Unfortunately, when it comes to spending money on business skills training, most of us put it slightly below the need to upgrade the filing cabinets.  (Note to reader:  if you have ever stared longingly at a new filing cabinet because it’s just so much more amazing than the filing cabinet you currently own, then you desperately need to find some better ways to entertain yourself.)  So what can you do to get the training that you need?  Fortunately, I have a few ideas:

Stage In-House Role-Playing Scenarios!  There’s got to be someone you work with who does community theater on the weekends, and I’ll bet at least one of the IT guys has an orc costume in his closet.  Add those things together, and you’ve got pretty much everything you need.  Besides, forcing reluctant participants to grudgingly engage in stilted conversations is a great way to boost team morale!

Buy A Zillion Inspirational Posters!  One of the best way to address real-world issues is to bury them beneath a mountain of non-specific platitudes.  Besides, there’s no problem that a picture of a waterfall can’t fix.

Sign Up for Levity University!  What’s Levity University?  I’m glad you asked.  I’ve put together a video database of hundreds of videos on over a dozen different areas of professional development – leadership, motivation, sales, conflict resolution, ethics, etiquette, and more.   They’re all short, they’re all funny, and the whole thing is free.  It’s the perfect way to get professional development training without breaking the bank, and we guarantee that your people will actually enjoy the process of becoming better.  Check out my collection of free training videos to see for yourself.  Because improving your business doesn’t have to be boring.

So there you go.  Was this a shameless self-promotion?  Kind of.  But that doesn’t change the fact that Levity University is free and awesome and awesomely free.  Enjoy!

Thank you, random Internet searcher for your curiosity about instant messenger at work!  As some of you know, I have a professional development presentation called Becoming a More Annoying You!  that covers issues of conflict resolution, dress code, office behavior, and sexual harassment.  Which means that when someone wanted to learn more about instant messenger etiquette, they naturally came to my site to see what I had to say about it.

The answer?  A big fat nothing.  NOTHING!  I HAD TOTALLY OVERLOOKED THIS!

How have I gotten this far without making fun of all the idiotic things people do with IM?  Seriously, I’m pretty sure I’d forget to put pants on everyday if I didn’t sleep with them on my head so I’d see them first thing every morning.  Anyway, here you go world – all the ways I can think of to annoy the crap out of anyone dumb enough to be your IMing partner:

IM The Wrong Person!  This is ridiculously easy to do when you have multiple IM windows open.  You know those 80s movies where a guy had two girlfriends who didn’t know about each other, and then they both called at the same time and he puts one on hold to talk to the other, then vice versa and so on and back and forth until he screws up and uses the wrong name with the wrong girl?  Yeah, it’s a lot like that, except you probably won’t get smacked in the face with a purse.  Instead, you’ll just get passed over for a promotion.  That’s so much nicer!

Keep All the Sounds On!  Your coworkers are lonely and sad, and the only thing that can possibly drag them out of their hopeless malaise is the incessant sound of your pinging IM whale mating call, or whatever weird-o sound you have whenever a new message pops up.  This is even more fun if you have different sounds for different IM windows; then you can make the same kind of annoying non-music that people make when they run their fingers along the rims of 15 differently-shaped wine glasses!

IM Your Boss to Tell Him/Her to Come to Your Office!  Couldn’t have thought this one up if I’d wanted to.  Someone told me it had happened to them.  Hilarious.

Spend Your Entire Working Day IMing People You Don’t Work With!  That’ll teach your company to block Facebook.  You’re technically being paid to work for 8 hours – but if you spend 3 hours of that time chatting with friends, then if you think about it correctly, your actual hourly salary will go way, way up.  Huzzah for fuzzy math!

So there you have it.  Now get to work not working!

Question:  How many of the above have you been guilty of?  Don’t lie to me!  I can tell when you’re lying, you know…

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And yesterday, after faithfully serving me for several years and through innumerable security checkpoints, my toiletry bag finally gave up the ghost.  Its poor little zipper would hardly open anymore, and the stitching was coming apart on all sides.  After performing a small ceremony (read: taking all my stuff out and throwing it in the trash), I decided to go buy a new one.  I had about 40 minutes between appointments yesterday, and so I figured I’d have plenty of time.  There was only tiny problem.

