Worker 'taking one for the team' won't

Grandstanding at his bi-monthly meeting, Sam Goater (35) declared he would go the extra mile - while keeping both fingers firmly crossed. In fact, he has no plans to do anything that will involve extra effort, a millisecond of inconvenience or the slimmest possibility that he might help someone.

One tearful colleague spoke of how impressed they were by Sam's sacrifice: 'You just don't often see acts of generosity like that'. Which is true. They hadn't. Sadly, 'taking one for the team' has become code for 'I'm ruthlessly ambitious and at the first opportunity I'll backstab the lot of you for a promotion.'

Said Sam: 'Last month I promised to 'leave no stone unturned' and to give '110 %' - in reality I just sat at my desk and played solitaire. I'm going to have these guys for breakfast. There may be no 'I' in Team, but there is plenty of meat.'

Photo by Redd F on Unsplash

Zoom staff can't remember where they left their office

Although Zoom has ordered their team to stop working remotely, no one is entirely sure where their main office is or if they had one in the first place. Said one employee: 'I think it had windows and a roof, but other than that I'm flummoxed. Do we have to wear trousers for this? I've been naked from the waist down for three years.'

There is also a concern that staff will try to mute each other face-to-face or think they are invisible, just because their camera is off. Instead of recording meetings, people will be expected to form actual memories and everyone will have to wash their whole body, not just their face.

Explained one executive: 'It's possible that one of our houses is actually our main headquarters - the only way to tell is if all your family look like office stationery. Once we find it, we'll be back to meaningful human interactions - which sounds ghastly.'

Hand Phone Zoom - Free photo on Pixabay - Pixabay

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Office of Useless Sods: the Bermuda Pants Triangle

One of the greatest political innovations is the Bermuda Pants Triangle. Rather than making any attempt to fix the problems they created, leaders in power whine about the people blaming them for how everything is screwed up. So politicians and special advisers are tasked with coming up with a way of shifting the blame for everything somewhere else.

The solution is to install a czar to look into the problem, and then create independent watchdogs and regulators to oversee the specific things screwed up. The people blame their leader, the leader blames the czar, the czar blames the regulator, and the regulator blames the government. The people become disillusioned with nothing actually being fixed, and the whole problem disappears into the Bermuda Pants Triangle.

Inevitably, much more time and taxpayer money is spent shifting the blame than could have gone into completely resolving the issues in the first place, and the whole useless mess becomes the accepted norm.

That's what great leadership is all about.

Now when you contact anyone about a problem and you are given the run around several departments, you are sucked into a BPT vortex and lost forever. Here is your comprehensive guide to the czars and watchdog offices of responsibility-hand-washing:

Rudeness csar: OffHand

Animal organs czar: OffAll

Carpeting czar: OffCuts

Cycling czar - OffRoad

Prevarication czar - OffAgenonagen

Sickness czar - OffWork

Redundancy regulator - OffShove

Missing persons supremo - OffRadar

Murder czar - OffBump

Offend - Government body formed to look into bottoms :

Offence - Government body formed to regulate the trade in stolen goods

Offline - Government body formed to oversee drug rehabilitation centres

Office - Government body formed to oversee activities in Antarctica

Offend - Government body formed to look into bottoms

Offsett - Government body supervising farmers' provision for badgers

OffTen - Government body responsible for supervising decimalisation

Office for Retail Milk Standards to be called OffMilk

New Government body to regulate boring football talk - OffSighed

Music Industry regulator - OffBeat

Skiing - OffPiste

It support - OffAndonagain

Counterfeit goods - KnockOff

Offquay - regulator for small harbours

Offerr, offagain and offtopic - regulatory bodies for "Just A Minute"

Offgrid - regulation of crossword, sudoku and related puzzle compilers

Offlimits - governor governance

Offsure - management of uncertainty in parliamentary statements

Offwight - local government quango overseeing Ryde to Southsea journeys

Offenders - alternate name for the Council of British Proctologists

OffplanIT - committee overseeing large government technology projects

Offcock - gender reassignment surgery

And the new Water regulator is to be renamed as UTwat, the 'U' standing for Useless, and...

Contributions from and hat tips to:

Lockjaw, deskpilot, Jack the Quipper, Titus, FlashArry, peterg, SteveB