The Average Joe: The Average Joe is an ordinary guy. He is often mistaken for Joe Six Pack, but he could be anybody.

Joe Six-Pack: Joe Six-Pack is a red state staple. He is their symbol of a regular guy (The Average Joe). He is the kind of guy who might work a construction job all day, then hit the convenience store for a six-pack of beer (Bud if he’s doing well, Pabst if times are tough) and down every beer while watching Nashville Star or Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. His wife is a soccer (or hockey) mom and his children attend public school (or are home-schooled if Joe Six Pack is a particularly devout evangelical).

Joe the Plumber:  Joe the Plumber is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, an “uncommitted” voter who is registered as a Republican but not licensed as a plumber. Barack Obama met him during a campaign stop and talked to him for several minutes. Joe wants to buy a business that he thinks would make over $250,000, the magic number at which the Obama tax hikes kick in. Wurzelbacher actually makes about $40,000 a year, but that’s not an important point. The point is that John McCain mentioned his name 25 times during a debate, so Joe (warts and all) is now the living symbol for Joe Six Pack. Depending on what reporters dig up on him, he could end up in jail or hosting a home improvement show on TLC.

Joe Biden: Joe Biden is a Senator and Barack Obama’s running mate. Joe might have been president twenty years ago, but he made the mistake of repeating someone else’s speech almost word for word and became known as a plagiarist. It has taken him 20 years to get another shot at the White House (if Barack wins but dies) so he is making the most of it. When he isn’t using someone else’s speech, he tends to stick his foot in his mouth, so he is pretty fun to watch. Joe Biden tries to act like an Average Joe, but nobody takes him seriously.

“Shoeless” Joe Jackson: Shoeless Joe was one of the greatest baseball players ever. Even though he played in the early twentieth century, he is still ranked in the top ten for best career batting average of all time. Unfortunately, he will never be in the Hall of Fame because he apparently took money to throw the 1919 World Series, even though other players say he never met with gamblers and by all accounts he played very well in the series. He hasn’t been mentioned by name very often in this election, but when Sarah Palin exclaimed “Say it ain’t so Joe!” during the vice presidential debate, she was evoking a famous (unconfirmed) confrontation between Shoeless Joe and a young fan who was heartbroken by the thought of Jackson throwing the series.

Joe Lieberman: An Independent who won reelection to the Senate after losing in the primaries as a Democrat due mainly to his frequent support of George Bush’s stance on the Iraq war and other issues. In 2000, before his falling out with the Democrats, he was Al Gore’s running mate and came within a Supreme Court party-line vote of being Vice President. Lieberman was briefly considered as a running mate for John McCain as well, until somebody asked “seriously?” and the whole matter was dropped.

Joe Scarborough: A conservative commentator on MSNBC, which is just as thankless a job as being a liberal commentator on Fox News. People mainly watch him because they keep waiting for him to explode – literally explode. Sure, it isn’t likely, but everyone wants to be there to see it if it does happen.

Joseph Stalin: Joseph Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. He was a very naughty man. Some people think that Stalin would have dealt with the current Banking Crisis in much the same way that the U.S. Congress has, with the small exception that he would have killed all of the bankers. Interesting bit of trivia: before Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party, he was a bank robber. You can look it up.

Joe The Six Pack Plumber: My new nickname at work – for reasons I cannot fathom. I am, after all, an unapologetic elitist.

The problem with enthusiasm is that, unless it just comes naturally to you, it will be hard to maintain in a corporate environment. Sitting in a cubicle all day is torturous on a number of levels. You cannot control the look (blue/gray accented by fluorescent white) or the noise (every conversation you never wanted to hear). You will be asked to “get on board” a number of flawed initiatives that will seem doomed to failure to you. At times you will be given a list of values/covenants that you are expected to believe in wholeheartedly and speak about enthusiastically. These run along the lines of:

• We will make our customers love us.
• We will obliterate our competitors.
• We will always succeed. Failure is not an option.
• We will fix every issue the day that it occurs.
• We will give 100% effort at all times.

