I thought the "scalp him" clip was actually from The Office.

I used to work for Cisco ... or so I'm told. What happened was that my original small-ish company (25 US employees and 100 offshore employees) was acquired by a larger company (about 1000 employees mostly in Scandinavia) that made network equipment and was a minor competitor of Cisco. My original company provided programmer consultants (like me) to various companies and was acquired by the Scandinavian company because they had written a client-customizable Skype clone app that clients were actually unable to customize to their satisfaction.

I had a fun couple of years customizing this app using a language and framework I had no experience with, while battling with the Scandinavian programmers who hated me and everything I stood for and not only refused to help me but actively sabotaged everything I was doing. Fortunately, these custom versions were for various ISPs and cable companies who offered them as free come-ons to their customers and they were never actually used by anybody. Also I worked remote from home the entire time, which my cats appreciated.

Then the new company was allegedly acquired by Cisco. I got a new work laptop in the mail, but never visited any kind of Cisco office in person and was never assigned any tasks whatsoever. After six months my manager called me and said that I and everyone else from the original small company was being laid off. I laughed and said of course we were. He was shocked that I was so accepting of it and surprised that I seemed to have known it was coming; apparently my co-workers didn't think doing fucking nothing for six months was a bad sign. I did actually get a severance package for the first and only time in my career. However, it was almost to the penny equal to the value of the unemployment I could have collected, but the severance meant I wasn't eligible for unemployment. Oh well, saved me the hassle of pretending to look for another job.

It was pretty clear that Cisco bought my second company just to dispose of a minor competitor.

Later I learned that my mother thought I had been working for Sysco (the food services conglomerate) the entire time. I had to go back and check my emails to see if that had actually been the case.

text doesn’t belong on road signs

Hard agree. Where I live, occasionally stop signs have a white lettered sign underneath that says "EXCEPT FOR RIGHT TURN". Usually it's at intersections where you're not really turning per se but just continuing straight on a road that happens to be curving to the right. It works fine ... for people that are from here that know that those signs are there and what they mean. But people from places where they don't have these stupid fucking signs approach on the cross street and only see the back of the stop sign and have no idea that the car coming from the right doesn't have to stop.

You leave Pete Townsend alone!

My local school district (that I actually work for as a bus driver) brought in a new superintendent for $600,000 a year. Did fuck all except for bringing in a bunch of his cronies to work meaningless jobs for over $200,000 a year and pissing off the teachers with more meaningless busywork. Three years into his six-year contract the school board had to run him out, by basically offering him his remaining $1.8 million to leave peacefully.

Jesus Christ on a crutch, NYC teachers start at $68,902 per year. That sounds kind of OK until you factor in the cost of ... fucking everything there.

Well OK, but it will take awhile ...

That would only result in everyone entering their own version of what they believe the data should be structured like, making it a completely mangled shitshow without a shred of consistent workflow across the company.

Hee hee, this reminds me of a job I had a couple of decades ago with a company that made software for Clerks of Court offices. I got a bug ticket that said a "States" picklist in the application had a "few" weird entries in it. I checked the DB and found a States table with 511 entries in it -- the 50 normal two-letter abbreviations for US states plus the territories, and hundreds of things like "Lousiana" and "Louisana" and "Louisianna", and even countries like "Frantce" and "The UK" and whatnot (this experience scarred me and I now have great difficult spelling Louisiana properly). Turns out the States table had originally been pre-populated with the proper abbreviations, but another programmer had gotten the job of automating a marriage form that had a line for indicating which state each person came from. The form dated to the fucking 1800s but they had subsequently used the line for generally stating where each person was from. The programmer was obsessed with relational DBs so he tied this field into the States table but wrote code to add new entries to the table if what clerks typed in wasn't already there.

This polluted every other place in the application that had a states picklist. How it got to 511 entries before anybody reported a problem is a mystery to me.

Fun fact: the cost of this software was $50,000. Per month. All 64 parishes in the state paid that fee. The application was written and maintained by four programmers, three of whom were morons (I'm not saying whether or not I was one of the three).

My code:

Meow. 
Mrrrow?  
Phhht

I bought a used school bus for $3600 on eBay to turn into a motorhome ("skoolie"). Best $50,000 I ever spent.

I walked into a Subway one time after a ride wearing my lycra bike shorts and jersey. Some little boys saw me, hiked their shorts up to give themselves wedgies, and started dancing around me like the dwarfs in This is Spinal Tap during the "Stonehenge" scene. Everybody in the place was laughing. I laughed as well and never went into a store again wearing my bike shorts. Kink-shaming can be a force for good.

I was part of a stable of about 50 programmers working for a company that manufactured lubricants circa 2000. For about a month at one point, the entire roomful of programmers spent the entire day calling into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to try and get on the show. Absolutely nothing happened to the company -- lubricants kept getting manufactured and sent to customers on schedule. The entire operation ran on mainframe applications that dated to the 1970s. I'm not even sure what any of these programmers did other than myself, and all I did was write IE6-based web frontends that sat on top of the mainframe apps (and they're still running to this day lol, which means the mainframe apps are still in use).