Work should be fun. Pick on your cube mates.

We're all horrible people at work usually kidding each other a lot. One of my cubicle neighbors has a sheep fetish, er, alleged sheep fetish after he knew too much about human/sheep interactions. He told us during one of his first days on the job that the way to have proper "relations" with a sheep is to wear boots and put the hind legs of the sheep in your boots - and walk up to the edge of a cliff so the sheep keeps backing up to you. I kid you not! Did I mention that many times people set themselves up for the joke?

We had been talking about the "Dance, dance, revolution" game on PS/2 and how some people use it to lose weight.

Another cubemate says, "We have that game."

"You play it?"

"No, I don't have any coordination."

"Where do your kids get their coordination from?"

"My wife. She plays the game. She used to be a dancer."

Hold my tongue... too late.

"Did it involve a stage and a pole?"

Bring in the consultants

Quick question - what is the difference between a project done internally by a company and one done by consultants given the same set of requirements?

The one done internally would be done as simple as possible for as little cost as possible.

The one done by consultants would end up being as expensive as possible and bring in as many additional consultants to do the work.

Take for example a real project - one to develop a portal page. Logic says that you could create a simple static web page and redirect people to their destinations. Just publish a standardized look and feel for all the different applications within the organization.

The consultants come in and want to change the portal page into a gatekeeper application where all the pages are retrieved by the gatekeeper application, parsed and updated, and then streamed down to the users. Not only has this introduced latency and a single point of failure, but it has also increased complexity since each application team has a bit of a different design and some things, like popup windows, aren't handled very well.

Still it seems easier to just publish a set of stylesheets and a design guide and let the different application teams work towards a single standard than parsing the pages and modifying them on the fly.

Consultants seem to be more concerned with spending lots of cash instead of producing a good product.