Some of these will seem possible, and others will seem silly, and a few won’t make any sense at all no matter how many times you read them. In most cases, there will be about twenty of them, and some will seem to completely contradict others. You will be tempted to point this out. Don’t bother. Nobody wants to hear that the values are silly, contradictory or impossible. The important thing is that you will need to embrace all of these things enthusiastically, no matter how much you want to run from the room screaming.

Here are the rules for faking enthusiasm:

First, do no harm

Your natural instinct when confronted with something you believe to be massively, painfully stupid is to say so. That is the instinct you must crush inside of you. When confronted with such a situation, talk yourself out of being critical. Critical thinking will only get you in trouble. Ask yourself, “How would someone who can’t see how stupid this is respond?”

Put the corporate values up on the wall of your cube

Nothing says “I Believe!” like having the values up on your wall. Try to find a place where everyone can see them but you. Actually looking at them every day could prove to be too painful to bear.

Learn to speak their language

When a corporation asks for enthusiasm, they are generally willing to accept any sign of it that they see. Remember that the same people who will be judging your enthusiasm are the ones who made up the empty platitudes that they expect you to get enthusiastic about. These are not deep thinkers. Pick a few phrases that you think you can deliver without wincing (a sure sign of a lack of enthusiasm) and have them ready to deliver. You don’t want to have to think about this. Stopping to think is also a sign of a lack of enthusiasm. Here are some good stock phrases:

• That’s Fantastic!
• This is what I’ve been waiting for!
• Sounds good to me!
• I’ll put these on my wall!
• Words to live by!

Work on your tone of voice

One of the biggest challenges of faking enthusiasm is to keep your voice from betraying you. If you undersell it you will seem sarcastic and if you oversell  it you will seem either sarcastic or just plain insane. You want just a hint of enthusiasm in your voice. A truly enthusiastic person can deliver more, but you want to stay on the safe side. Sell it, but just a little. You should probably practice in front of a mirror. Until you get it right, stick to being enthusiastic via email.

Come up with some tips

Sometimes you can get away with just saying a stock phrase, but at other times you will be asked to “implement” the platitude. That means you will have to come up with something you can do to carry out the platitude. Look for very small ways in which these things can be implemented, preferably by doing things that you already do or that cannot be verified. Be prepared for your ideas to be shot down. If they are, nod. Nodding is a great way to make no comment while appearing enthusiastic and agreeable.

Platitude: We will make our customers love us.
Response: We should spend more time listening to our customers!

Platitude: We will obliterate our competitors
Response: We should start a United Way campaign!

Platitude: We will always succeed. Failure is not a possibility
Response: We should form collaborative teams!

Platitude: We will fix every issue the day that it occurs
Response: We should make sure to act on every item in our inbox every day!

Platitude: We will give 100% effort at all times
Response: We should all make a to do list!

Move on

Most of these values statements just get ignored after a while. The important thing is to show enthusiasm every time they come up, then go back to doing your job once the furor dies down. Be prepared though. Another list will be in its way soon enough.

Make a Long List

Buy a set of 100 3 x5 cards. On each line of each card (both sides) list an item that you want to accomplish. Do not leave any blank space. No task should be considered to large or too small to list. If done properly, you should have approximately 2000 tasks that you need to accomplish. That should tide you over for the first month. Every time you feel yourself starting to relax, pick up one of the cards and do not rest until you have completed every task on the card.

Don’t Clean

A clean environment is a relaxing environment. Stress needs chaos to survive. Clutter your desk. Add a new junk drawer. Pile your dishes. All of these messes will make it almost impossible for you to relax, which will make for dynamite productivity.  Remember, a messy desk is a productive desk.

Avoid limits

Setting limits on your time just encourages you to become protective of your needs. Being protective of your needs means taking the occasional break. Breaks are for losers and orthopedic surgeons, and you sure don’t look like an orthopedic surgeon. Spend too much time on your email. Edit that paragraph another seven times. Common sense says that you need to move on, but common sense if for common people, not achievers.

Move faster

Walk fast. Drive fast. Eat fast. Read fast. Motion equals progress. If you stop to think, you may think of a reason to stop, so speed through tasks as quickly as possible. The more important a task is, the faster you should do it.

