Logics 2.0 (f/m).

Basically unrivalled – told by a lady (?).

I (female) go home by bus. It is rather crowded, so I would like to save myself the trouble of having to squeeze through the crowd in order to get to the ticket-cancelling machine. I am starting to ask the lady in front of me to do it for me. But how to address her? Can I thou and thee her?

Since she did not get up at the last stop, I can safely assume she will be riding with me to the final station. I take a closer look at her. She carries a bottle of wine, which means she is on her way to meet a man. The wine is not of the cheap sort, so it must be a handsome man.

In our street, there are only two handsome men: my husband and my lover. She cannot be on her way to meet my lover, because I myself am going there. Consequently, she must be on her way to meet my husband. My husband has two lovers – Katrin and Andrea. Katrin is currently on vacation. …

I: “Hello Andrea, would you be so kind as to cancel my ticket for me?”

Andrea: “How do you know me?”

From the facebook feature Nackt gefällst du mir besser through Matthias Wühle über.

What I like about the story is the unemotional and not-at-all male view of a still very emotional topic… And I hope it is neither anti-masculine nor anti-feminine, but just plain stupid.

It has been slightly modified by me (Roland Dürre).

RMD
(Translated by EG)

It was Rolo who pointed me towards this story and its author:

Jobber’s Story

We jobbers assembled wires and spirals, put small plastic discs into oval red-painted metal pieces – and at the opposite end of the assembly line sat Mehdi. He drilled a hole through the eggs with his machine, then the thing was finished.

During the first few weeks, I still tried to find out what it was I made. After all, you wanted to find something that made sense in what you did – or at least that was the idea. Well, said one of the jobbers, a politics student from Sierra Leone, the piece is obviously for car motors. It plays an important role in the carburator. The Polish student of religions said it is for export to Japan, where it will be part of a shintoistic sect cult and highly venerated.

The only thing we knew for certain was that the finished pieces were rather expensive. Behind closed doors, it was said that they cost 300.- Deutsch Marks per piece. But nobody knew for certain. The eggs had different sizes. They varied weekly. Our foreman adjusted the machines to fit and we had to do everything exactly as he ordered it.

He enjoyed being in charge and ordering people around. Soon, these students would leave the university and then play boss with their bizarre theories, but here, in the practical world, it was still he who was boss.

His favourite sentence was: »We do not pay you for thinking, but for working.« He was really one of the old types. For him, the phrase “co-operative leadership” belonged in the same category as homosexual swinishness.

One morning, shortly after seven o’clock, Mehdi, the exiled Iranian, called to the foreman: »The machine is not correctly adjusted.« The foreman’s reply was: »How would you know that, you stupid Turk. Shut up and do your work.«

Around eight, Mehdi again called the foreman: »Can’t you see! The machine is not properly adjusted. The angle for drilling is too steep. I think if you…«

The foreman said: »We do not pay you for thinking, but for working.«

Mehdi drilled. He drilled and drilled. 120 eggs per hour. The smile on his face got broader and broader. Occasionally, he shook his head with an air of incredulity: »Rejects«, he said. »Friends, do not waste hard labour on this«, were his words to us, »I am turning all your work into rejects, anyway. These are all rejects.« He chuckled softly. We started wondering when they would discover it.

They found out half an hour before the day’s end. The department head yelled, sounding like he had fallen into the skip. Mehdi was already cleaning his machine when the hierarchy approached him: the department head, the master, the foreman. Well, said Mehdi, hadn’t he told them that the machine was not properly adjusted? The foreman asked how Mehdi assumed he would know this kind of thing.

Mehdi said: »Well, I study machine engineering in the eighth semester.« With tears in his eyes, the department head asked Mehdi if he was aware of the fact that he had produced rejects to the tune of a quarter million Deutsch Marks. »Is that how much it was?«, said Mehdi. The rest of us who were standing around quickly did the arithmetic. Well, it meant that the 300 Deutsch Mark per piece were true.

I think this is a truly beautiful story!

The author is BOV BJERG
Bov Bjerg, born 1965. The former truck driver is now editor for the magazine »Salbader« and columnist of the Berlin city paper »Scheinschlag«. He reads at the »Reformbühne Heim & Welt« and at the »Mittwochsfazit«.
(On the internet: www.bjerg.de)

RMD
(Translated by EG)

P.S.
Rolo is  Rolo Zollner, a cherished friend and excellent photographer. Occasionally, he permits me to publish pictures he took in the IF blog.

We are in the year 1968. Roland was not yet eighteen and went to school at Augsburg Jakob-Fugger Grammar School. There were still 9 years of grammar school (G9),which means I was still in the year preceding graduation, which was basically the 8th year but called 12th form. And we did not yet have “Kollegstufe”, even though you were already allowed to “drop” some subjects at the end of this year.

Those were the days when yours truly and his friends saw to it that they were – if possible – never seen without a cigarette in public. And in the evening, the beer from “Evi” at the Rehak (that is the pub on Augsburg Bahnhofstrasse), or – if you decided you wanted to be an intellectual – the red wine in the Republican club were a “must do”.

