Your life filled with absurdities?

From the excellent book: The Healing Power of Humor by Allen Klein

"Your life is filled with absurdies. Look for them; they are laughable. One of the easiest places to find these is in your mistakes, those bloopers that are an inevitable by-product of being human.
Here are some examples:

(From student tests)

Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, veins, and caterpillars

To be a good nurse you have to be absolutely sterile

(From letters parents wrote to teachers)

My son is under doctor's care and should not take fiscal ed. Please execute him

Please excuse Ralph from school on Friday. He had very loose vowels

(From a letter received by a county department)

I am very much annoyed to find you have branded my son illiterate. This is a dirty lie, as I was married a week before he was born."

Exaggeration Exercise?

Yes. You can have fun expanding a "truth" about yourself. Here are a few examples from my humor class:

• I talk to myself all day while driving and tell myself jokes and laugh. Other drivers think I'm crazy. They may be right.
• In the morning I take 20 minutes getting my hat ready to put on my head, take the cleanest clothes out of the dirty mess on the floor. On the way to work I yell at other drivers. At the end of the day I go home and talk for hours with my best friend: The television.
• I am technical. If someone asks for the time I tell them it is 4:42 not a quarter to five. If someone asks me what I did I tell them---precisely what time I did it and where. My boy friend doesn't understand this----particularly when I report things like precisely what color shirt my waiter was wearing at lunch.
• I need to decorate space. Bows and flowers, pillows, and knickknacks. I dream about Ethan Allen. I can't think straight when there is an unpainted white wall.
• I have a love of olives: black, green, and stuffed with anything. Sometimes I bounce them off my children's forehead. At my bachelor's party we stomped them into the floor when we missed tossing them into a ring.
• I talk with my hands more than my mouth. Sometimes I can't figure out why people around me keep flinching and ducking. Then suddenly I realize they're trying to avoid possible serious injury.
• Most of the time I get this overwhelming feeling that I am boring. I have the feeling that when I say something to someone they will turn to someone else and speak as if I hadn't said anything. It's ridiculous, particularly when I determine that I didn't say anything to anyone.
• I blow my nose and I leave my Kleenex in my nostrils. It keeps my nose warm. It keep the air warm that I breathe. I look at myself in the mirror and think I wouldn't want anyone else to see this.
• I have a cowlick that pops up every time I touch it. It has a mind of its own. My girl friend makes it a habit to touch it. I could weld it down and it it would still pop up.

Prime Qualifications for Work?

Here's a list from Humor Workshop participants:

• Low enthusiasm
• Willing to work long hours for little pay and to feel good about it
• Ability to smile
• Ability to use ears, eyes, and voice for long hours
• Showing up/able to entertain self
• Able to count to ten
• To be small minded, judgmental and have boring taste in clothes
• Be able to write like a doctor and speak with a heavy accent (any country)
• Can read manuals
• Know something about cars and oil
• Strong back, willingness to work hard, get filthy, and be abused for as little money as possible
• Being able to ignore the department next door
• High stress tolerance
• Must be related to another employee in some form or another

Your Childs's View of Work

What do you think a child's view of your work might be? Your children? The child in you?
Here are some possibilities:

• I want to go to work and play computer games all day like they do
• She sits at a desk with a putter and talks on the phone and runs around all over
• My daddy works in a tall building. They don't let him out until after my bedtime
• They bring work home at night and put sheets of paper in piles
• They hate something called the boss. I think it has something to do with white and brown cows
• They have chairs with wheels on them
• Their computers must be bad drivers because they crash
• They must have a lot of timeouts at work
• When I call them at work they whisper so I can't hear them
• I don't think they would have much to say at show and tell
• All they do at recess is drink coffee
• I like Saturdays because mom takes me to where she works and I can take pictures of my hands
• Someday I'm going to work with my daddy to see the clowns he works with
• I wish my mon wouldn't bring so much work home. Couldn't they just put her into a slower learning group?
• Did you know my mommy works for a witch?

Excerpt from Laughing Nine to Five

CEO Feedback

There is increasing evidence that the nation's executives are upset with the increasing agitation being voiced in the house and senate about executive salaries, bonuses, parachutes, and other perks that CEOs are receiving.

One CEO, who wished to remain anonymous, said "We have been scapegoated for all the problems in the economy. It is definitely not our fault that government regulation of our business has been diminished. Certainly the SEC is to blame for much of what has happened. For example, their requirement that executive benefits be limited to less than $10,000 was indeed micro management at its worst."

As a result of this ruling companies are reducing the perks for executives. For example, there has been a significant reduction in the payment of country club fees. This is particularly devastating because most senior executives work their way up in corporations by networking while playing golf or tennis.

CEOS appear to me the most upset about losing the personal financial advising benefit---a reduction of 74 % to 62 % in the past year in the Fortune 100 companies. They argue that this perk is of value in running their organizations. There could be some truth here. The Dow Jones average dropped 770 points on September 29th.