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Reports have come in today of a product recall on a meat processing machine, model number 43OhNo. This is due to a malfunction where the computerised meat processing machine develops a mind of its own and has been taking matters into its own grinder.

After installation at a new butchers shop in Lancashire things had apparently been going well. That is until the butcher woke early one morning to begin the days sausage preparation. Meat was placed in the mixing section, along with spices and a little fat.

‘There’s been a shortage of piglets this year’, claims the butcher, ‘we have to make ingredients go further so sometimes we add tasty, wholesome pig parts that some might take for ears, eyes or hooves’.

It was when the butcher began adding the eye balls to the meat processing machine that things took a nasty turn. Apparently, there was a spare piece of metal sticking out and it was here that he caught his sleeve. For some unknown reason, the safety button failed when the butcher hit it and he was up to his elbow before help arrived.

The man was taken to hospital for emergency surgery and the contents of the meat processing machine were taken with him. Surgeons were able to reattach his fingers, albeit in the form of sausages. ‘I have to look below the surface’ says the butcher bravely. ‘They may look like sausages, but underneath, it’s all me. Besides, I think they look rather fitting, even though I won’t be going near that machine again!’

In other parts of the country, more mayhem has been caused by the wayward antics of the meat processing machine. In Wales, mutton was being ground to add to burgers and all was going well. It is believed some of the mutton was a little past it’s best, possibly due to the sheep grazing on grass that was subject to recent nuclear fallout from an accident at a nearby power plant.

It is reported that something became lodged in the grinder causing the machine to kick back and go into overdrive. Vibrations from the overloaded meat processing machine caused it to vibrate all around the cold room, trapping a butcher’s assistant against a wall until he cried.

After his rescue, the assistant emerged covered in blood (sheep’s blood not his own) looking pale and scared. He has now decided to take a job in IT deciding it would definitely be safer.

The 43OhNo meat processing machine has also been found to have malfunctions with its onboard computer. Phallic shaped sausages that cannot be put on the shelves have been widely reported as have square burgers and rolled joints that you would typically see in the hands of a backstreet teenager than on a butchers display!

All owners of the 43OhNo meat processing machine are being asked to report any faults on the emergency numbers below and to make arrangements to have their machine picked up and returned. A full refund is promised and customers are being asked to return the machines for their own safety.

Health and safety expert Catherine Harvey looks at what can go wrong with a meat processing machine and the risk to health.

There you have it and we admit we have thrown in the towel. We have lost interest in everything. That doesn’t mean we’re bored; it just means we have no interests. None. With no interests it’s harder to get bored, no?

At any rate, we have what the cowboys would say ‘gone out to pasture’. In other words, our useful and productive days on this planet have since passed. We don’t do anything; we just exist and speak a collective ‘we’.

If you are as young as you feel, what happens when you feel you are really old? Does your usefulness as marketing fodder diminish as you mentally prepare for your very own final check out time? If adult means the opposite of kid and kid means interested then adult means not interested? That’s us. We just aren’t interested in anything, like we have been telling you…

We have been there and done that. We have seen it all and done it all several times already and just aren’t interested in anything at the moment and that also includes the foreseeable future. We are what the medical researchers call the “flat lined living”; it might look like something is going on, but believe me, nobody is home. Not anyone that matters anyway…

We became this stupid through great effort and we resent those that demean and belittle our far reaching efforts. It’s in our spirit and in our blood…it’s what we do. We consume, go to the store, go to the clinic, and consume some more. It’s us. Again, it’s what we do. We like to do our fair share to make it all work out hunky-dory for everybody…isn’t this a great country?

Well, for most of us it is a great country. Except those that have to live here…ha, just kidding. We also dumbed down by not thinking very much and by not thinking about much of substance. That way we make certain we have nothing to discuss, especially with Dog off the air. Dog was the last truly intellectual informational TV series in our time. Dog was actually the last intellectual thing in our life period. We still talk about Dog.