Toiletry bags for men apparently don’t exist.

I went to Macy’s, failed, and was told to go to The Boston Store to find a murse.  I went there, and failed.  I went to Sears and JCPenney and found nothing.  During that time I passed roughly 43 million purses, makeup bags, and other sacks that women can put every imaginable thing into.  By the time I reached JCPenney I was ready to buy myself an adorable sparkly clutch to shove my toiletries into.  What do I care if the security guy looks at me funny?  He’s already seen me naked in their millimeter scanner thingy.

Recently I’ve read a lot of articles about women’s place in the workplace.  Well ladies, let me talk for a moment about a man’s place in the world of bag-finding.

What it feels like to be a woman looking for a new bag:

11:30am – decide to go shopping for a new bag

11:55am – get partially exhausted by the overwhelming number of options online

11:56am – opt for a relaxing lunch out to soothe your overstimulated senses

12:15pm – see a cute bag in the store next to the restaurant and decide to go in there after lunch

12:57pm – begin the process of touching 413 different purses, satchels, handbags, clutches, pocketbooks, and totes in 13 different stores, all of which have a wealth of options

1:43pm – finally settle on one of your 4 trillion choices

2:01pm – arrive home and experience a slight amount of buyer’s remorse

2:02pm – decide not to return the bag you just bought

2:03pm – get online to look for accessories to complement the new bag you just bought

In fact, I don’t think I went to a single department of a single store that didn’t have bag options for women.  In my entire life, I have never – not once, not ever – met a girl who did not like purses. You would think, with fully 50% of the world’s population obsessed with buying things to put other things into, that someone somewhere would have thought, “I wonder if men want these things, too?”

Things We Decided to Invent Before Inventing Toiletry Bags for Men

-          Hypoallergenic dogs

-          New species of fruit

-          Leisurely space travel

-          Particle accelerators

-          Augmented reality glasses that display things like heart rate, metabolism, relevant facts, and body temperature analysis of whoever’s dumb enough to stand in front of you

-          Computers smart enough to win Jeopardy

-          Sarin gas

-          Gene-specific targeted drug therapies

-          Indoor grass patches so your hypoallergenic dogs can poop without the indignity of having to go outside

-          Giant pieces of metal you can shove into your earholes

-          Every other thing you can possibly think of

So now, as the honorary spokesperson for all men out there, let me tell you what it’s like to try to find a bag to put stuff into.

What it feels like to be a man looking for a new bag:

11:30am – decide to go shopping for a new bag, plan to finish by noon.

11:40am – arrive at first store

11:42am – leave first store after being directed to second store where clerk at first store is “100% certain” you’ll find what you need

11:50am – arrive at second store, get directed to the luggage department where someone might have once seen something that could possibly function as a bag that men would use

11:55am – start to get angry that you’re in the luggage department when you don’t want to buy luggage

11:58am – get even angrier when you realize that you’re going to be late and that the luggage department doesn’t have the stupid bag you need

12:00pm – call whoever you’re meeting, tell them you’re going to be 15 minutes late, apologize

12:05pm – go to a store that sells literally everything, certain that there’s no way you won’t find something there

12:06-12:20pm – walk through every section of the store, including sections that don’t carry what you want (bait & tackle, automotive, lingerie) because maybe you’ll get lucky and find what you know is hiding there somewhere

12:21pm – postpone your noon meeting for a second time, apologize again, start cursing quietly at everything you see

12:25pm – find a store clerk to help you, follow them as they walk through all the sections YOU JUST WALKED THROUGH with the vague belief that maybe their eyeballs are smarter than yours

12:27pm – make a small child cry with the look in your eyes, apologize to the mother

12:30pm – watch the clerk stare at the same things you stared at 10 minutes ago

12:31pm – listen with disbelief as the clerk tells you that they don’t carry bags for men and that you should probably go back to the first store you went to

12:32pm – suffer an aneurysm

At one point in my completely futile search, I was told that the only times stores carry toiletry bags for men is on Father’s Day or maybe Christmas.  So not only are manbags essentially mythical, but they’re only designed to be given as gifts, since apparently no self-respecting man would ever want to buy one for himself.  Which also means all those unmarried guys I sit on planes with must be stuffing their toiletries into their socks.

