Excellent. Here they are:
- If you don’t want this job, I’ll find someone who does
- I don’t pay you to think
- I won’t have you on Facebook while you’re on the clock
- I’ll take it under advisement
- Who gave you permission to do that?
- Drop everything and do this now!
- Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions
- Sounds like a personal problem to me
- I have some feedback for you…and everyone else here feels the same way
- In these times, you’re lucky to have a job at all
Here’s one of the best parts, in response to number 3 (“I won’t have you on Facebook while you’re on the clock”):
Decent managers have figured out that there is no clock, not for white-collar knowledge workers, anyway. Knowledge workers live, sleep, and eat their jobs. Their e-mail inboxes fill up just as fast after 5:00 p.m. as they do before. Their work is never done, and it’s never going to be done. That’s O.K. Employees get together in the office during the daytime hours to do a lot of the work together, and then they go home and try to live their lives in the small spaces of time remaining. If they need a mental break during the day, they can go on PeopleofWalmart.com or Failblog.org without fear of managerial reprisal. We are not robots. We need to stop and shake off the corporate cobwebs every now and then. If a person is sitting in the corner staring up at the ceiling, you could be watching him daydream—or watching him come up with your next million-dollar product idea. (Or doing both things at once.)