We all want a dream job like Dog’s old job. Man, did he have it made. But alas, we get what we get, not what we think we deserve. Unfortunately our expectations are usually too high and we feel burned by any result that is less than spectacular, such as our work life. If there is one part of our lives that reeks or isn’t spectacular, it’s our work.

We work because we have to. That’s it. We put ourselves in this have-to box and we have no easy way out. So we sit in the trap year after year. Decade after decade. It makes us dumber by design.

That’s us…dumber by design. After so many years, we cease to function on a normal level and get this quizzical look. We don’t answer because we don’t hear the question, so we look puzzled because we have no idea what the heck you just said. We are so wrapped up in our own little microcosmic universe that we cease to register and record what is actually going on around us. Sorry, we’ve already checked out. Hence, we appear really thick but in reality, we just aren’t home.

But we do try to keep our spirits up, no thanks to others like you. They nag and gripe and complain at every twist and at times are simply unpredictable. And we seem always to get kneed by the unpredictable…

So what else is new? Actually not much. You see, once you have done it all there’s not much left to do. It all becomes a type of repetition and dance of futility. But all is not lost, no, not if we can help it. Our mantra, “I didn’t do it!” was, is and shall remain the statement of our faith, belief and hope. With zero expectations we’re just thankful for a continental breakfast in the morning. And lots of coffee…after that, what else can one realistically expect?

As that fixed glazed look settles somewhat permanently across our sunken eyeballs we know that it is not a matter of if but only a matter of when. We are in the first stages of our final chapter and are trying to go gracefully and if not gracefully, at least with some sort of low key whimper. And why not? It’s a long time lying in that cold, cold ground, no?

And maybe if we all close our eyes and wish real hard, we can make it all go nicely away at least until tomorrow. Life goes on. But lest we forget, it’s a long time lying in the cold, cold ground…

Jack Deal is fascinated by the dumb by design personality profile. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/business and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com

A new study tells us we should stop worrying about worrying as if we didn’t already know. It all started when some group of research pointy heads found out that worrying about paying health insurance premiums was causing people to get sick. Their conclusions were the patient was going to be sick anyway so may as well jack up the premiums.

Now we are told if one worries about having a heart attack, one more than likely will have the Big One than if one does not worry about having the Big One. So now we have a worry about a worry, if that makes sense. But of course it does.

It’s simply a matter of civilized visualization. If the baseball player visualizes himself striking out, well, that most likely will be the result. We do know that in the end the survival of the fittest strategy may come down to who can worry less about worrying. Or as my good pal Clem Oakley used to say, ‘it’s time for some very, very hard liquor right now.’

Good old Clem, rest in peace. Clem always knew what to do when things seemed darkest. Clem knew how to deal with things like worry. Clem always saw the mug as half filled which for him meant he had just chugged the other half.

But Clem aside, one should worry a lot about having a heart attack, no? Don’t you just hate to visualize all that chest clenching and pain and loss of awareness and sensitivity for others? Those having heart attacks almost always are focused on their own needs and entirely ignore the needs of others that are most likely becoming stressed as well.

So now, thanks to folks like you, we have not one but two things to worry about; 1) the Big One and 2) the worry about the Big One. As a consequence we now must spend our days thinking through all our worries and our difficulty remembering them all, which could be a plus or a minus.

Not to cheer too soon, because all this eventually causes new anxiety and probably new worry as well. You know what they say; one little worry leads right to another and nine days later out pops a brand new little baby worry crying its heart out. It’s a cultural thing and an element of pride. Once you really learn how to seriously worry, amateurism simply will not do.

As a sideshow, a whole entire industry will pop up over night teaching everybody and his brother how to cope with worry; ‘we don’t get rid of it, we just dull the pain.’ Sounds like fun. Sounds like another thing to worry about. Somehow we just can’t wait to attend all those worry capacity building workshops. As a group, we have found that group worry brings us closer to each other and our common worries. We also recommend it for families with rude and crude teenagers. Talk about worry…bring me the bottle, Clem.

