Consultant and Consulting Jokes (2)

If you know any consultants, please mention these postings to them.

Back when I was a self-employed consultant I started to collect consultant jokes, with the half-baked idea of self-publishing and selling a paperback book of jokes and cartoons. Below, the first part of what I had collected.

For people who are seriously considering a career in consulting, I strongly recommend buying a copy of Alan Weiss' book, Getting Started in Consulting. When I was getting started, I would read the entire book every few weeks. It help tremendously in understanding how to establish visibility, 'gravitas', reputation, etc. as means of rising above the competition. 

I also remember being asked and answering two key questions about becoming a self-employed consultant: Separate from your credentials, experience and knowledge, "Are you comfortable talking to strangers? Are you comfortable talking to no one?" Because if you cannot do the first, you won't find clients, and if you cannot do the second, sitting home alone in your office with the phone not ringing an no one to have coffee with will be depressing.

MORE CONSULTING JOKES

A doctor, an engineer, and a consultant were arguing about what was the oldest profession in the world.

The doctor remarked, "Well, in the Bible, it says that God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam. This clearly required surgery, and so I can rightly claim that mine is the oldest profession in the world."

The engineer interrupted, and said, "But even earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most spectacular application of civil engineering. Therefore, mine is the oldest profession in the world."

The consultant leaned back in her chair, smiled, and then said confidently, "Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?"

---

An efficiency expert concluded his lecture with a note of caution. "Don't try these techniques at home."

"Why not?" asked somebody from the audience.

"I watched my wife's routine at breakfast for years," the expert explained. "She made lots of trips between the fridge, stove, table and cabinets, often carrying a single item at a time. One day I told her, "You're wasting too much time. Why don't you try carrying several things at once?"

"Did it save time?" the guy in the audience asked.

"Actually, yes," replied the expert. "It used to take her twenty minutes to make breakfast. Now I do it in ten."

---

The classified ad said, "Wanted: CEO needs a one-armed consultant, with a social sciences degree and five years of experience."

The man who won the job asked, "I understand most of the qualifications you required, but why 'one-armed'?"

The CEO answered, "I have had many consultants, and I am tired of hearing with each advice the phrase 'On the other hand…'."

---

A man had a male cat that howled all night, every night. The sleepless man concluded that the cat has too much testosterone and took him to the vet to be castrated. To his great surprise, the cat continued howling.
"Why are you doing it now?" he asked the cat.
"The other cats hired me as a consultant."

---

There’s a glass of water on the table...
First consultant says, "It's half full." That’s an optimist.
Second consultant says, "It's half empty." That’s a pessimist.
The Human Resources consultant says, “You have too much glass there.”

---

A consultant is ...

• Someone who takes the watch off your wrist and tells you the time
• A person who in theory knows 99 ways to make love, but doesn't have any actual experience
• Someone who is called in at the last moment and paid enormous amounts of money to assign the blame

---

Consulting Revisited

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

It takes two things to be a consultant - grey hair and hemorrhoids. The grey hair makes you look distinguished and the hemorrhoids make you look concerned.

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

To spot the expert, pick the one who predicts the job will take the longest and cost the most.

After all is said and done, a hell of a lot more is said than done.

If you consult enough experts, you can confirm any opinion.

Hiring consultants to conduct studies can be an excellent means of turning problems into gold (your problems into their gold).

LIGHT BULB JOKES

 How many consultants does it take to change a light bulb?

• We don't know. They never get past the feasibility study
• Two. One to change the bulb and one to speculate how Tom Peters would have done it
• That depends - how much money is in your budget...?
• None. Time to buy a new fixture - with a service contract. For a reasonable fee we can survey light fixture suppliers, conduct on-site examinations of the finalists, and make a recommendation
• That's difficult to say. First, we need to do a major study to see if you really need light in that area, determine historically why the light burned out, and conduct an analysis to determine whether it's the right kind of light. We may need to survey employees for risk of light sensitivity. After that, we can: develop RFPs and RFQs, evaluate the abilities of various maintenance workers to perform the task, recommend personnel selection, and supervise the activity.

  A consultant who came upon hard times and had lost quite a few clients was forced to have a serious economic discussion with his wife and told her that they would simply have to cut back. "If you can learn to cook, we can get rid of the cook," to which the wife replied "Yes, dear, and if you can learn how to make love we can get rid of the gardener too."

A consultant is an ordinary person 50 miles from home with a PowerPoint presentation.

A consultant is someone who comes in to solve a problem and stays around long enough to become part of it.

One consultant, told he was a pain in the neck, said he was glad to have been moved up.

A client with one consultant knows what to do. A client with two consultants is never sure.

 A consultant is someone who…

 …spends weeks asking you about your job, then tells you how to do it better.

 …solves a problem you did not know you had, in a way you don’t understand.

