When I was just a wee slip of a girl starting out in this field, I worked at two huge, internationally recognized financial services firms.

Like most large companies, both places were chock full of all the corporate bullshit bells and whistles you might expect. When I worked at Vanguard, we were forced (OK, not forced, but strongly urged and may I say perhaps even blackmailed?) to participate in time-wasting crap like World Diversity Day. This was an annual event in which each member of each staff in my department had to bring in food items from our assigned "culture" and recite a little spiel about it. I mean how fucking stupid is that? I'm there to get a job done and get the hell to happy hour, not learn about the indigent cuisine and hunting habits of the little-known Fijian Kummonawannalaya tribe. It was like a third-grade book report. Christ.

In 2001, I moved to Principal Financial Group, where the seemingly de rigueur office decor were a bunch of asinine motivational posters. I'm sure you've seen them before. These posters depict a photograph of something as random as the Great Sphinx or a dewdrop on a lilypad, and then proceed to wax poetic about some abstract crap like "Courage" or "Teamwork," thereby motivating all of the staff to....ridicule it? I don't know. That's all we ever did, anyway. It's not like these posters illuminated some life-changing concept for us.

So you can imagine how tickled freaking pink I was to discover these spoofs. Comic gold!

Labels: bitching, funny stuff, technology, work