What this all means in the final net net is that we just have to learn to deal with more worry if we want to get the full benefits of a worry based existence. What me worry? Why not, it’s good for you, no?

Well, yes and no. If one worries enough about having a heart attack, maybe one will also change one’s diet and adopt an exercise plan. Or not. So the positive aspect of doing positive things that help prevent a heart attack may in fact offset the negative aspect of worrying about the big one.

So be it. But just because it is, should we worry about it? The unpopular truth is probably so. That’s life. Like the jaguar in the jungle, what you worry obsessively over won’t sneak up on you in the middle of the night, right? Who wants to wake up in the middle of the night having the Big One? It’s enough to spoil the entire evening…

No worries for the real worry pro though, adding a worry or two presents no problem. Worries need room to expand and grow if they are to become healthy and vigorous and mesh into the melting pot of full blown anxieties and neuroses. And subsequently aid in the increased dysfunction of both individuals and tribes. What’s not to like about that?

Just remember that things are never as bad as they seem and never seem as they truly are; your problems emanate solely from your peculiarly skewed perceptions. You are somewhat strange. Don’t try to blame it on nature or nurture; be a real man or a real woman and simply take the blame yourself. In the long run it’s less painful and certainly less confusing.

Whatever you do, don’t blame me. Just remember you were told worry is us and that’s all you really need to know, right? Right?

Jack Deal is worry tolerant owner of Deal Business Consulting. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/business and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com

You know who they are. They wear a tool belt for all their phones and gadgets. They look like a telephone line repairman. They waddle when they walk. They can speak but like all good children they only speak when spoken to. You might try texting them because it’s quicker. Besides, they will tell you they just don’t listen very well. They hear just fine, but don’t listen. It’s not what they do.

They have been called gadget addicts and worse. You know the argument, video games and virtual reality are the equivalent of drugs. However, drugs only affect the brain and do not actually become part of the neural network, unlike gadgets. Gadgets become part of the flow of the parsed bits and bytes and therefore become indispensable. Take out the gadget and the neural network crashes.

So with the New Techies, the gadgets have become part of the Extended Neural Network or ENN. Taking away these gadgets is like taking away whole sections of the ENN. It’s like surgically removing a chunk of brain; well, sort of.

As a consequence anything and everything that is connected with this gadget simply disappears when the gadget disappears. This can cause a problem since all data of significance run through this device’s chips. This data includes such non-essentials as family, school and other community and personal experiences not including friends.

Adults who don’t care about how they look often wear a dumbing down earphone headset and can be seen in public gesturing and talking to themselves. The question is, does this make them feel important or just look more stupid? It sure hurts any chances for finding a date; who wants their conversation played out to everyone in the fruit and veggie section at the local Trader Joe’s? Is this the type of behavior young people should emulate? Is this the type of behavior one should be exposed to while shopping for basil and artichokes?

Needless to say this New Techie withdrawal from the human race and real time relationships means that the New Techies will become even goofier than their nerdy and goofy predecessors. Staring at a terminal too long used to cause goofiness and now this syndrome has simply coded seamlessly over to cell phones and handhelds of all shapes and colors. How about a little pink one in the shape of a heart for someone you really despise?

It’s easier so subsequently there is little reason for the New Techie to become interested in things like hiking, surfing, football or even dancing. Dancing is especially worrisome as it sometimes creates relationships and relationships are clearly problematic for the permanently sanitized and wired.

As the Greeks said, beware excess. Unfortunately chronic usage of add on devices results in the New Techies’ mental circuitry becoming fried. Offshore research has shown the neurons en masse begin to fray and melt into a sort of soft goo paste. This goo or anti-brain matter causes dysfunctional withdrawal from the real world into the safer and less threatening virtual world where nobody gets punched, insulted or called nasty ethnic names. After all, like the Super Bowl, World Cup and Presidential Election, at the end of the day it’s still just a game.