All I want is a bag, people.  That’s all I need, a stupid manbag that doesn’t attach to my hip.  To all the bagmakers out there, I am giving you a billion dollar idea.  We men are sick and tired of shoving our toiletries into Ziploc bags.  We demand equality.  We will pay for equality.  You know what you need to do.  Seriously, JCPenney could pull itself out of its death spiral just by offering manbags.

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Question:  What’s one product that either doesn’t exist or is hard to find that you think people should make?

But living in the past isn’t such a bad thing.  I had an awesome time as a 6-year old, and I see no reason to stop acting like I did then just because occasionally wetting myself isn’t considered as normal as it used to be.  So to help you cling to the past like there’ll be no tomorrow, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Act Like There Really Won’t Be a Tomorrow!  There’s a difference between sticking with tried-and-true traditional processes and outright refusing to innovate under any circumstances.  This prescient quote by Robert Vanderpoel sums it up nicely: “The most successful businessperson is the one who holds onto the old just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is better.”  But I don’t know who Robert Vanderpoel is, which means we shouldn’t listen to him.  So start incorporating phrases like “That’s not how we did things back in my day” or “What is this Internet of which you speak?” into your daily conversations.  Then watch the ossification begin!

Refuse to Recognize the Validity of New Data!  One of the best ways to live in the past is to automatically assume that all new information is a lie.  Numbers are super easy to manipulate.   For example, I am technically 5’11” tall, but I prefer to call myself 6’ -1” because it sounds taller.  So when someone says, “We tested this with 500 potential customers, and it seems to be 23% better than what we’re doing now,” what they’re really saying is, “awesome person ever.!!!”  Or something like that.

Ignore Demographic Shifts!  Odds are your customer base has changed in the last 5 years.  You’re probably trying to attract a completely new or hitherto-ignored population of potential money-payers.  But that’s a whole lot more work than just assuming that the whole ‘changing demographics’ argument is a big fat lie.  So stick with what’s comfortable!  And if you think this isn’t a good idea, just go ask the Republican Party how well this worked out for them in the 2012 election!  They couldn’t be happier!

So there you go.  Consider this my eulogy to Hotmail, and to dial-up Internet while I’m at it.  Man, I sure do miss the days of dial-up.  “Don’t get on the phone, I’m going to get online, just want to look at a picture, should only take 16 minutes to download, please stay off the phone please!!!!”  Those were the good old days.

Question:  What’s one thing you or your company needs to do in order to stay current within your industry or for your customers?

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Notice how I took a generally happy time and turned it into something terrible?  It’s easy to do.  Here’s how!

Look for the Negative in Every Positive! 

Newton’s third law of thermal dynastics states that “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  Which means that for every good thing that happens to you, you should assume something crappy is just around the corner.  The best of you won’t even wait for the good thing to happen before you start to lament the inevitability of your depressing future.  So when someone says, “It’s a great day, isn’t it?”, you should look contemptuously at them and say, “Is it?  Is it really?”  Doing so will make sure nobody tries to dissuade you from your completely unreasonable belief that bad things are on their way.  Self-fulfilling prophecy time!

Accumulate as Many Negative Things as Possible! 

Healthy people deal with each problem as it comes in order to avoid being overwhelmed by a mountain of bad news.  But healthy people are notoriously boring at parties, and I think we can all agree that healthy food tastes like soap.  So instead, keep a careful record of every bad thing that has ever happened to you or near you.  Cut out news clippings of tragedies and post them around your office; mark the anniversary of every illness you’ve ever suffered; and definitely downplay any good news as a brief and ultimately transient interruption to an otherwise consistently downward trend.  Now who’ll be the life of all those parties you used to get invited to!

