Taking the Pys

This page is dedicated to the lighter side of IO Psychology. Please forward any contributions for the stress relief of all!

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This story from a DNRC operative is proof that the secret to good office productivity is poor communications:

At my last company, a number of us (all engineers) became frustrated that our boss would page us for no reason other than to ask a simple question about his web browser. It started out with just a beep every now and then, but it soon escalated to weekend and night calls because he was curious about something. We came up with a very simple, but very effective, solution.

We started to have conversations in the office about the horrible paging service the company subscribed to. We would tell true (and by "true" I mean false) stories about pages not coming through - and about the extraordinary and heroic measures we had to take when we finally got emergency messages. This worked beautifully; eventually, my boss even joined in complaining about the paging service as though he had experienced similar problems with his own pager.


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