A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realises he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"

The man below says: "Yes, you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."  "You must work in Information Technology!" says the balloonist. "I do." replies the man. "How did you know?"

"Well" says the balloonist, "Everything you have told me is technically correct, but it's no use to anyone".  The man below says "You must be a Project Manager." "I am" replies the balloonist, "But how did you know?"  

"Well" says the man, "You don't know where you are, or where you're going, but you expect me to be able to help, and you're in the same position you were before we met, but now it's my fault."

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On the first day of Grade Three, Martyn's teacher asked the students to count to 50. Many of them did very well, some getting as high as 37. But Martyn did extremely well; he made it to 100 with only 3 mistakes. At home he told his Dad how well he had done. Dad told him, "That's because you are from Australia, son."

The next day, in language class, the teacher asked students to recite the alphabet. Some made it to the letter "k" with only one mistake, but Martyn outdid them again. He made it all the way through, missing only the letter "m". That evening he once again brought his Dad up to date and Dad explained to him, "That's because you are from Australia, son".

The next day, after Physical Education, the boys were taking showers. Martyn noted that, compared to the other boys in his grade, he seemed overly "well endowed". This confused him. That night, he asked his Dad, "Dad, they all have little tiny ones, but mine is 2cm bigger than theirs. Is that because I'm from Australia?"

"No, son," explained Dad, "That's because you're 27."

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A magazine recently ran a "Dilbert quotes" contest. They were looking for people to submit quotes from their real life Dilbert-type managers.

Here are the finalists.

1. As of tomorrow, employees will only be able to access the building using individual security cards. Pictures will be taken next Wednesday and employees will receive their cards in two weeks.

2. What I need is a list of specific unknown problems we will encounter.

3. E-mail is not to be used to pass on information or data. It should be used only for company business.

4. This project is so important, we can't let things that are more important interfere with it.

5. Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule. No one will believe you solved this problem in one day! We've been working on it for months. Now, go act busy for a few weeks and I'll let you know when it's time to tell them.

6. My Boss spent the entire weekend retyping a 25-page proposal that only needed corrections. She claims the disk I gave her was damaged and she couldn't edit it. The disk I gave her was write -protected.

7. Quote from the Boss: "Teamwork is a lot of people doing what I say."

8. My sister passed away and her funeral was scheduled for Monday.  When I told my Boss, he said she died so that I would have to miss work on the busiest day of the year. He then asked if we could change her burial to Friday. He said, That would be better for me."

9. "We know that communication is a problem in this company but we are not going to discuss it with the employees."

10. We recently received a memo from senior management saying: "This is to inform you that a memo will be issued today regarding the subject mentioned above."

11. One day my Boss asked me to submit a status report to him concerning a project I was working on. I asked him if tomorrow would be soon enough. He said, "If I wanted it tomorrow, I would have waited until tomorrow to ask for it!"

And finally...

12. As director of communications, I was asked to prepare a memo reviewing our company's training programs and materials. In the body of the memo, one of the sentences mentioned the "pedagogical approach" used by one of the training manuals. The day after I routed the memo to the executive committee, I was called into the HR director's office, and told that the executive vice president wanted me out of the building by lunch. When I asked why, I was told that she couldn't stand for "perverts" (pedophilia) working in her company.  

Finally, she showed me her copy of the memo, with her demand that I be fired - and the word "pedagogical" circled in red. The HR manager was fairly reasonable, and once he looked the word up in his dictionary and made a copy of the definition to send back to her, he told me not to worry; he would take care of it. Two days later, a memo to the entire staff came out directing us that no words which could not be found in the local Sunday newspaper could be used in company memos.

A month later, I resigned. In accordance with company policy, I created my resignation memo by pasting words together from the Sunday paper.

Material on the "Offside" webpages have all been created by other sources, with most of the material having been forwarded to me.  I have named the author when known.  Please let me know if you have created any of the above material and want it removed.