I recently took a chance on humor in a large teams meeting full of engineers and managers with a tongue-in-cheek mini-presentation on the new “TPS” reports I was proposing for detailed project tracking in service of our “lean” directive. I even proposed a new electronic “cover sheet”. I was trying to satirically point out how most of our waste comes from ‘great new ideas’ that serve no real purpose beyond gratifying those who invented and championed them.
Several of the more experienced engineers sent me private messages about “making work”. Everyone else [i]loved [/i] the idea. Not one person even recognized the movie reference that I specifically picked to be the escape hatch for anyone too dumb to understand my satire outright!
We’re doomed. The smartest people around know little about their own culture and are too stupid to identify satire. This is how a totalitarian regime was able to take over our government. Not because most Americans love totalitarianism, but because they have NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT IT MEANS!