During the summer days, we spent our time in the “family public swimming pool” and always got quite a nice sun tan. At night, however, we tried by all means to go and see the US GI-s in their clubs (Hank’s at Oberhausen, Playboy at Pfersee). They were mostly African-American, because in our region, the US army was stationed. The army was basically “black”.

Early in the morning, when we stepped out of the smoky pubs as the sun rose and were greeted by the fresh air, we looked rather pale, regardless of all the nice sun tan.

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Another 14 nights to go!

Since yesterday’s InterFace AG Christmas party was so nice and yesterday’s nonsense was such a success, you get another advent calendar window with what I consider total nonsense and for which I guess the only way to stand it is in a state of total drunkenness! Please note how complex my stupid sentence is.
So here we go – open – and press <more>!

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Due to the very complex structure of real enterprises, discussions concerning them often end in chaos. Instead of technical questions, you get dogmatic questions. Even the most basic relations get jumbled up into philosophical and almost bellicose disputes. Instead of added insight and more knowledge, you get frustrated and de-motivated.

I myself often witnessed it. Especially the (theoretical) question: “What profit is adequate for an enterprise?” caused me quite some frustration in my entrepreneurial life. That is why I came up with the Kiosk Parable:

Imagine a very small railway station kiosk. Only one person can enter at a time. The room for products is limited. Customers are served through an open window, just like at a counter. The kiosk salesperson does all the work single-handedly.

You can buy two kinds of products at the kiosk. Small bottles of Jägermeister and cigarettes. Since the salesperson buys the Jägermeister for 1 € and sells it for 2.50 €, the extra money the customers pay for the Jägermeister is 150 %. The margin for the cigarettes is not quite as good. He buys them for 4.50 € and sells them for 5 €, which means 0.50 € more. In other words: a margin of 10%.

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My readers often send me strange stories. Here is one of them – I hope you will find it entertaining mid-week nonsense. Let us just listen to the author…

I accompanied my father (66) when he went to buy a pair of new shoes in the shopping mall. After having run around all the time, we were hungry and decided to go and eat something. We went to the “Food Court”, where we immediately found something tasty (to eat) and two vacant seats.

Over his pasta, my father kept looking at a young girl sitting nearby. Her hair was styled like a cockscomb. It shimmered in all imaginable colours: green, orange, red and blue. My father found it impossible to not stare at her and all the piercings she wore along with her hair.

Finally, the girl started to notice. Each time he looked at her, she caught my father staring at her. When she had enough of it she sarcastically asked:

“Hey, old man, what is your problem? Did you never do anything wild in your entire life?”

Knowing how nimble-witted my father could be, I quickly swallowed all I had in my mouth. After all, I did not want to choke on my last bite, because I knew something special was going to happen right away.

As indeed it did. With dignity and without the slightest flicker of even an eye, my father replied:

“In fact, I did! At one time, I took drugs and fucked a peacock – and now I ask myself if you are the result.”

From Herbert (soccer friend of mine), who took it from the internet. The original author is unknown to us. Now we would like to wish you a wonderful week!

RMD
(Translated by EG)

Several years ago, Jowi, a good friend of mine, wrote about the Midlife Crisis in a forum. It is a crisis that is sometimes laid open, sometimes left to be found between the lines. It is occasionally denied and despised, occasionally hated and loved.

Here is his short contribution on the subject. I think it is still plausible and, above all, very personal.
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A very good friend of mine from Switzerland sent me the following story:

It is an overhung day in a small town of a concerned country. It rains and all the streets are empty. Times are not good, everybody is indebted and all people live on borrowed money.

One day, a German tourist drives through the town and stops at a small hotel. He tells the owner that he would like to take a look at the rooms and perhaps rent it for one night. The deposit he puts on the counter is a 100-Euro bill.

The owner hands him a few keys. Then they start:

1. soon as the visitor is up the stairs, the hotel owner takes the money, races to see his neighbour the butcher and pays his debts.
2. The butcher takes the 100 Euros, runs down the street and pays the farmer.
3. The farmer takes the 100 Euros and pays the bill that came in from the association for using storage facilities.
4. The gentleman in charge there takes the 100 Euro bill, hastens to the pub and pays his liquor bill.
5. The pub owner descreetly hands the bill to a prostitute sitting at the bar. She has seen poor times and allowed the pub owner some liberties on credit.
6. The whore runs to the hotel where she pays the hotel bill with the 100 Euros.
7. The hotel owner puts the bill back on the counter.
8. At the same moment, the traveller comes down the stairs, takes the bill and says that none of the rooms he saw was to his liking, Then he leaves the town.

➩ Nobody produced anything.

➩ Nobody earned anything.

➩ Everybody got rid of their debts and

➩ they all look optimistically towards their future.

So, now you all know how it is done. This is how easy the EU emergency package works.

The author is unknown to us.

RMD
(Translated by EG)

P.S.
Now we know. Detlev SIX had found it out: The author is Cordt Schnibben. The story is out of Spiegel “Die bürgerliche Kernschmelze”. See the comments.