Miss Perfect

Once upon a time there was a young man who wanted to become a great writer. "I want to write things the whole world will read, "he declared. "Stuff that will elicit strong emotions from people in every walk of life. I want my writing to amke them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger." He now lives happily ever after in Redmond, Wash., writing error messages for Microsoft.

An engineer died and ended up in Hell. Soon, he became dissatisfied with the level of comfort in Hell, and began designing and building improvements. After a while, they had flush toilets, air conditioning, escalators. The engineer was a pretty popular guy. One day God called to Satan and said with a sneer, "So, how's it going down there in Hell?" Satan replied, "Hey, things are great. We've got air conditioning and flush toilets and escalators, and there's no telling what this engineer is going to come up with next."God exclaimed, "What? You've got an engineer? That's a mistake--he should never have gotten down there in the first place. Send him back up here." "No way," replied Satan. "I like having an engineer on the staff, and I'm keeping him." God threatened, "Send him back up here now or I'll sue!" Satan laughed and answered, "Yeah, right. And just where are YOU going to get a lawyer?"

A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They wee driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt, scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do? "I know", said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way." "No, no", said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Knife with me, nad in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way." "Well," said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."