Don’t Change Any of Your Habits! 

Generally, if you are a happy person, it’s in part because you do things that make you happy.  Conversely, if you are an unhappy person, it’s partially because you do things that make you unhappy.  So keep doing so!  If your commute to work makes you miserable before you start your day, then don’t look into alternate routes, getting up earlier, or moving to a happier location.  If you have a sales job but your soul belongs to marketing, don’t make any effort to find some openings in the marketing department.  After all, if you make changes to improve your life, what will you have to complain about?

So there you go.  There’s no reason to be happy about anything.  Even puppies can’t make me smile anymore, but I know they’ll all grow up to be dogs, and dogs aren’t as cute as puppies.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go barricade myself in my home.  Although I just read another story about a house-swallowing sinkhole, so maybe that isn’t the best idea.  There’s no safe place, people.  Remember that.

Now I’m sure some of you know that I used to be an English teacher, and so you might be tempted to think that I find this development unnerving.  But nothing could be further from the truth!  I think this is perfectly awesome.  And let me tell you why:

Sticking with the Things That Came Easy to You as a Child Is Way Better than Learning New Things!  This is the primary reason that I only eat soft foods.  There was a time in my life when I didn’t have teeth, and there might come a day in the future when I don’t have teeth again, so I see no reason to learn how to use them while I have them.  All of us should encourage our children to do only those things that they feel immediately comfortable with, because if we don’t then they might get good at too many things and decide to leave and have a life of their own.  Similarly, you should only encourage your team members to stick with what they already know, no matter how unhelpful some of that knowledge is.  Why stretch their boundaries when you could keep them in a tiny little cage instead?

Using Two Fingers is Way Faster Than Using Ten!  I’m not a math major, but even I know that.  It’s the same reason that I regularly win basketball games all by myself against full five-member teams.  And I’m pretty sure all software programmers, video game designers, stock market analysts, and every other person who normally uses typing skills to create whatever it is they create would be way, way faster if they just switched to texting.  Besides, having so many fingers moving all at once is confusing.  Should I use my right thumb for the space bar, or my left thumb?  Which finger is going to reach up to hit the 2 button?  If I’m only using two fingers, I wouldn’t have to worry about that!

Technology Is a Perfect Replacement for Actual Thought!  The wunderkind hailing the marvels of predictive keyboarding obviously has not sent a hilarious inappropriate text thanks to their smartphone’s predictive keyboarding.  Most people think that computers are unconscious machines, but there is no way that can be true considering how often they like to replace ordinary words with the most vulgar and ridiculously inappropriate predictive substitute.  I know they’re enjoying themselves; they have to be.  And your colleagues will enjoy themselves a lot more if you’d stop thinking about what you’re writing and just let the computer do all that pesky thinking for you.

That’s all for now.  I also wanted to let you know that I typed this entire thing with my face, smashing my nose against the keys in what I can only assume will be the next evolution of our communications.  Fexting, or face-ting.  Hmmmm…..facetext!  That’s what I did.  I facetexted this.

Anyway, this is the one day each year when we’re supposed to remind ourselves how invaluable our administrative assistants are – indeed, that without them our respective businesses would essentially stop functioning.  But since I feel like indulging in a thought experiment, I’d like you to imagine a world without any administrative assistants.  There are probably several excellent reasons to let go of all of your support staff, but here are the first three that come to mind:

Spending Hours Searching for Important Information Is a Great Way to Spend Time!  Given that there’s a decent chance that you don’t even know all the phone numbers of your immediate family members, I think it’s safe to say that there is all kinds of information you need every day that you would have no idea how to find without the help of your administrative assistants.  But they’re basically stealing all the fun from you!  Treasure hunts are awesome, as evidenced by the success of Pirates of the Caribbean, and I think it’s high time that you channel your inner Jack Sparrow by going on a long, circuitous, and endlessly maddening journey trying to find the stuff you need to do your job.  If you’ve ever spent five minutes wandering the parking lot looking for your car, then I think you can appreciate how great an experience this will be for you.

