Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Salary deferential

According to a recent survey, women still earn less than their male counterparts. In some cases, they earn significantly less. Now, crazy feminazi arguments aside, there are good reasons for women earning less. They can't work as hard as men because they have to do the cleaning, cooking, and child-raising. Why are you going to pay a woman more money when they can't spend as many hours working as a man?

But I am an open-minded, equal opportunist. Businesses do need to eventually realize that the gender disparity in salary is problematic. There's no reason the male employees should be earning more than the female employees. Coming from my years of experience running a tight ship at my own company, I can tell you that this is a prime opportunity for companies to use the rise of women in the workforce to their advantage. Women are providing competition for the men. We can use that as a way to drive the male salaries down and reduce the company overhead costs.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Vacation Days



According to a recent survey, 34 percent of Americans do not use all their vacation days. For a country proud of its Protestant work ethic, this figure is appalling. That means that 66 percent are taking more time off than everyone else. And what is it with employed workers taking vacation days? Those are days of no work and productivity, which is a royal waste if you ask me.

If you look at the number of vacation days broken down by country, you can see why I make it a point never to hire Europeans. They expect a month of vacation time. I can't afford to have my employees taking that much time off. It's no wonder they get nothing done across the pond. If they're constantly off frolicking on vacation, how are they being productive and getting things done? On the other hand, the Japanese don't usually use only about half of their vacation days. Better than the lazy Americans. I'd hire more Japanese workers if those silly Asians would just learn to speak better English.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Bunch of chimps

My employees' inability to get their assigned tasks done is a frequent source of frustration with me. I've often wondered whether a bunch of monkeys would be more productive than my sorry crew of workers. Well, it turns out that a bunch of monkeys might indeed be better than a human workforce. A study of chimpanzees shows that they have better memory skills than humans. My employees stare at me with glazed eyes when I ask them what they were supposed to do. I always thought that they were faking not remembering. Now I know it's that they are stupider than a monkey and really don't have any memory.

It turns out the chimpanzees are also good at using complex tools. I can't even get my employees to figure out how to use their computers. I mean, I'm paying them for their supposed expertise at software, and they can't even fix my printer, get my e-mail working, or get my company software projects up and running. Maybe I should send them back to visit their chimp ancestors and take some lessons on how to use tools to get stuff done.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

The Look

Although looks have nothing to do with competence, research shows that apparently looks have a lot to do with how competent we are perceived to be. People who look competent are more likely to be perceived as competent and thus more likely to be in higher paying and higher responsibility positions. It's a good thing I'm so dead sexy. My good looks helped me rise to the top, because God knows it wasn't my brains.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Role models

I recently stumbled upon a page of veritable pointy hair pride role models: Dickipedia. The list reads like a "Who's who" of pointy hair awesomeness. Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Kim Jong-Il, Bill O'Reilly, Hugo Chavez, Anne Coulter, etc. These are all pointy hair high impact people. They are the movers and shakers. They had enough cajones to do something important enough to land them on Dickipedia. If the liberal commies hate you, you know you've made it. My hats are off to the members of the Dickipedia list. I'm working my way there. It'll be a proud day when I'm enough of a dick to be on Dickipedia.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

PHB Survey

I found an excellent survey for determining your pointy haired bad-assedness. Here are the questions:

1. Have you ever publicly criticized an employee?

2. Do you take credit for your employees’ work?

3. Do your employees fear you?

4. Do you expect employees to do what you tell them without question?

5. Do you believe employees should know what to do without you telling them or providing guidelines?

6. Are you a yeller?

7. Do you demean employees as a form of punishment?

8. Do you play favorites?

9. Do you hate delegating?

10. Do you check everyone’s work?

Done with the quiz? Excellent. Here are my answers for comparison:

1. Of course. Public ridicule is a highly effective method of shaming employees into performing. I didn't study pyschology for nothing.

2. Why wouldn't I take credit? I'm paying them to do the work, so the work belongs to me! What a silly questions. Next!

3. If they don't, then they should. I'll have to ramp up my screaming boss routine to make sure.

4. Duh! That's what they're paid to do. I'm the boss because I'm supposed to give orders to the underlings. They are underlings because they're not smart enough to be boss. Asking questions just pisses me off and wastes time.

5. Yes. If they don't know what they are doing already, then they are incompetent. They should be fired ASAP.

6. HELL YES! I HAVE TROUBLE HEARING MYSELF, SO I MAKE SURE TO SPEAK UP AND MAKE SURE I CAN HEAR MYSELF AND THAT EVERYONE ELSE CAN HEAR ME. THAT WAY I CAN BE SURE EVERYONE HEARD MY INSTRUCTIONS.

7. See answer #1. I've learned from my psychology training that negative reinforcement can be an incredibly powerful tool for getting employees into action.

8. Finally, my "no" answer. I can't possibly play favorites when all of my employees are equally incompetent.

9. Absolutely not. I'm the boss. It's natural for me to delegate all the work.

10. Always! Like I mentioned above, all of my employees are #$%#% incompetent. I have to check to make sure that they did their assigned task exactly as instructed. Besides, if I didn't check, they would most likely just blow off the task. It's critical to check up on everyone's work several times throughout the day.

Joseph M. Scandura, incompetent moron, idiot, pompous, stupid, failure, asshole, arrogant, bullshit, micromanager of the year, technologically clueless, ignorant, condescending, senile, dementia

scandura@scandura.com
mailto:joescandura@comcast.net