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There's some psychological term for it, but I think this poster pretty much sums it up.

The downside of being better than everyone else is that people tend to assume that you're pretentious.

In the short term though Linux will have to endure a little pain and FUD, but that's OK: "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger [unless it leaves me a cripped wreck!]"

You really could use this.

[...] This is extremely difficult because no customer wants to be interrupted by a reboot during business hours.

So? Why would "what they want" be of any importance? They hired to you do a job, right? Or did they hire a yes-man?

I particularly liked the slogan for the Demotivators Screensaver:

"Windows. Now more depressing than ever."

As you may be aware, ":-(" is the registered trademarked property of Despair, Inc. It has come to our attention that Slashdot's use of this trademark was unlicensed, and thus it must be removed. If our trademarked :-( is removed immediately, it will not be necessary for us to file charges . Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Perhaps it's time the spam companies learned from the RIAA's bullying tactics. Copyright the "@" symbol (hey, despair Trademarked the :-(). Offer an amnesty program, where all you have to do is "opt-in" to be safe from their frivolous suits.

They would, of course, promise not to sell your email addresses, just share it with their "partners". Of course, the partners pay for the privelege of being one.

Having spotted the typo in the initial Google I finally, found the link!

Sounds like a poster I've seen somewhere. That article title should definitely be made into a Demotivational product.

No one will have any money left over to pay your licensing fees after paying Despair, Inc. to use their trademarked Frownies(tm). :-(

(Oh crap, I owe another $5 now! :-( $10, d'oh!)

No one will have any money left over to pay your licensing fees after paying Despair, Inc. to use their trademarked Frownies(tm). :-(

(Oh crap, I owe another $5 now! :-( $10, d'oh!)

Half full mug

There are only a small handful of Fry's stores. If they'd really purchased 5000 of this Apathy poster, well, you'd have noticed it.

I've actually ordered posters and other goodies from Despair.com a couple times... they make great gifts for coworkers or friends you still maintain contact with at former employers. Just about everything Despair.com does is satire. The order confirmation email you get has a long rambling story about buyer's remorse. The invoice on the package had a blue stamp on it that read "Inspect By: Some random idiot". Every bit of paper or communication you get from them has some humorous corporate satire on it somewhere.

There are only a small handful of Fry's stores. If they'd really purchased 5000 of this Apathy poster, well, you'd have noticed it.

I've actually ordered posters and other goodies from Despair.com a couple times... they make great gifts for coworkers or friends you still maintain contact with at former employers. Just about everything Despair.com does is satire. The order confirmation email you get has a long rambling story about buyer's remorse. The invoice on the package had a blue stamp on it that read "Inspect By: Some random idiot". Every bit of paper or communication you get from them has some humorous corporate satire on it somewhere.

Perhaps a link to our friends at Despair.com would be in order :).

- Neil Wehneman

.

DALLAS, TX - November 3, 1998 -- The call came in sometime after midnight. As soon as COO Kersten was informed that Fry's Electronics was calling, he rushed to the telephone.

"I immediately sensed the limitless potential. My own customer experiences with Fry's were so excruciatingly painful that I was overwhelmed with the possibilities of a relationship. They are truly Jedis of Customer Disservice", from whom I could learn much," Kersten stated.

Kersten was flattered to learn that Fry's was calling to talk business. Company President John Fry wanted to purchase APATHY Demotivators(tm), thousands of them. He had seen the design during a visit to his local post office, and felt it perfectly articulated their own indifferent sentiments towards customers. In completing the transaction, Fry's became the largest single customer of APATHY poster outside of the government sector.

"It is a wonderful irony that the company that turned Customer Disservice into an artform has entered into a relationship with the company that turned it into artwork. We couldn't be more flattered, offered Kersten on the purchase.

In reply, Fry offered, "This will keep our employees from losing sight of what is important. -- Nothing."

At one point, during a conversation with Fry, the notoriously unemotional Kersten found himself choked up with tears. His personal secretary and confidante of ten years, "Hey You", later commented that they had revealed some radical new techniques for Customer Disservice"; they intended to test in their Dallas store.

Kersten declined to reveal details, saying only, "How much does body armor go for these days" This led some to speculate that Fry's may be considering shooting customers at random to gauge subsequent buying patterns.

Fry's legendary indifference to customer service, although occasionally drawing criticism and media scrutiny, has only led to increased loyalty amongst their customer base and continued explosive growth. Analysts theorize that Fry.s customer base, heavily skewed towards poorly socialized, pure geek demographics, may actually derive some erotic gratification from the masochistic purchasing experience.

That which does not kill you merely postpones the inevitable.