Business Relationships are More Satisfying When You’ve Had to Build Every One of Them from Scratch!  I’d be willing to bet all kinds of money (in all kinds of currencies, while I’m at it), that your administrative assistants have been greasing the wheels of your business relationships for years – writing thank-you notes, remembering birthdays, sending flowers and gifts to important clients, and otherwise making sure that people think of you fondly whenever it’s time for you to work together.  But what’s more fun – crossing a bridge, or using an underwater torch to weld support pylons into the sea floor?  I think we all know the answer to that one.

Computer Program User Manuals are PAGE-TURNING READS!  Not that your administrative assistants would know.  They’ve become masters at Quickbooks by spending years developing an unbelievable mastery of its various ins and outs.  So get rid of them!  I can think of no better way for you to spend the next 3 months of your life than by screaming obscenities at your computer screen because the STUPID YOUTUBE TUTORIAL VIDEO YOU’RE WATCHING DIDN’T TELL YOU WHAT YOU NEEDED TO KNOW!!!!  Or whatever the problem ends up being.

I think I’ve made a pretty good case, although I undoubtedly missed a billion different things I could have mentioned here.  That’s the problem with administrative assistants; they do so many things that it’s really hard to know where to start getting mad at them for being so proficient.  So here’s to you, administrative professionals!  Thanks for sucking all the fun out of our jobs.

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That’s how most mistakes are – small, easily fixed, and usually little more than embarrassing.  And I know you want a lot more embarrassment in your life.  I know for myself that I start to get twitchy if I haven’t made a complete fool of myself every 6 or 8 hours.  So to help you make the same kinds of ridiculous mistakes the Dallas-Fort Worth Fox affiliates did, here are a few fun, embarrassment-happy tricks!

Work at an Impossible-to-Maintain Pace!

The psychotically frenetic pace of today’s news media has caused them to produce more content than it is possible to produce at a consistently high quality.  And you can do the same thing!  If you operate a factory, I’m sure you can pump 40% more units through each line; and if you’re working on a major deadline right now, there’s no reason not to add two or three equally pressing deadlines all at the same time.  Doing so will ensure that you don’t have the time to do all of your jobs well – and it will induce you to flopsweat, which is an awesome word we simply don’t use often enough.

Don’t Have Anyone Edit Anything!

You’re too busy, remember?  Besides, people will no what yew meant.  It’s fine if you accidentally use the wrong worm from time to thyme in your emails and other public Asians, and it won’t at all make people think that you’re hopped up on painkillers.  Enjoy!

Keep Separate Projects in the Same Working Folder!

This is obviously where the Fox affiliate folks went wrong.  Someone was running a story about Zooey, someone else was running a story about the Boston bombings, and they blobbed those together in an embarrassingly incorrect way.  You can do it, too.  In fact, if you’re an auto manufacturer, I more or less insist that you do the same.  Because I have wanted an off-roading Prius with fine leather detailing and a 290,000 pound towing capacity for years, and it’s not going to happen if you keep putting all those different features into different automobiles.

That’s just about it for today.  Hope this helps you screw up something fun!

If the world of Bitcoin finance makes any sense to you, then you should probably get into currency trading, since that only makes sense to seven people.   However, as an homage to everyone who recently lost money in the bursting of the Bitcoin bubble, I have a few ideas to help you become as successful as all those Bitcoin daytraders.

Dive Headlong Into Things You Know Nothing About!

If you listen to interviews with billionaires, you’ll notice that they all tend to do one thing really, ridiculously well.  They concentrate on media acquisitions, or high-end commercial real estate, or petroleum, or emu farming (not sure there’s a billionaire emu farmer, but you get my point).  Which is why you should dabble unintelligently in as many disparate fields as you possibly can!  The fact that so many do this is a large part of the reason that so many Nigerian princes have been anxious to invest with random Americans for the past several years.  So if your background is in distribution, you should definitely override the opinions of your sales manager when it comes to devising a sales strategy.  I’m pretty sure your experience selling old furniture on Craigslist counts for just as much as someone whose made a career from sales.