Multitude-task

Most people think that they have to multi-task in order to succeed. Those people are fools. Multi-tasking doesn’t come close to describing what you need to do. Multitude-tasking is far better. If you aren’t working on 20 tasks simultaneously, consider yourself to be a slacker. Up the ante. You never know how many things you can accomplish at once until you accomplish something.

Sleep as little as possible

Sleeping is not a productive use of your time. Try to avoid it.

• Never outline what you are planning to develop. Outlines give you structure and help you to organize your thoughts. That is just the sort of thing you want to avoid. Always write on the fly.
• Learn as you write. Clients are learning as they read; you should approach your documentation the same way. As long as you’ve figured it out by the time you finished, you’ll be fine. Even if you don’t, if you throw enough words at the problem, the reader will get bored or frustrated long before they figure out that you don’t know what you are talking about.
• Avoid graphics, especially explanatory ones. A picture is worth a thousand words, so throw a thousand words at it instead.
• Embrace inconsistency. Every time you write about the same process, approach it a completely different way. Stay away from style guides, standardization and repetition at all costs.
• Edit sparsely. Editing is like smoking. If you’re editing now, stop. If you haven’t yet begun to edit, don’t start. This goes for peer reviews too. Avoid them if you possibly can. They’ll only make you change stuff.
• Avoid white space. Good visual design is far too helpful. Readability is your enemy. Crowd as much text onto the page as you possibly can. Long paragraphs are the way to go.
• Create as unreasonable a schedule as you can. If you have a product that you need documented, don’t even think about giving the writer more than a few days. Sure, it took you sixteen months to develop the product, but it should only take six hours to document it.
• Start the documentation as late in the process as possible and end it as early in the process as possible. If you have a ten-month development cycle, contact the documentation people after about eight months, but make sure they have to get it out before the product is finished. The more features you change after the manuals are out, the more frustrating the documentation will be. The customers will hate your product (they probably would have anyway), but you can blame the whole thing on the documentation.
• Use Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has the ability to crash while creating a table of contents. For longer documents, it often loses pages. Even better, the automatic numbering feature appears to have been created by dyslexic boll weevils. A random lost page and a bad table of contents will go a long way toward reaching your customer dissatisfaction goals, but inconsistent numbering will really put you over the top.
• Avoid establishing any processes or procedures. Procedures create repeatable results and avoid confusion. Processes can only hurt the documentation if they are unnecessarily complex or completely inappropriate for what you are doing. That is a lot of work to go to just to screw up your projects. It is easier to keep things nice and random. That will screw the documentation up with a minimum of effort.
• Never pay for usability testing. Usability testing is the nemesis of bad documentation. Actually letting the people who use your product have a say in the documentation (or god forbid the actual product) will result in unwanted improvements and increased customer satisfaction. Luckily, most companies avoid usability testing the way democrats avoid cohesion and unity, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
• Once your manual is produced, forget about it. Revisions are for suckers. Products come and go, but bad documentation blows and blows.