Maybe the saddest thing I heard in my three years at S*** V*** PC tech support, were the calls I got from the retired ex-VP who set up their original "Lifetime, Free, no-waiting" tech support and now had to call and struggle through the new Cost-Containment, script-driven, if-we-make-this-hurt-enough-you-might-go-away policy his replacement put in. Explaining that "lifetime" and "free" were now considered relative terms was certainly no fun.

And implying they'd lose you as a customer ? They just laugh or hang up on you, or both.

Working for Intel, OTOH, was a real eye-opener. We'd give people the S*** brush off we were used to giving, and inside 3 mins we'd have our supervisor asking "what the ^&$ are you doing? Intel just chewed me out! Get that customer back and give them a solution!" whether the problem was with our product or not.

The "worst" thing working at Intel was that anytime we found an easy fix to shorten calls, they'd automate it and release it as a patch.

It may be just fear of lawsuits, but those folks took customer service and product quality seriously.

"People are already so frustrated with tech support, they're not even calling,"

Don't ya just love it when everything goes as planned

the nail that sticks up gets beat down.

(Bias note: I've written commercial/consumer software for a *long* time)

Blame The key to success is knowing who to blame for your faults and failures.

One way to tell :)

"If I reduce costs enough I can make money without selling any products" is a Dilbertism.

"The Mythical Man Month" made the point 20 years ago that there is no point in hiring cheap for IT projects. You are better off with a small group of good people who stay with the company than with cheap outside labor that could care less.

I would also like to hear of an example where outsourcing works. HP is still recovering from its attempt. Bell Canada's outsourcing encourages people to switch phone companies. I've been involved in outsourced software projects (as a unix admin, I just watched the chaos) and the code produced is crap because no one cares about quality, and everyone has an incentive to leave stuff in that needs to be fixed.

Un-outsourcing is difficult and costly (look at Nortel, billions in outsourcing, and now they don't even need the people they contracted in, they paid enough the outsourcing companies outsourced, and the quality of the doubly outsourced people was unbelievably low), and it involves blaming highly placed people, so it does not happen. If you can't be part of the solution there's lots of money in prolonging the problem (see demotivation).

Irresponsibility
No Single Raindrop Belives it is to Blame for the Flood.

Most of the commercial software niches that exist today are filled. You have your word processors, pixel-pushers, 3d modelers, databases, calendars, web browsers, etc. These are all well-known components, and the solutions to implement them are pretty standard. Most commercial software today uses many such components; they are put together like legos. The process of making new combinations of these components is becoming increasingly automated.

Some people mentioned that open-source projects are thriving, in contrast to the monotonic world of our corporate masters. This may be nominally true; however, most open-source projects today merely play catch-up to the coroporate versions of the same software. Open Office (MS Office), xmms (Winamp), Gaim (AIM/ICQ), XFree86 (DirectX/MacOS)... these are just some of the big ones. The open source industry is not dead, but it's spinning its wheels. Actually, it's not even an industry in the conventional sense.

Of course, software innovation will always be needed to some extent. However, it is becoming increasingly scarce outside of the academic environment. The software industry is becoming similar to the automotive industry, where most of the work is done by robots, and innovation amounts to adding in a new kind of spoiler.

Not a patent but a trademark, but it's the same USPTO providing the quality service.

The link is: http://www.despair.com/demotivation.html

Is Just to Fire all of the unhappy people

Limitations

Here's my favorite snowflake picture:

Inspiring picture with Snowflakes

I love that site... hilarious (and no, I don't work for them or get money from them in ANY way)

Swarm intelligence (or any other kind)? Not in the business world.

It may be frist postty, but it's certainly not FIRST POST. You fail it miserably!

You know what? You failed miserably.

Man, you so FAILED IT!

Truly, BitterSweets(tm)" are the perfect gift for you OR for someone you love, especially if that special someone is one who doesn't want to hurt your feelings but just doesn't feel that way about you but still wants to be friends so they can torment you with stories about their crushes on someone who doesn't appreciate them like you do, can't love them like you can, and actually takes pleasure in corralling a herd of fawning "just friends" behind themselves as they indulge in one self-destructive relationship after another, with no hope of ever finding true love, despite an army of souls eager to lavish it upon them.

It's from a Despair, Inc. Demotivator poster, "Cluelessness".

It's from a Despair, Inc. Demotivator poster, "Cluelessness".

Don't give me none of this "nature theme" business

I dunno, hell frozen over might make an interesting "nature" photograph, maybe for a motivation (or de-motivation) poster....

Makes me think of this poster from despair.com

Here.

Moderators please note this is not a flame, but a literary reference to Wayne's World.

Yeow!! There goes another one. They're kinda cute, really. Once you get used to the Borg implants.

This is too early in the morning for diplomacy, I haven't had my coffee.

