Work is a necessary evil to be avoided

We, me and my colleagues at work, got a surprise when our project leader went around passing a piece of paper. She said it came from the bigger boss. We read it when she left, and were shocked what was written on it. It's a collection of quotes – work related of course. I stood up and asked loudly, 'What's this? Words to live by?' Everyone laughed and read through their favorites. I guess now, I can forget about that old motto: What is beauty if the brain is empty?

Got me thinking, why on earth would our 'amo' give us such a list? Have we turned into such dunderheads that such quotes need to wake up what was left in our miniscule brains? I'll go through some of them and try to analyze where they could be used the best.

Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts. – Nikki Giovanni

This is good actually. For example, the operator calls you up at around 11 at night saying that there's an error encountered in the end-of-day processing. You curse to high heavens while you are on your way back to the office. You called up your boss saying that you need access to the production machine. She'll give it to you then ask you what happened. You'll answer… I'll check, I'll check.

You came to the dark office, signed-on and scratched your head seeing that it was the program you just changed that caused the error. Damn! You said to yourself, I should have checked if the user keyed-in anything stupid. And so you typed in the necessary codes to rectify the error. Your boss calls you up and asks again, 'So what happened, huh?' You answered, shit happens and you did not consider that the users could be such a knucklehead. So you changed everything to work around such stupid data and asked the operator to retry.

Here's another example: You got a call saying that they can't restore data. So you checked the error, operator got no authority. You told the operator to cancel the job and wait for your instruction. After getting the right authority, you called back to the operator to re-do option 2 to restore. But to the shock of your life, you saw in the log, as it rolled in front of your very eyes, that the back-up was cleared. The bonehead pressed option 1 instead of 2!

The moment you stop learning, you stop leading. – Rick Warren

Okay, this one is best for my bwakanginang saksakan ng bobong amo. Ayoko ng ulit-ulitin pa, sumasakit na ang dibdib ko – ayokong maging dalahira.

In case you want to know who said the quote I used for a title, it was Mark Twain. I’m pretty sure that quote wasn't included on the list our boss gave us.