10 Ways to Annoy the Hell out of your Writers’ Group

• Attend sporadically. Most writers’ groups have rules about attendance, but once you are there, what are they going to do? Do they seriously have the stones to kick you out? I think not. Writers are usually nice people — exploit that.
• Bring the whole novel. Most writers’ groups try to keep the length of the things they are discussing to a reasonable level. After all, most members have jobs or kids or classes. Some members even want to spend time on their own writing. They can’t be expected to read and critique hundred of pages a week… or can they? After all, the main reason the group exists is to serve your needs.
• Don’t worry about the genre. The science fiction writer’s group is the perfect place to present your nihilistic seventies romance. If anyone makes a fuss, tell them that they’re stifling you.
• Don’t waste a lot of time reading the other member’s work. Try to limit any review to the five minutes before the group meets. Make a show of marking up the paper with red lines or a highlighter. Just pick random passages to mark. There’s always something wrong with everything if you look hard enough.
• Keep an eye out for typos or spelling errors. Some writers think that a writers’ group should focus on character, plot, themes and other esoteric things. Stick to the basics. If you find a spelling error or a grammar error, focus solely on that. Make sure the discussion lasts twenty minutes at least. By discussion I mean you prattling on, interrupting other people whenever they try to take part.
• Keep other criticisms as vague as possible. Look for statements that sound intelligent but mean nothing. String them together for as long as you can. Sample Rant: You need this story to feel more real. It doesn’t speak to me yet. When I read it, it feels like a story. It’s as if someone wrote it down and expected me to read it and come away with some sort of impression. I shouldn’t have to know so much about the characters in order to get them. They should be a part of the page. The whole thing should function holistically and organically.
• Don’t say anything positive. People only attend a writers’ group to hear criticism, especially your criticism. That’s how you bring value to the group. Take as much time as you need to make sure they know just how badly written their work is. If you’re lucky, you just might get to see the moment when a writer’s spirit is crushed. You can usually catch it in their eyes, so be alert.
• Bring your political agenda with you. Everyone should share your views, so share your views with everyone. If you’re reading a story about an African hunting expedition, for example, never miss the opportunity to advocate vegetarianism and declare that hunting is murder. Never move on. Never let it rest. Their story should be your story.
• Don’t ever accept criticism of your own work. When other people point out problems with your story, they’re really just being petty. They can see how much better your writing is than theirs, and the only way they can deal with it is by pointing out minor, imaginary flaws. Anyone who brings these things up clearly has an ax to grind. Argue every point. Make it personal.
• Leave in a huff. Tell the group they’re idiots and you’re never coming back. That will make your appearance the next time mean so much more to them.

Write on the side of the wet paper sack (either from the inside or the outside depending upon the size of the sack you find yourself in). Press down hard, preferably with a pencil or a high quality pen. This should get the paper, weakened by the moisture, to tear. Once it begins to tear, you will probably want to increase the size of your letters. Writing with small letters is great in the beginning, when you want to establish a hole, but tiny handwriting will become an impairment later on. In the later stages, You will want to write large, swooping letters because this will help to open up the tear in the sack. The larger the tear, the easier it will be to write your way out of it. Towards the end, you might want your letters to be several inches, or even a foot or so high. This will broaden the hole until the entire sack tears away.

Note: Avoid felt tip pens. A felt tip pen or a marker may prove to be insufficient for the task at hand.

Now you are almost done. In the final stages, it is important to remember that you are writing your way out of a wet paper sack, not acting or dancing your way out of a wet paper sack. Those tasks require an entirely different skill set that we won’t go in to here. Keep your pen or pencil in hand. Use it to remove the individual pieces (wet paper sacks tend to fall apart). Place the pencil over the remaining pieces of wet paper sack and let your prose flow. Write with a slight flicking motion so that the paper seems to almost fly off your pencil. Be diligent. Make sure that every piece of paper sack is off of you. At that point you will have written your way out of a wet paper sack. Congratulations! You can proudly tell all of your friends that indeed, you do have this skill and have proven it.

Note: You might want to have someone film your escape from the sack so that you can avoid having to perform this act multiple times. As important as the skill is, writing your way out of a wet paper sack isn’t particularly enjoyable, so you will probably prefer to perform this task only once.

• You just named your new spell Abracawhatever.
• Your young hero is approaching the dangerous cave with his sword out when you suddenly decide to have him start tap dancing and singing Ain’t That a Shame.
• You’ve named your hero’s new magical horse Assisto.
• The head wizard tells your hero that the legendary medallion they are seeking is shaped like an enlarged pituitary gland.
• The evil king who captures your hero forces him to do hours and hours of filing, and attend status meetings. He continually threatens everyone with outsourcing.
• The fair maiden your hero seeks to rescue is in a dungeon named Promises after wrecking her coach while escaping from flash wand wielding paparazzi.
• Your rescue party is told to Follow the laminate flooring road! Follow the laminate flooring road!
• You write a 150 page section in which your hero is wandering through the woods but include only a 12 page epilogue. Thanks JK!
• Your evil troll is named Ferdinand and he’s decorated the underside of his bridge pink with white trim because it just felt homier.
• The part where your hero is nearly killed and emerges from the ordeal a changed man with a renewed purpose for some reason takes place over coffee with his parents.
• You name your enchanted woods Funkytown.
• It’s six a on a Sunday morning. You’ve just finished your last chapter with the words, And then the frog price told him to lightly salt the bacon and add a pinch of brown sugar.

