I was chatting with one of my favourite in-laws last night about work. He’s a skilled tradesman, and he told me this story:

A few years back, I was working on a big job with a whole bunch of guys. The foreman on the job had left the company, so management was looking for a new foreman to oversee everybody.

They picked the most incompetent fool out all of us to be the foreman. The guy was a complete idiot. No clue at all about what he was doing.

So me and my buddy went to speak to the guy in charge about his choice of foreman. “Why’d you have to pick this guy?” we asked. “He’s a lazy fool!”

“Well yeah,” replied the manager. “But we’ve only got a limited number of guys working on this job. Picking him as foreman means there’s no loss of production.”

Remember this the next time you work your butt off to get a promotion!

[tags]employment[/tags]

I have posted up some of the pictures we took in Cuba. Use the Next link in the top left-hand corner to navigate the photos (clicking Previous will bring you to other unrelated photos).

I strolled into my backyard on Saturday, drink in hand, to see how the garden was doing after our week away.

Rosie, one of our neighbours’ children, was vigorously hammering away at something over the fence.

“Hi Rosie,” I said.

“Hi,” she replied, ringlets bouncing as she thumped away.

I continued to inspect the garden.

“We chopped a worm in half,” remarked Rosie.

“Really?”

“Do you want to see it?”

I walked over to side of the fence and peered over at the table she was working at. She pointed out the remains of the worm. Half of its gray, meaty length led to a large splat mark and chunks of glistening worm guts. The second half of the worm was missing.

“That wasn’t very nice for the worm,” I said.

“Yeah, but it was dead already,” she chirped. “So that’s okay.”

My beautiful and wonderfully loving and affectionate wife and I travelled to Varadero, Cuba for our honeymoon almost two years ago. At our wedding my mom slipped me a note. It said, “Did you know that Cuba has more imprisoned journalists than any other country in the world?”

I’m pleased to be able to say that today, we will be supporting everyone’s favourite dictator and reporter-imprisoner, Fidel Castro, by once again travelling to the beautiful country of Cuba and injecting large sums of tourist dollars into their liquor industry.

If I can find Internet access while I’m there – our “4” star hotel no longer provides it, for some reason – I’ll keep you updated, otherwise, we’re back next Friday.

There is a great new web startup company called Pandora that you really have to check out. It’s like an Internet radio station, except that you create your own stations by telling it what songs or artists you like. It takes those songs or artists and starts playing music that is similar. As you hear songs you can train your station by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to the songs it plays.

I have been rocking out all morning to my latest station, which I have dubbed Hard as Nails Bitch, that features the finest in modern hard rock and classic screaming guitar 80s metal.