and do the complete opposite!

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Are The Banksters Guilty Of Treason Against The Nation?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

“Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?

Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

Ovid / Sir John Harrington

When I first though about this subject for a post on my blog, I had America mainly in my mind, I suppose because that is where the rot started to show. But when I though about it a little more I quickly realized that the same charge could equally be brought against banksters in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, France and in fact the entire European Union. 

They took money that was not theirs, that was placed in trust with them for safe and responsible stewardship, and they gambled it and lost it.

Then they used their influence on stupid and greedy politicians to steal the honest taxpayer’s money to fill up their coffers again. They were apparently too big to fail – what an utter load of nonsense!

They promised when they were stealing OUR money that they would use it to make loans to businesses and thereby stimulate and reactivate the economy that they themselves had brought to a standstill when they lost OUR original cash in stupid and foolhardy deals that no one with any brains or any sense of responsibility to their clients would have dared to go near.

They lied.

They took OUR money for the second time and kept it for themselves. A lot of it went on bonuses, sometimes in the tens of millions of dollars. A reward to themselves for staggering incompetence.

In any other industry, if you were so bad at your job as to bankrupt your company, you would not only be fired but stand a good chance of being charged with fraud or negligence or something. But if you are a banker and have successfully sold the lie that you are “too big to fail”, then you get away with it. It doesn’t hurt if you have a few politicians in your pocket either!

And, apart from paying yourself huge bonuses for losing OUR money the first time, what do you do with the proceeds of stealing OUR money the second time? Well, of course, first you give yourself another big pay rise, and then you gamble again and lose even more of OUR money.

Remember the J P Morgan $2billion loss – er, make that a $9billion loss would you. Just as Hillary Clinton “mis-spoke” when she lied to the public, J P Morgan “mis-counted” the first time they declared the extent of their incompetence! We probably have not heard the truth yet.

And President Obama has the gall to tell the world that these morons and liars are “the best we have”! Seriously? Do you really expect the people to believe that? I don’t think so. I certainly hope not.

But the J P Morgan $2billion loss turning out to be a $9billion loss is just the tip of a colossal  iceberg. This one is a hell of a lot bigger than the one that sank the Titanic  -  it’s threatening to sink entire countries.

The public and even the various governments have not been made aware of the full extent of the catastrophic losses these idiots (remember the best we have) have made. All the big banks, whether in the US, or Britain, or Spain or France or wherever are furiously cooking their books and have been for the last five years. Their companies are insolvent, they are bankrupt, but they are hiding the truth from everyone.  

This is fraud.

In fact, because of the power that they have, and the impact their stupidity inevitably has on the entire national economy, what they have done and are continuing to do is commit treason.

In a country run by Joe Stalin or Saddam Hussein (perhaps proving that not everyone is all bad all of the time) these treacherous bankers would have been put up against a wall and shot. That may be a bit extreme for us, but at the very least they should lose their jobs, have their stashes of personal wealth confiscated, and be thrown into jail. If it was good enough for a thief like ponzi king, Madoff, it should be good enough for thieves like them.

End rant, cue a few videos on the subject.

Enjoy!

A view from Britain

A view from Ireland

The best government money can buy

Understanding The Financial Crisis--For Kids and Grownups