Microsoft act hard

In October 2003 Microsoft fired a long-term temp after he posted a photograph on his blog of G5 computers from rival company Apple Macintosh being delivered to Microsoft’s Redmond company campus.
Hanscom, who worked at the MSCopy print shop, noticed a truckload of G5 Macs being delivered to the campus, and took a picture of them [...]

An All Time Low

On 10 am Thursday September 5, 2002, a New York office worker, Tripp Murray, sent a chatty email to Mary Callahan, a woman he’d recently taken on a date, asking if she intended to go to a Bon Jovi concert that night and if not suggesting himself as company.
He was surprised to receive a reply [...]

A Grade A Date

In 2002 Jacqueline Kim made the mistake of emailing her unusually materialistic assessment of her date (good kisser, nice car, needs to get a haircut and shower her with presents if he wants to keep her) to a few friends outside her office – some of whom promptly forwarded it on for the delight and [...]

Impossible is nothing

Getting your CV noticed is half the battle in today’s competitive job market. And so, to a certain extent, Yale student Aleksey Vayner’s decision to include a video presentation with his eleven page application to a New York bank could be seen as inspired. Unfortunately, however, the contents of the video proved him to have [...]

Setting The Wrong Tone

I was five minutes late. It didn’t go down well with the power hungry new team leader. The proof was in that fact that I was publicly roasted and humiliated.
Not that there was much point being on time because all the phones had gone down – and to ice the cake, the computer system collapsed [...]

A load of bollocks

The fact that the office of the building firm I work for is completely open plan is annoying when I want to take a snooze, but does present some unique opportunities for amusement.
A few weeks ago for instance, we all witnessed a young man hurrying past our desks, looking harassed, and nervous and most definitely [...]

Bad council

In October 2006 David Clutterbuck, a 72 year-old Conservative councillor, found himself the laughing stock of the nation thanks to a joke he forwarded on to fellow council members at Bournemouth Borough Council.
Ironically enough, the joke itself was determinedly unfunny: a description of the trouble Noah would have floating his ark nowadays thanks to the [...]

Baring all

Someone from an audio company wrote to me asking if I could “bare” to send him a book written by a client of the literary agency I work for.
I forwarded this message on to a colleague with a note saying I didn’t mind sending him a book but I certainly wasn’t going to bare anything [...]

A terrible message

I once snorted to a friend about a technician’s terrible spelling in an email (at Oxford University, no less).
Naturally I hit ‘reply all’ by mistake, and sent the guffawing tirade back to the technician. Oops.
andybman

Hitting the wall

At the end of my interview for a very technical academic job at a well-respected UK university, I was feeling reasonably pleased with how things had gone. I said bye to the panel, turned round and walked into the wall (rather than through the door which had been helpfully opened for me). On [...]