 …think a half-day means leaving at 5 o'clock.

 …knows the people at airport security better than the next door neighbors.

…borrows your watch, then charges you to find out the time.

 …has room service on speed dial.

 …is on a first-name basis with the dry cleaner at O’Hare.

 A consultant died and went to heaven. There were thousands of people ahead of him in line to see St. Peter. To his surprise, St. Peter left his desk at the gate and came down the long line to where the consultant was, and greeted him warmly. St. Peter took the consultant up to the front of the line, and into a comfortable chair by his desk. The consultant said, "I like all this attention, but what makes me so special?" St. Peter replied, "Well, I've added up all the hours for which you billed your clients, and by my calculation you're 193 years old!"

Consultant and Consulting Jokes (1)

If you know any consultants, mention these postings to them.

Back when I was a self-employed consultant I started to collect consultant jokes, with the half-baked idea of self-publishing and selling a paperback book of jokes and cartoons. Below, the first part of what I had collected.

For people who are seriously considering a career in consulting, I strongly recommend buying a copy of Alan Weiss' book, Getting Started in Consulting. When I was getting started, I would read the entire book every few weeks. It help tremendously in understanding how to establish visibility, 'gravitas', reputation, etc. as means of rising above the competition. 

I also remember being asked and answering two key questions about becoming a self-employed consultant: Separate from your credentials, experience and knowledge, "Are you comfortable talking to strangers? Are you comfortable talking to no one?" Because if you cannot do the first, you won't find clients, and if you cannot do the second, sitting home alone in your office with the phone not ringing an no one to have coffee with will be depressing.

YOU MIGHT BE A CONSULTANT IF...

PRIVATE LIFE

• Ha! Like you have a private life
• You refer to dating as test marketing
• Your love letters have executive summaries
• You refer to your significant other as "my co-CEO”
• You decide to reorganize your family into a "team-based organization"
• Your "deliverable" for Sunday evening is clean laundry and paid bills
• You start doing your kid's math equations in reverse Polish notation
• You insist that you do some more market research before you and your spouse produce another child
• You believe you never have any problems in your life, just "issues" and "improvement opportunities"
• At your last family reunion, you wanted to have an emergency meeting about their brand equity
•  You believe that e-mail between you and your spouse is enough to keep your marriage strong
• You refer to divorce as "divestiture"
• You refer to your previous life as "my sunk cost"
• You insist that your friends submit time sheets at the end of the month so you can see what you missed

TRAVELING

• You are upset when you come home late at night and the lights aren't on, the bed isn't turned down, and there are no chocolates on your pillow
• You can tell the hotel staff what their room-rate policy is
• You also understand airline fare structure
• In fact, writers for the OAG call you to verify flight numbers and times
• You have seen more movies at 35,000 feet than you have at a movie theater
• You ask the car rental agent if the car comes with an Internet connection
• You like both types of sandwiches: ham and turkey
• A good lunch consists of vending machine snacks
• A good dinner consists of vending machine snacks
• You feel naked without a laptop hanging from your left shoulder
• You've been staying in the same hotel so long you instinctively call it "home"
• Your spouse flies “home” (to your hotel) for the weekend
• You can call room service and order multiple entrees without looking at the menu
• The hotel staff recognizes you and gives you the same room every week
• You know the valet parking guys by first name
• You get more calls from the hotel staff to see if you're OK than you do from your friends
• Then you realize the hotel staff are your only friends

 ON SITE

• You use the term "value-added" without falling down laughing
• You believe it's efficient to write a ten page work-plan with six people you’ve never met before
• You can explain the difference between "down-sizing," "right-sizing," and "firing people's asses," and you actually believe your explanation
• You believe every company is "a traditional functional organization, with promotion based on tenure, but one that needs to change as it is facing ever increasing competition..."
• You know every single piece of clip art in PowerPoint
• Your favorite stories begin "Bob Jones, VP of marketing, sat at his desk and stared out his window..."
• You believe the best tables and graphs take an hour to comprehend
• The new client staff come to you for information on how to start the coffee machine
• You can tell the copier repair person at the client site exactly what's wrong with the machine and what parts need to be replaced
• You cry when your PC won't start (you have a name for your PC. It’s a secret)
• Someone mentions a 7:00 meeting and you say, "AM or PM?"
• New staff point at you and say, "... that's him, that's the old guy ... "

JARGON RULES YOUR LIFE

• You use the word "paradigm" in a sentence
• You use the word "granularity" in a sentence
• You use the word "robust" in a sentence
• You can spell “paradigm”
• You believe CAPM is just as important as the Theory of Relativity
• You believe CAPM
• You carry on a 5 minute conversation about data warehousing (encryption, search engine optimization, web usability guidelines, etc.), then you ask what it means

  

History of maynardlifeoutdoors.com

 www.maynardlifeoutdoors.com actually a blog, not a website, was started January 2010 as a place to post the columns I was writing for the Beacon-Villager, the weekly newspaper put out by Gatehouse Media for the towns of Maynard and Stow.  The paper ceased publication in May 2022. After letting this lie fallow for months, I decided to resume posting new and recycled content on a not quite weekly basis.

