Workplace humour.
Is that an oxymoron?
Or is a sense of humour an essential tool-in-trade if you want to survive the stresses and strains of professional life?
From the abundance of jokes about the office, shop floor and boardroom doing the rounds, it would seem that work can not only be fun, even if the joke is often on you, but that it can sometimes be enlivened by a comedy of errors.
Some of the funniest cartoons are about the workplace, perhaps second only to politics and politicians. One of my all time favourites is a cartoon by RK Lakshman featuring two prosperous looking individuals sharing an impressive office, with the younger man asking the other one: "Uncle, what is the meaning of nepotism?"
Some excellent, even pioneering works in management literature have been enriched by their underlying humour. Thus, there was nothing light-hearted about Parkinson's Law by C Northcote Parkinson, which stated: "Work expands to meet the time available."
Parkinson's Law An elderly lady of leisure can spend an entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the post-box in the next street.
Or about his second law, "Expenditure rises to meet income." Both are serious studies about the causes and consequences of flawed thinking at the workplace and beyond, but Parkinson's light touch straightaway captured the reader's interest.
Parkinson's Law-Example
Politicians and taxpayers have assumed that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. Faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. Actually, the number of the officials and the quantity of the work to be done are not related to each other at all.
Decades later, the Peter Principle first stated "If things can go wrong, they will." How true! We know from experience that things will go wrong even if they can't.
And can anyone equal that wonderful euphemism Laurence J Peter invented about people being "kicked upstairs" when they reach their level of incompetence in a hierarchy?
I'll recall below some fond memories of my long if undistinguished professional career.
"Every piece of paper you see is here for a reason: I haven't thrown it away."
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The Dilbert cartoon strips have been reproduced from an online source. The other cartoons are courtesy The New Yorker.
The first one has to do with two extreme examples of leave letters, one the very soul of wit thanks to its brevity, and another a tribute to the author's talent for descriptive prose bordering on poetry, written by colleagues some 40 years ago. I came across these literary masterpieces during my stint with State Bank of India, Hyderabad.
My colleague Ghazi Salahuddin's letter was a gem of precision.
His application for leave to get married went:
"Dear Sir,
Please grant me three days' casual leave to enable me to enjoy conjugal bliss."
Yours faithfully
Ghazi Salahuddin"
Ghouse Khan, a tennis star of the 1970s, made an emotional appeal to be excused from work under trying circumstances. His letter said: "On Wednesday, the 25th I came down with a running nose, sore throat and high temperature. I took a Crocin and expected to be fit for work on the morrow. Unfortunately, my fever showed no signs of abating on Thursday, when I decided to consult my family physician…" Ghouse continued in similar vein till he came to the point of requesting for his absence to be condoned and leave granted for the period.
Closer home, the Sanmar lunchroom can be a riot of good-natured leg-pulling and near character assassination. Some of the most famous perpetrators and victims of these gags are no longer in the service of the group. The brilliant former Ranji Trophy fast bowler
B Kalyanasundaram gave us some memorable moments of pleasure in these exchanges, and good old CG Sethuram often threatened to crack the glass windows with the sheer volume of his (sometimes tall) stories from his eventful years in his profession. The tradition continues, even if we miss some of these stalwarts.
V Ramnarayan
"He can't speak to you at the moment — he's bonding with his compensation package."
Parkinson's Law
An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals. Officials make work for each other.