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The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business
An anonymous reader writes "Business 2.0's fourth annual review of the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid moments of the past year. Yes, SCO is represented..."
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... my company's hiring me, as evidently I am reading slashdot at this very moment. And we've got a patch going out today.
Mark one for the "little guy".
Dairy Queen franchisee W.A. Enterprises is docked $700,000 by a jury in Richmond, Va., after DQ employee Ayman Ahmed Hasaballa allegedly slides into a booth next to a female customer, pulls down her sweater, bites her breast, and says, "I am like Dracula." The jury holds the company responsible because it didn't fire Hasaballa six months earlier after he allegedly attacked a female co-worker.
Are they hiring?
Again... No sarcastic, slanted, political message from the editor tagged on to the end of the story.
How in the world am I supposed to know how to think? You expect me to actually read the article?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
That's the dumbest moment in advertising? I thought that commercial was hilarious!!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
IBM contracting out DOS to Microsoft...and letting Microsoft keep ownership.
If IBM had played hardball and demanded ownership, more than likely Gates would have caved. The world would be much different today, that's for sure.
No butterflys. The Rolling Stones wouldn't have sold out...ok, maybe that would still have happened.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
the 101 stupidest business moves, lets hear more about this Lingerie Bowl in #10!
Today's Physics Lesson:
Generally speaking, when something is cooled down it contracts and when it is heated it expands. The chemical compound commonly known as "water" follows this rule until 4 degrees Celsius (just under 40 degrees Fahrenheit) when it reaches its maximum density and starts expanding as it is further cooled. One interesting fact is that if you read the ingredients for many common beverages (say Diet Coke for example), you would see that they are comprised mostly of this "water" substance and thus take on many of its interesting physical characteristics. Another interesting fact is that in order to make "ice" which is the common name for "water" in its solid state, you generally have cool it to below 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). Surprisingly enough, we actually have a device in our very own office building commonly known as a "freezer" capable of cooling "water" enough to bring about this magical state change.
So what is the point of my little physics/trivia lesson? When you put an (already pressurized) can of Diet Coke into a freezer for more than a few minutes, it typically explodes!
In the future, please refrain from placing beverages in the office freezer.
The Management
I'm glad that idiot is listed so high, that lawsuit was just wrong. I guess he owns the market on "Spike" huh? I was hoping the network won, but it turns out there was a settlement, wonder how much it cost to have Mr. Lee grace the network with "his name" - what a tool
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
The OSDN Personals ads get my vote!
This one gets my vote: In Canada, General Motors is forced to come up with a new name for its Buick LaCrosse sedan after discovering that crosse is a slang term for masturbation in Quebec. If gives a whole new meaning to "road trip." Happy Trails, Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Requiring TEN PAGE VIEWS to get through a dumbest moments list.
And since when is it sexist to show women playing football? Sure, they were in lingere, but that just shows off the beauty of nature. What do people have against nature? Why are people so damn puritanical in this country?
Are we even allowed to have fun anymore?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
For those who don't want to hunt and find the SCO reference on the slow server
83 How to win friends and influence software sales.
"Terrorists do things designed to intimidate people, and we see a lot of that going on all the time--people trying to attack us or people that we're associated with."--SCO Group CEO Darl McBride, complaining about the backlash from hundreds of thousands of Linux users after the former Linux software vendor sued IBM, a major Linux proponent, for allegedly violating its intellectual-property rights.
Darl really did say that! - i know it is hard to believe.
Talk about the kettle calling the pot...
8 Just to be on the safe side, let's also lose the jack, the fuel pump, and the four-stroke engine.
In Canada, General Motors is forced to come up with a new name for its Buick LaCrosse sedan after discovering that crosse is a slang term for masturbation in Quebec.
Its also a slang term for "a rip-off".
I never heard it used to mean masturbation when used as a noun, its masturnbatory meaning is only applied when used as a verb. So To me that GM car sounds more like a rip-off than a jerk-off. Also note that GM laid off a lot of people in Quebec recently by closing down a plant...
Ah, fond memories of the sign "do not cross the track" at the amusement park with my friends when I was 14... : )
You can't take the sky from me...
Clear Channel's recent decision to replace O'Hare airport as a landmark for the traffic updates in Chicago with the Allstate Arena due to a marketing agreement?
Clear Channel is worse than the devil.
I belong to the ______ generation.
I don't know if I trust my finances to a guy who, when you look him up in the phone book is listed as Strong, Dick.
The guy's probably pretty good at "screwing" his investors.
</juvenile_humor>
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Maybe that's a role played by HR consulting firms that I'm simply not aware of, but my understanding is that those guys typically search criminal records and so forth.
Who's up for a web site that catalogs this sort of behaviour, easy to search, for use during recruitment? Otherwise these guys just prey on our lack of communal memory.
What's a popup?
Wait... [thinks long and hard] ... that's one of those Internet Explorer afflictions, isn't it?
Take one of these, six times a day:
Mozilla, Opera, etc etc etc
Sheesh! Anonymous cowards these days! When I was a lad, etc etc etc
This is where the serious fun begins.
My wife was watching QVC, and I wasn't really paying attention until I saw the guy fall off the ladder. At first, I thought it was a part of the show until I heard someone saying, "It's OK, he's moving..."
Then it occurred to me that perhaps they would have a hard time selling this ladder when their own demonstrator fell off the thing on national tv!
And the best part: The host continued to plug the ladder as safe and convenient, in spite of what had just happened!
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
from the article:
come on!! they had a PERFECT headline for the #1 dumbest moment, they could have had:
damn the political correctness!
39 They thought about changing their name, but, sadly, Whizzinator was already taken.
U.K. energy company Powergen finds itself so often confused with a similarly named Italian battery maker that it issues a statement disavowing any connection between the two enterprises. It's not so much the Italian company that the Brits want to distance themselves from as its Web address: Powergenitalia.com.
The humor . . . it is too much . . .
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Coulda bought $21 billion worth of beer and returned the bottles and still would a made $900 million more money.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Articles like this are cute and give us a chance to snicker at idiotic behaviour, but the worst business decisions of (pick a year) should really be looking at and even emphasising the deeply amoral and criminal behaviour of some companies. Consider Coca-Cola, in India: They're draining ground water, bottling and reselling it, and dumping the purification byproducts onto the desert they've created where fertile farmland once stood. A few years ago, Nike (and then everyone else) ran into issues with sweatshop labour, but we don't hear about these things anymore, and they're still going on!
Bottom line, I'd like to see a magazine doing an article on the REAL abuses of businesses, and not just their silly little dumb decisions.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The problem I have with this - as I expect most people do - is that it's a double standard. If my wife wants to contact me at work, that's verbotten. If there's an emergency at work after hours, the company expects to be able to count on my personal resources (phone, computer, time, etc.) because, well, because...
If the company has no loyalty to me, if they refuse to take my side, then I'll refuse to take theirs. On the other hand, if they have the common decency to allow reasonable use of company resources for personal reasons, then I'll be more than happy to allow them to make reasonable use of my personal resources for company reasons.
I'd say the key word here is reasonable. If the company is willing to be reasonable with me, I'm willing to be reasonable with them - and vice versa. The company often gets to define what's reasonable; in the above case, based on the company's attitude towards employee use of company resources, I think that a reasonable response to your boss calling you at home would be to slap them with a cease-and-desist order for harassment.
In any case, while I think the above was a good example of a pretty unreasonable policy (at least for a salaried employee), you're right - at least it was it writing.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9