As of January 2024, there have been roughly 500 postings, 30-40 per year. Cumulatively, the postings have accrued 919,000 views. The total should top one million in a couple of years. The chart provided by the blog server shows a gradual increase from 2010 until reaching a plateau of 5,000-10,000 per month from 2015 onward. The top four:

Luna Moth: Photos, Symbolism and a Poem (May 28, 2013; 106,000 views)

Calories in Human Blood (September 15, 2010; 40,300 views)

Wild Cucumber - Annoying Native Plant (August 20, 2013; 21,900 views)

Recovery from Donating Blood (March 5, 2011; 10,500 views)

All the others are in the broad range of under 100 views to low thousands.

Thus, hundreds of thousands of views, yet fewer than 300 comments over all that time. The golden era of blogging - posting and following - was in the early 2000's, when popular bloggers would have thousands of followers and many had monetized their blog on Blogger - a free service owned by Google - by allowing advertising to appear on their blog. From the beginning, I doubted I could ever have that sort of following - no going 'viral' - and so chose not to monetize. I figured a non-cluttered site would promote repeat visitors. My expectations held true. As of 2024, I have 24 people who signed on to see my blog whenever they logged on and I had posted something new. I guess that all the other visitors are people who stumbled across my site from having it turn up from an internet search on a topic. 

Long-since the golden era of blogging, "going viral" applies to Facebook (already fading), YouTube, Instagram, Twitter (now X) and TikTok. People aspire to millions of views. 'Influencer' has become a status to achieve, and for a few, a profession. 

MAYNARD MASSACUSETTS: A Brief History
was written for Maynard's 150 anniversary (2021)

The majority of my 500+ postings (that includes ~50 column repeats) have to do with Maynard's history. Many were collected into three books which are described in the About Me content at the top of the blog. There is also a chronological listing of columns separated by topic: History, Nature Observations, Recreational Opportunities, and Health.  

this is a work in progress 

The Operation Generation

Baby Boomers – men and women of a certain age – can also be thought of as members of an operation generation. Their grandparents were extremely unlikely to have undergone surgery for any condition. The odds their parents had surgery were much higher, but mostly for life saving and life prolonging procedures. For those earlier generations an osteoarthritic knee or a ligament tear were more likely to put a person on a cane for the rest of their life rather than the operating table.

Today, we the aging have higher expectations for surgery as a means of repairing damage and restoring mobility in order to sustain an active lifestyle later in life Be it hips, knees, ankles or feet, we are damaging ourselves more often than our parents did, and we want stuff fixed.

X-ray of knees showing thinning of cartilage 
between the bones (dark space) and mis-alignment
of bones in right knee (left side of image)

According to the American College of Rheumatology, each year there are close to 800,000 knee replacement surgeries in the United States. The number of hip replacements is a bit more than half that of knees, with the number of knee replacements per year is growing at a faster rate than hip replacements. The prime age for both procedures is 60-80 years, with the major cause being osteoarthritis.

Ligament and tendon surgeries are also trending up, and represent more evidence that we expect to stay physically active despite the betrayals of our bodies. Passage of Title IX in 1972 led to a ten-fold increase in the number of female students participating in competitive sports. One consequence has been an increase in knee surgeries to repair tears to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Estimates are that there are more than 200,000 ACL surgeries per year, mostly associated with high school and college basketball, soccer and football teams. Not counting foorball, girls outnumber boys by about 3X.

Exact numbers are hard to come by, but Achilles tendon injuries are not so much the downfall of the active young athlete as they are of the somewhat older person, more likely male, who is living a sedentary life yet at times participates in recreational sports. The high risk age is 30-40, when the mind remembers how do to what the body has forgotten. This weekend warrior lifestyle leads to “Snap, Cripple and Pop!” Post-surgery recovery involves weeks in a cast, months in an adjustable boot, followed by more months of physical therapy exercises.

Knee replacement

The next generation will surely utilize surgery to improve on the human condition vis-à-vis performance. The concept was humorously presaged by Ray Bradbury’s 1954 story “The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse.” His protagonist says “If somehow my leg was severed accidentally, I wouldn’t wear a wooden leg, no! I’d have a gold leg crusted with precious stones made, and part of the leg would be golden cage in which a bluebird would sing as I walked or sat talking to friends.”

More to the point, professional athletes are already having their vision laser-surgery modified to improve vision to 20/10. Gene modification theoretically could increase testosterone synthesis,  make muscles respond better to exercise, or permanently increase red blood cell production, thus carrying more oxygen. Only time will tell if our bones, cartilage and tendons (or our surgeons) can keep up with our muscles.

