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