Back when I worked for a living, I was responsible for emailing out daily automated status reports. These included a lot of boring details on the software processes I was responsible for. Since I didn’t like boring reports, I created a file I call buster.txt with all kinds of one-liners that I’d collected over the years. The program I wrote to generate the reports would pick a quote from the file and add it to the bottom of the report. I found that engineers would look at my status reports just to see what Buster was saying that day. Here are a few from that:
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk I have a work station…
Do not meddle in affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either, just leave me alone.
Does the reverse side also have a reverse side?
Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
Home is where you hang your @
Honk if you love peace and quiet
How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hands….
I put the “fun” in dysfunctional.
If God wanted me to touch my toes, he would have put them on my knees.
If all those psychics know the winning lottery numbers, why are they all still working?
If work is so terrific, how come they have to pay you to do it?
Isn’t Disney World a people trap operated by a mouse?
Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re NOT out to get you.
On the other hand, you have different fingers.
Andrew's View of the Week 
Given my extended family’s obsession with all things Disney (which does not include me), I LOVE that particular one-liner.
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I’ve always liked that line. I’ve only been to Disneyland twice in my life and don’t have plans to return.
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I’m behind in my blog reading since we had family in for several days. But what a hoot it was to read these this morning! Even made my hubby laugh out loud too. We especially liked the work station one.
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I’ve always liked that one.
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Fabulous! I laughed out loud at all of them. And I’m impressed at your ingenuity! I never did find a way to convince people to read my tech reports. 🙂
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Well, I was getting bored reading my own reports and thought they could use some spicing up.
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Impressive that you knew how to write a program that would pull a quote from this file. Maybe it’s not very techy, but neither am I, so it’s impressive to me. Also, these are great. Way to be well-liked by your coworkers too!
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It’s a simple program, but still not everyone can write it and like most things, I partly stole the code from other places to make it all work.
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These are some of your best for quite a while. I particularly loved “Honk if you love peace and quiet”.
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These have stood the test of time and I felt it was time for a little look back into the file.
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I LOVED the “workstation” one!
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always one of my favorites.
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Andrew,
Your idea for automating one liners was used in Unix systems for years as a method for doing things like providing a quips of the day on screen upon user logins. The script/program that ran it was commonly call “fortune”. Do you recall that?
A short one that I favored was:
#>
Core dump…. Your fault
Some of them were lengthy paragraphs like Mark Twains little essay about converting English words to full orthographical spelling.
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I recall fortune, my function was a rewrite of that. I had a number of UNIX servers of different flavors (AIX, HPUX, SUN, etc) and a room full of windows systems all that generated reports of some kind so I had to have scripts that worked across platforms, it’s was a little more work in the 90’s when the scripting on Windows wasn’t as good as today.
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Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re NOT out to get you.–that’s not even funny anymore. Yikes!
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It was a lot funnier in the 90’s. 😉
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‘If work is so terrific, how come they have to pay you to do it?’
– I am starting a new job on Monday, and this one really got me, I know exactly why…
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I once asked a manager this question. He wasn’t as amused as I was … 😉
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haha
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Haha, Andrew, this is one way to get people to at least scroll through the report.
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Yup, they’d at least open the email. 😉
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Ah, funny Andrew. So THAT’S how you got into your Friday one-liners! I love the story. And I bet your co-workers loved your reports.
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They did like them. Sometimes they’d even send me new one-liners for the file.
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I particularly like the one about toe-touching …
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Almost true. 🙂
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