Never let the fact there’s ostensibly nothing left to do get in the way of a 12-hour working day. Pickaxing a bare patch of ground, reversing a truck into a position and then moving it back into its original position and thrashing at a fence with a piece of rope are all examples of noble labour.
Read MoreLinguists recently identified around 20 words still doing the rounds today that were being uttered as many as 15,000 years ago. They included ‘spit’, ‘worm’ and ‘mother’.
‘Learnings’, ’empowerment’ and ‘monetise’ weren’t on the list. But these are such sturdy, evocative and indispensible words that I have no doubt they’ll be around 15 millenia hence. This got me thinking about what words not yet in the dictionary THAT I hope will be getting verbally lobbed across offices and work sites thousands of years from now.
Read MoreIn most cases… these people are barely able to keep their heads above the scum-topped liquid of their own career puddles despite wearing an inflatable giraffe ring around their waist at all times (sometimes metaphorical, often not).
Read MoreIn my day there were horses over the back fence in middle-suburban Melbourne, my Grade 3 teacher wrote “Go the Demons” on my report card and the 20 cent piece you found lying on the ground in Coles New World bought you a veritable cornucopia of milk bar lollies.
Read MoreAs I was de-mounding the plates of porcine humans, I saw no prospect of becoming the Universe-famous digital vigilante and high-profile columnist I so longed to be. I saw no prospect of anything, really.
Read MoreThe problem of loud sneezers in the office is almost universally shrugged away as a mild annoyance. The idea that epic nasal detonations are on a par with double booked meeting rooms or coffee breath is dangerous conventional wisdom.
In fact, those who get to the 130 decibel mark or above are nothing less than a menace that must be ripped from the coalface, roots and all, like the insidious species of human weed they are.
Read MoreThe first speaker of the day called himself an inspiration vocaliser and assured everyone present that the secret to work life happiness was getting your job title right. He then slid down from the stage on an inflatable ramp he called the Dream Realisation Embankment and began asking people to say their job titles into his “Psych-rophone”, which was just a giant peach-coloured microphone.
Read MoreBut the greatest moment of all was when I witnessed a bloke lose control of his pendulum.
He was a flighty individual and must have feared having someone standing beside him at the urinals; that was understandable. What I had more trouble empathising with was the exclamation “Wh-wh-whoooa!” followed a furious flurry of activity during which urine passed over the top of the nearby cubicle and squirted into his own face.
It was like a small child trying to regain control of a full-bore fire hose.
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