8. Your company uses a considerable number of permatemps to deal with such annoying problems such as having to pay for benefits or sharing profits. You currently need 100 permatemps to make sure that your new software gets out the door. As each permatemp reaches his or her third month with the company, s/he realizes that you will never ever hire him/her, and has a 20 percent chance of leaving at the end of any given week without advance notice. Recruiting companies constantly call to offer you more permatemps, but each one can only supply 4 contractors before you throw a hissy fit and cancel the contract because the company is no longer a "preferred vendor". Considering that the software life cycle is two years, how long can you continue to choose new "preferred" vendors until the number of recruiting companies that have dealt with your company exceeds the number of stars in the known universe?
9. After your last layoff, your company was bought by Microsoft, but Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer demand to see full documentation of your new, ready-to-ship product before the deal is finalized, and said documentation must be understandable by a general audience. Sadly for you, the technical writers were the first people you laid off, and your head programmer offers to write the documentation himself because "I've been a writer for years." Also sadly for you, your head programmer's sole experience with writing consists of writing "Star Trek: The Next Generation" fan fiction featuring the erotic exploits of Wesley and Worf for a GeoCities site, and he spells individual words correctly in these stories about 15 percent of the time, with proper punctuation and syntax being deemed "unnecessary". How many rim jobs will you have to give Bill and Steve in a 24-hour period before they decide that their own tech writers can handle the assignment?
10. You have managed to run eight companies in the last eight years, successfully driving each of them into the ground and receiving a job offer from another just before the previous company suddenly had no money to cover the payroll of your former employees left behind. How many more can you gut-and-flip before someone outside of ****ed Company notes your track record and decides to challenge the
PR gibberish being printed about you in the "Wall Street Journal"?
11. You inherited a once-profitable media company with one large paper and several TV stations about twenty years ago, and you saw the Internet boom and subsequent stock market speculation as the perfect way to make a fortune off what many of your underlings thought was nothing but a fad. Unfortunately, you made some truly asinine decisions, such as investing $38 million in the CueCat and taking your company public, where the stock price dropped from $30 a share to $10 and stayed there. Your company's only hope is tied to advertising revenue on both Web sites and standard media. Out of the few advertisers remaining after the dotcom crash, 15 percent will declare bankruptcy and never pay their ad bill, 23 percent will require the services of very high-priced lawyers before they finally pay their bills, and 18 percent took advertising because their CEO was a fraternity brother of one of the board members, and calls about payment are answered with "You don't understand. Ray and I have an _understanding_ about those ads." How many of these flakes can your company withstand in a six-month period before you have to consider kidnapping cameramen and reporters and selling their body parts on the black market to keep the company solvent?
12. While going over your company's books, you realize that your company is doomed to bankruptcy next week, and you have no way of covering employee payroll. You currently have 500 kilograms of "essential office supplies" such as titanium golf clubs in your office, that must be cleared out before either they are confiscated by the bankruptcy court or before the employees discover your deception, put a gasoline-filled car tire around your neck, and set you afire in the parking lot. You can carry out 10 kilograms of "office supplies" per trip to your Lexus without your employees becoming suspicious, but your Lexus can only hold 75 kilograms of cargo at a time. How many trips can you make before the staff gets wise and starts ripping out the copper pipes from the walls as "compensation"?
13. You just shut down your dotcom after telling employees for months that the financial situation was "wonderful" and that they should make longterm financial decisions that they'd never make if the company was foundering, leaving 5000 hard-working employees on the street with no warning whatsoever. Since you invested every penny of their 401(k) funds in Enron stock, they are now penniless. You, however, are not penniless, having cashed in your stock at the first sign of trouble, and while you publicly empathize with your poor suffering ex-employees for the TV cameras, you have no intention of sharing a penny of your $30 million windfall with them, not including the $2 million you awarded yourself as an "executive retention bonus" while the bankruptcy goes through the courts. About three weeks later, as you and two $2000 ladies of the night are out celebrating your grand luck and fortune, fifteen of your former employees greet you at your SUV parked on a dark street. 20 percent of them have riot clubs or lead-filled pipes, 15 percent of them have steel-toed boots, and five percent of them have dental picks to help remove your gold fillings. How many months will you spend in the Intensive Care Unit after your much-deserved beating and gang-rape before you relearn such advanced skills as color vision and bowel control?