ItsOnlyBob

Cleaning out my work emails recently, I came across one I'd been saving for years. It was a mass email from some guy off in middle-management somewhere who was a big fan of a weekly email quasi-blog called "Thoughts While Shaving."  The author, Len Fuchs, compiled his emails into a book called " Thoughts While Shaving: Common Sense Leadership Principles ." The concept is pretty clever - you picture the guy standing in front of the bathroom mirror, raking the stubble off his chin and experiencing daily epiphanies about leadership and management ("Leaders are influential, even when they are not the number one person in the organization"), and even about thought itself ("Ideas that initially appear to get in the way often lead you to someplace new and better"). Then he jots down these epiphanies in the form of a quasi-random list of principles (#170 - "Leaders know that success is not random"), and starts cashing the royalty checks....

1. Must they leave the damn door open? I'm sure people stop in the hallway to gawk at the dork sprawled in the chair, wearing shades and a bib. 2. At least the shades are wraparounds, so I look cool. Don't I? 3. I don't care how cool her European accent is: If the dentist asks me, "Is it safe?" I'm hauling ass. 4. (Note to younger readers: "Marathon Man." Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier. You'll never look at your dentist the same way again.) 5. There's nothing quite like the hungry squeal of tungsten carbide bearing down on the pulpy innards of a hollowed-out molar at 400,000 rpm. The bit looks like a medieval toothpick, modified for lethality. As it grinds out the remains of the old filling, the bur feels like something the size of a baseball, or possibly a cantaloupe. 6. Obviously foreign objects feel bigger when they're inside your mouth. 7. (That's what she said.) 8. (Not really.) 9. Are we there yet? 10. Appar...