New Business Card for David Mark

Old business card over new card

The image indicates a transition from my role as an author to my involvement with the Assabet River Rail Trail and Trail of Flowers organizations. 

As a Maynard author, I penned some 425 columns for the Beacon-Villager newspaper, starting fall of 2009 and ending May 2022 when the B-V ceased to be a newspaper in print. Pre-dating that, I had submitted the occasional letter to the newspaper with topics of local history or observations on nature. Two that became early columns were on the history of Maynard's stone walls and an observation that some robins no longer migrated south for the winter. When I contacted the editor in 2009 - Brian Nanos - he welcomed my proposal to submit columns on local history, observations on nature and outdoor activities readers might pursue in Maynard. And made clear that the paper could no longer afford to pay columnists. I agreed to those conditions. 

 Over the years I submitted 30-40 columns per year. Initially, all columns were new, but starting in 2014, I started submitting repeats, limited to 3-5 per year and not counted in that annual or cumulative total. The repeats incorporated some minor revision, and were indicated as repeats. Looking at all the articles, roughly 50% were history topics, 25% observations on nature, 20% suggestions for outdoor recreation (bicycling, kayaking, hiking, etc.) and 5% health-related. 

Some of the columns were incorporated into paperback books published by The History Press, a publisher that specializes in town histories. Maynard: History and Life Outdoors came out in 2011. Hidden History of Maynard in 2014. and Maynard Massachuetts: A Brief History in late 2020 as a Town of Maynard publication in celebration of the town's 150th anniversary. For each book I had to provide 50-75 photographs with captions. Those were either my own or sourced from the archives of the Maynard Historical Society. The second and third books have some overlap in content, specifically how Maynard became Maynard. Sales of each were in the range of 750-1000 copies. All are available via Amazon. Given the specifics of my contracts (no advance on royalties before publication, royalties on books sold equal to 7% of wholesale price) I did not get rich. In fact, in the best early years it meant a royalty check once a  year that would cover a dinner for two at a moderate-priced restaurant. 

After a no-submissions sabbatical, during which I was often triggered by an idea that I thought would make a good column, I decided in the fall of 2023 to resume posting to this website. Without the newspaper columns' mention of this website, I anticipate lower views. I am asking here that if you find my output - old or new - intersesting, that you mention maynardlifeoutdoors.com to family, friends and acquaintenances, either directly or through social media, so that I can feel that I still have an audience. 

The banner across the top of the new card assumes recipients know that ARRT refers to the Assabet River Rail Trail organization. I have been a volunteer for ARRT for more than ten years. Paving of the north end - Acton and Maynard - was completed in August 2018. Much of the work before that involved clearing the future route of the rail trail in Maynard and Acton, so that all parts could be walked, run and orr-road biked. Post-paving, volunteer work has included clearing fallen branches and trees, replacing wooden railing broken by those falls, picking up trash, emptying two trash receptacles in Maynard, and removing dead standing trees that had been part of the original 2017-18 landscaping.

Last, Trail of Flowers, website provided on both cards, is an organization I started in the fall of 2018. The thinking was to create a volunteer organization that would plant and maintain flowering plants bordering the Assabet River Rail Trail. From 2018 through 2023, TOF has raised and spent a bit over $10,000. The funds have come from a mix of private donations, towns' Cultural Council grants, towns' garden clubs, corporate donations and sale of ONLY IN MAYNARD coffee mugs at several stores in Maynard. The arrival of COVID-19 was a setback in growing an organization structure for TOF that hopefully will be remedied in 2024. TOF counts itself very lucky that FTD (Florists' Transworld Delivery), the network of local florists that allows arrangements to be ordered on line, has an arrangement called "Trail of Flowers" as a casket adornment, did not ever register that as a website domain (nor did anyone else). So, our local Trail of Flowers is www.trailofflowers.com. 

Weigela "Sonic Bloom"

Having reached the end of 2023, TOF has planted thousands of daffodils, hundreds of flowering annuals such as daylillies, irises and hostas, and close to 100 flowering shrubs and trees, mostly in Acton and Maynard, but beginning in 2021, in Marlborough. The plan is to add Hudson in 2024. Donating garden clubs recommended that TOF plantings include pollinator-friendly and bird-friendly plants in addition to the daffodils, tulips and forsythia that provide neither nectar nor pollen, so there has been diversification in the more recent plantings. Those include Beauty Bush, Winterberry (berrys for robins), Weigela and Butterfly Bush. Wild, i.e., not planted, growth of such as Queen Anne's Lace, Goldenrod, Phlox, Blackberry and Japanese Knotweed are allowed. Yes, Knotweed is an aggressive invasive species, but there are patches that are somewhat contained, and the late summer flowers are favorites of honeybees.