We certainly make it harder on ourselves since we humans are messy creatures creating a lot of fuss and bother and then leaving a bunch of garbage. It’s so much easier just to wire directly into that Extended Neural Network ENN and not have to deal with all the other parts of human bodies that are quite frankly embarrassing to most New Techies. Part of the advantage of being wired is avoidance of physical contact. No icky germs…

But the question remains of just how is elevated art and culture to be transplanted from the worldly wise into a pea sized cerebrum that is constantly bombarded by low-end, sleaze ball digital stimuli? The short answer is it isn’t because it can’t. The wired brain is not free and inquiring; the wired brain is bored, boring and stuffed with spam. Mostly spam. All irrelevant input and no relevant output. That and gooey anti-brain matter.

But in the net net, it doesn’t matter. The inconvenient truth is we are what we think. Or put another way a bit more pessimistically, we are only what little we think. Does it matter that we plug and play into the only conscious freethinking organ we have? How many independently generated new ideas did your liver and kidneys come up with this week? But in the end, if you really think about it long and hard, who really needs those smelly, ugly old frontal lobes anyway?

BTW, did you get my text message about your text message?

Jack Deal is the owner of Deal Business Consulting and a technology advocate. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/business and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com

That’s it. No more sad stories. No more long faces. We just can’t take it anymore. We, the moral supporters, staff and affiliates are on strike.

We are on strike against doom and gloomers. We are on strike against those that continue insisting the sky is falling.

There is no joy in Mudville. Nor in Cupertino or Thousand Oaks. Let us hang our collective heads and knash our designer teeth.

Most employees are not happy campers. It really doesn’t take much intellect to see if someone is happy and smiling or sad and frowning. It is one of the first things we learn as babies. Duh?

See for yourself in the next business you go into. Simply look and observe if the folks you see are smiling or not. Then, look at the customers present and see if they are smiling or not.

That’s all the effort you need to spend in this portion of your corporate culture analysis.

Then go back to your office or the nearest coffee shop and sit down and analyze your results. Odds are if the employees are smiling, the customers are smiling. If the employees are frowning, the customers are frowning.

Some psychologists call this the mirror effect or the idea that we reflect the behaviors we observe. This is true for most monkeys and probably for most humans since we are genetically 98% alike. At least most of you are…

Imagine going into your favorite pub and the waitress has a long face. Your mind frantically searches through your cerebral database to come up with reasons for the long face.

You stall on ‘bad food’ and decide it is perhaps best to have a beer now and eat somewhere else later.

Somewhere else where you won’t get sick like the waitress.

The truth of the matter is the waitress’ four year old poured all of daddy’s cement into the toilet and the sitter wants to know what to do since it is starting to harden. But that is no excuse.

You missed the special of the day, missed the winning touchdown on the widescreen and your favorite pub went bankrupt the next day because your waitress was wearing a long face and all you could think about was E. coli.

Anyway, none of it matters in a gloom and doom world. We need to bottle and sell happiness; who would pay for doom? You may laugh and think it’s stupid and what kind of company creates and sells happiness since we can’t even define it?

And just how does one become a joy agent?

Jesting aside you probably know how collective melancholy can kill your business but did you also know it eats into the neurons of your hippocampus thus explaining why all people that constantly frown are perpetual losers?

It’s that simple: frown and your hippocampus turns to mush. That’s what we tell people. Not all of them believe us but that’s our company line.

We also very firmly believe that if we say it enough times even we will start to believe it.

But the honest truth is we just don’t like frowners and losers. We strongly suggest you get them out of your workplace before they poison your whole work environment.

Send them on a business trip with a one way ticket.

However if you have been noticing a funny odor for the last several days you may want to check the source out.

Most likely it will be a rotting rat inside a wall but sometimes employees have been known to pass away and not be missed for weeks.

Sometimes management attention span is short and they neglect to check up on their people. It’s always good to keep the thing light by using tricky campaign style buttons that say “We Check Our Employees’ Oil Each and Every Day.”