Ignore the Need for Market Research!

The hallmark practice of start-up businesses that fail to start up, although it’s hardly limited to new companies.  My favorite story about this involves one of the major phone companies launching a huge Cinco de Mayo campaign in Miami to attract Latino customers without having done enough research to realize that Miami is populated predominantly with Cubans who don’t celebrate Cinco de Mayo!  The point is, if you don’t know what you’re getting into, you’ll probably have no idea what you’re doing once you’re in it.  And uncertainty like that will add a new element of zest and excitement to your life – at least until your money runs out.

Panic!

This is the culmination of the above, combined with the first instance of anything going even slightly wrong.  If you have no idea what you’re getting into and haven’t even done a cursory amount of market research to learn more about it, then you’ll have no idea how to react to bumps along the way.  Is it a hiccup, a serious problem, an opportunity, a sign of impending disaster – I DON’T KNOW!  This will also allow you to do all the panic-inducing kinds of things you’ve always dreamed about: running around screaming, sweating profusely, making frenzied phone calls, speeding out of the parking lot, and racing home to gather the family into the car with what they can carry before the authorities catch up to you.  And trust me, that last one is tons of fun.  A great story to share with the kids when they get older.

Hopefully that’ll get you started.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just been approached by a man I’ve never met to consider a real estate investment that sounds almost too good to be true.  If I don’t write anything next week, it’s probably because I’ll soon be a millionaire.  Good luck with life!

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And to help make sure you are able to craft the kind of semi-literate opinion that others are sure to ignore, here are a few simple tricks you can use:

Don’t Bother Reading the Source Material!  Nevermind that it takes two seconds to link to the original article, and that those links will be posted in every opinion about that article that you’ll ever read.  And nevermind that source material is pretty much the only way to get a clear understanding of what started all the comments in the first place.  (Side note: this is the reason that my recent book, My Interpretation of What God Really Wants Based on a Lot of Chat Room Discussions I’ve Participated In, hasn’t sold quite as well as the Bible.)  The point is, forming an opinion without reading the thing that you’re forming your opinion on is a great way to have the kind of opinion no one cares to hear about.  Although that, of course ,is just my opinion.

Spend the Majority of Your Argument Attacking the Other Person!  In debate terms, this is called an ad hominem attack, but you can just call it the “you’re wrong because you’re ugly” line of reasoning.  Doing this will allow you to completely ignore the issue you’re addressing and pick away at completely irrelevant personal information about the person you disagree with.  For example, I think we would have a much better country if Maria Sotomayor would defend her position on a particular court case by saying, “Well, Scalia voted in favor, and he’s a turdbag, so I’m voting against.”  Besides, debating the merits of an argument would require you to have a fully articulated opinion of your own, and that much thinking is like really hard.

Defend the Idea that There is ONLY ONE RIGHT ANSWER TO THE QUESTION YOU’RE DEBATING!  There are times, I suppose, where there really is only one right answer to something.  Illegally downloading movies without paying for them is stealing, which is why we’ve created laws that no one listens to.  But in cases like the Princeton mom, there are actually a lot of right answers.  Some women want a career, others want to raise a family; some men want to work, others want to be stay-at-home dads – and there is an enormous difference between saying “I disagree with your way of thinking” and “Your way of thinking is entirely invalid.”  To suggest that one of those philosophies is categorically wrong is categorically stupid, and it’s a great way to demonstrate that your understanding of the world is limited to only your personal experience.

So next time to care to share your thoughts with the world, make sure to use one or more of these techniques.  Because if you don’t do what I’m suggesting here, then you’re obviously a sad and lonely person with bad hair and a dismal credit score.  And people like you don’t even deserve to have opinions.

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