Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

(A link for those of you not familiar with the term “Welfare Queen”, only thing is, this time the welfare checks are written by the Federal Reserve by means of bank bailouts and inflationary monetary policies).

“Hi, I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help!”

A man is getting into the shower just as his wife is finishing up her shower,
when the doorbell rings.

The wife quickly wraps herself in a towel and runs downstairs.  When
she opens the door, there stands Bob, the next-door neighbour.  Before
she says a word, Bob says, ‘I’ll give you $800 to drop that towel.’
After thinking for a moment, the woman drops her towel and stands naked
in front of Bob, after a few seconds, Bob hands her $800 and leaves.  The
woman wraps back up in the towel and goes back upstairs.  When she
gets to the bathroom, her husband asks, ‘Who was that?’

‘It was Bob the next door neighbour,’ she replies.

‘Great,’ the husband says, ‘did he say anything about the $800 he owes
me?’

Moral of the story:
If you share critical information pertaining to credit and risk with your
shareholders in time, you may be in a position to prevent avoidable exposure.

..considering the current turmoil in the world markets, the apt video above might serve as a useful informational piece on how things really work in the financial markets..

Dumbass of the week: National Geographic claims in a (later corrected with a note) video that global warming is threatening polar bears in Finland.

Just one slight problem with the story - Finland is a bloody cold country, but the only place you’ll find a polar bear in Finland is the zoo. There are no indigenous polar bears in Finland!
I guess someone was just too quick to publish a juicy story about a current mass-hysteria..

“Never let facts get in the way of a good story”.

I have to spend about three days a month in Sweden in my current project, to sync up with the head office of my client. I was talking today to one of my clients HR people, and explained to him that I’m used to long commutes of 1.5+ hours, and the fact that I have less than 30 minutes to the office while in Sweden almost makes it feel like I come to Sweden once a month to get rested.

His spontaneous response was: “Really? That means we almost have to deduct something from your rate”.
In fairness, he said so jokingly, but the fact that he implied in his joke that “You can’t possibly make as good an effort if you’re not suffering” somehow made me think of Catbert, Evil Director of Human Resources..

I probably receive around 100 e-mails a day, which means I can’t really read all of them with equal attention. This has led me to create my own little personal filtering mechanism (beyond spam-filters) that works something like this, unless the sender or subject line is especially important or interesting:

• If I am not personally mentioned in the “to” or “cc” lines (the mail is to a mailing list), I don’t read it.
• If I am a “cc” on the e-mail, I don’t read it.
• If I am on the “to” line of the e-mail, but the e-mail has gone out to lots of people who are also on the “to” line, I only browse over the e-mail in a cursory way.
• If I am on the “to” line, and I am the only name personally mentioned on the “to” line, I will read it.
• If the sender is unknown to me, and the subject line looks “spammy” or speculative (ie. bears no personal interest to me and the sender does not seem to know anything about me), all of the above rules are null and void, and I will delete the e-mail without opening it.
• If the sender is a friend whom I have no business dealings with, who I know has a tendency to send send nonsensical “FW” e-mail jokes etc, and the subject line looks like yet another one, I will delete the e-mail. If it’s that important, he or she can call me.

My filtering mechanism is not intended to be rude or arrogant to other people, it is simply a response and necessity given todays information and communication overload. Now I only wish I could automate this process altogether, so I would only have to read e-mails that really mattered.