*

OK, OK, it *could* happen. MS has published good software in the past, which in time it felt compelled to modify and expand until it looked like a prisoner of war about to rupture from beriberi. In fairness but that should be attribute to Corporate Command, not the very bright programmers they have working there. (My college roommate was assimilated in 1989 and was very happy there. Getting rich tends to make people happy.)

I have to disagree vociferously about Outlook -- it's a ticking time bomb that has already gone off several times, yet is still installed on 3/4 of the hard drives out there. A clear example of bloat leading to unreliability, specifically irresistible evil hacker bait. Yes, I know they're finally closing the barn door, but that's not the point.

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of management." Unk. (seen on a Depressories calendar {recommended -- new! Demotivators})

We've got one of those lame secret Santa things, so I'm just going to pick up the 2003 Despair calendar. With such gems as:

Meetings: None of us is as dumb as all of us

Good stuff!

later,
ajay

The opposite of Motivator posters, not exactly Linux or BSD (well except the 'limitations' poster)
But here has some realy good stuff. Most geeks (and Disaffected college students) should love them.

Some of my favorites are:
Procrastination
Motivation
Meetings
Consulting

But it is realy hard for me to choose any favorite. Also check out the stuff about fownies :-( they managed to get copyright on them :-)

The "journal" is probably completely "sponsored" by the groups actively creating and pushing this. If you read the article you'll notice that Gillette has "sponsored the development of" Alien's RFID technology, so it sounds like Gillette is a major investor, and probably one of the "sponsors" of this "journal". That would also explain the "Gillette is so cool" angle.

The "independent" journal has probably been created to help market the concept to retailers and other customers, but naturally biased towards the sponsors of the journal. In other words, the journal is advertising material disguised as independent reporting. I can't imagine what independent group would be creating a journal like this.

Judging by their FAQ, it sounds like this area has been quite competitive for a while, in terms of different companies trying to come up with low-cost RFID tags, and different companies creating different standards. But the world is going to pretty much need ONE standard for this to work. And naturally, the company that gets their standard in place is set to make incredibly huge truckloads of $$$ further down the line, once this is implemented on a large scale. Thus it makes sense for investors like Gillette, who appear to want to be in on the deal, to sponsor such a journal. I am of course speculating, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

They even mention on the page an alliance with a group working with SAP to integrate this technology with SAP software, which would then just extend this automation of supply chain management even further. The system would be able to do things like automatically "alert staff" if buying trends indicate that a retailer is running out of stock of a particular item.

Essentially, the gist of all this is that managers realise that most of the jobs in a retail store can be automated, and that all you really need is a few managers using the right software and hardware tools. You don't need human cashiers when the customer can just put his trolley of goods under a scanner that tallies his entire shopping cart in under a second and automatically bills his credit card. What this is probably going to mean, 10 or 20 years from now, is that HUGE numbers of people in retail and distributing are going to lose their jobs to these little tags.

The biggest joke of all is how they seem to avoid mentioning this issue in the "journal". To quote the FAQ: "The aim of most auto-ID systems is to increase efficiency, reduce data entry errors, and free up staff to perform more value-added functions". Yeah right, more like "free up staff to perform more value-added functions, like collecting unemployment".

This technology is probably inevitable though. As technology improves, more and more people can have their jobs replaced by computers. I know somebody is going to reply by saying "but it just shifts the jobs to somewhere else, e.g. the people who create these tags and create and maintain the software". Sure, to a degree, but if you follow the trends to their logical conclusion, you get to a point where millions of low-paying jobs are getting lost and being replaced by maybe a couple thousand higher paying jobs. At some point, something will have to give .. all those people who end up losing their jobs will be the retailers customers themselves, so their business drops.

Reminds me of this despair.com poster: http://www.despair.com/motivation.html

http://www.despair.com/demotivators/incompetence.h tml

Note: I am not an employee of Despair.com, just another suicidal customer.

If you work at some big dumb company, your CEO will now keep you from sharing those songs, regardless of the artist's intent. Duh, Big Dumb CEO is going to be convinced that music is not something for the coporate intranet if he is not already. The policy will be made and the violators shit canned. Thank the RIAA both for threatening lawsuits and raising FUD over bandwith.

In the end, you will be lucky to have music at all in that kind of company. Just a little more FUD about company IP walking off in iPods and USB keyfobs, evil backdoored music software that's not MS Media Player and real info on the Media Player's licensing that makes it a backdoor and poof, you are without music.

There are two things to remember as you are expected to put in more of your personal time for work and are alowed to do less of what you need to get done there. First, enjoying your job is like stealing from the company. Second, get back to work, you are not being paid for the power of your dreams.

Here.

You mean like this: www.despair.com/demotivators/frownonthis.html ?