So the next time one of your customers asks “Who died?” take it as a constructive criticism and not a perverted death wish or personal grooming insult.

So until then, check your oil every day, keep the faith and don’t forget that beautiful smile!

Jack Deal is the owner of Jack D. Deal Business Consulting and finds business humor wherever he can. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/humor and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com

It’s always better to avoid being downwind from pigs. My Maya friend Poot had our permission to put a couple of pigs in back of our village hut. Somehow Poot took couple to mean six. A smelly six at that…especially downwind.

The bad news is the pigs he bought are of the ‘Americano’ variety and not the Mexican variety. The Americano pigs eat a special feed that Poot later found out make his pigs more costly to raise and so subsequently he will make nothing.

Bad business. The good news is that when they grow a bit more he will sell them and get out of the pig business; forever, we do all sincerely hope.

The bad news too is he can’t let them out of their pig pen and he has to clean the pen twice daily. The other bad news is we all have to smell what he cleans up.

He laughs that only the Americano pigs smell bad; the Mexican pigs smell sweet. He says they smell sweet but that is not the case.

Better yes, but sweet no. The Maya do have a sardonic sense of humor and living amongst them one occasionally has to bear the brunt.

In Mexico there is a dark skinned pig that can still be seen in many rural villages and ranchos. These pigs eat corn but mostly roots and weeds and garbage. In fact, these pigs will actually clean up a weedy lot and keep it clean.

And because they are not kept in confined pens, they really don’t smell that bad or have to have their pens cleaned twice daily.

The owners keep giving them corn so they won’t walk away to another village. Pigs aren’t stupid; they follow the corn.

Recently we drove to several Maya villages deep in the jungle with these free range pigs running throughout the village. Even though these pigs aren’t marked everyone knows whose pigs they are.

We even remarked how cute the little ones looked if loose pigs in the streets can indeed be called cute. Actually no one pays them any attention except for the senoras that are always shooing them away.

No matter what pigs are dirty and make a mess. It’s a pig thing.

My first night many years back in rural Veracruz was spent inside a hut with a dirt floor. In back there was another ‘room’ which must have contained farm tools or such. Later the truth was revealed.

At about 2:00 in the morning there was a very loud noise. Pigs. A bunch of them. Maybe ten little ones and four or five big ones. What a ruckus!

If you have never had the pleasure of sleeping with pigs then you probably don’t know they sleep in a pile at night. It’s a pig thing.

Several times a night they get up and run around in circles and change positions. And make quite a bit of noise in this social bonding process.

No need to try and figure out what’s going on because it happens to be a pig thing.

To make matters more perplexing the next morning it was clear someone had smeared my motorcycle with mud. In broken Spanish I questioned why someone would do that?

The answer was ‘puercos’ or pigs which I misinterpreted as thieves or bandidos. They all had a good laugh. Silly Gringo. What kinds of thieves go around smearing mud on motorcycles?

Of course the pigs had wallowed in the mud as pigs like to do and found my motorcycle a good place to scratch themselves, hence the mud.

That skinny Gringo ended up marrying that family’s oldest daughter and to this day they love to tell the story of the skinny Gringo teenager who thought thieves came at night and covered his motorcycle in mud. Silly Gringos.

Needless to say when considering what types of animals to put on my jungle ranch pigs were not a consideration.

They smell, get sick, get stolen and my resident jaguar would kill them off with great regularity. Domestic pigs are so much easier to catch and eat than wild pigs. No match for Mr. Jaguar.

Besides, it might be tempting to just give up on them and have a barbecue. Good eating but not much of a ranching business.

Yet there really is no doubt our paths will cross again. It’s inevitable and it’s fate…along with an occasional BLT or barbecue ribs with the ball game.

It’s a human thing.

Jack Deal is the owner of Jack D. Deal Business Consulting and still eats pig. Related articlesmay be found at http://www.jddeal.com/blog/humor and http://www.freeandinquiringmind.typepad.com