You are working as a technical writer on a project that has gone horribly and quite predictably wrong. The original sizing for the project was for five technical writers. Your project was given three. One of the three was fired and the other one quit. You are now all that’s left and the project is overdue. Whose fault is this? It’s yours of course! You’re the lead technical writer. You weren’t the lead originally, that was the guy who quit, but you are “in charge” now and that makes everything your fault – right? Well, it is if you’ve got an insane moron for a project manager. Here are a few more signs that you’ve got an insane moron for a project manager.

• The PM holds a weekly status report meeting, and then emails you the next day to check on your status.
• The PM likes to play motivational music at the beginning of the status meeting – either Eye of the Tiger or The Final Countdown, depending on the project status.
• The PM asks you to take the meeting minutes because, “You’re the writer.”
• The PM constantly repeats the mantra “faster, better, cheaper” but has never heard of the book.
• The PM asks, “All you have to do is write stuff down. Why does that take so long?”
• When you tell the PM that the project can’t be done with the available resources the PM says, “I need you to be a team player on this.”
• When your co-workers quit, the PM assigns their tasks to the next person on the Excel spreadsheet.
• When the project that doesn’t have enough resources goes into Red Status, the PM asks, “What can we do to fix this?” When you tell them that you need more resources the PM asks, “Isn’t there something else we can do?”
• The PM assigns you two tasks with the same deadline and tells you that Task One is the highest priority – then calls you every day to check on Task Two.
• The PM schedules you for three meetings the day before your deadline.
• The PM schedules user testing for two weeks after the documentation is due. Doesn’t understand why you would want that sort of thing in advance.
• The PM urges you to think outside the box. He then demonstrates by getting into and out of a box.
• The PM “stops by” at five minutes to five, “Just to check on how things are going.” He proceeds to stick around for an hour looking for signs that you were actually thinking of going home.
• The PM disappears for a week without notice, then comes back feeling “rested” only to disappear again the next day – never to be seen again.

1. Remember that real writers use a typewriter. They don’t like these newfangled computers. A manual typewriter and a bucket of Wite-Out™ are the tools of a serious writer.
2. Never pick an average name that a regular person would have. Go with something that explains the character. If your character is a cop on the edge, then try a manly nickname coupled with the name of a gun — something like Rip Magnum.
3. If your book is about a real person, just alter their name and location slightly — Jorge M. Bushe, Presidente of the Federated Territories.
4. Make sure you’ve got a lot of similar names too. Donald, Donna, Dina, Dana and Danny just feel right together.
5. Make sure that the good guys are clearly good and the bad guys are overwhelming evil. Don’t confuse your readers by having all the characters have good qualities and bad ones.
6. Explain everything. When your character is angry, just say that she’s angry. There’s no point in trying to show that through her actions when you can just tell that to your reader.
7. Don’t explain anything. Why did your villain spend the whole book clutching a blanket? Leave it up to the readers. They’ll fill in the blanks.
8. Pile on the adjectives and adverbs. Why have a woman speak when you can have her whisper breathlessly in her lustful, wind-swept voice?
9. Fill your book with coincidences, especially towards the end. Nothing beats having the exciting climax occur because the hero bumped into the villain in a small-town cafe when they both had a craving for peach-filled semi-sweet chocolate pie. Did you mention that both characters love the exact same pie? Now would be a good time.
10. Don’t let your character’s established traits get in the way of a good plot twist. Just because your hero is a priest who preaches non-violence (We’ll call him Father Angeltoe) doesn’t mean he can’t be an expert marksman with an itchy trigger finger.
11. Use lots of technical jargon. Don’t worry about whether your reader will understand it, or whether you understand it. Just stick it in. It will make your characters sound smarter.
12. If you are writing a historical novel, don’t sweat accuracy. The reader won’t care. Go ahead and have Napoleon invent the automatic rifle. Who could say he didn’t?
13. If you are writing fantasy literature, make sure your magical animals have never been thought of before. Try a talking armadillo. No, forget the talking armadillo. I want that one for myself.
14. Make sure to add …A Novel to the end of your title. You don’t want people to forget what they are reading.
15. Don’t feel as if anything has to happen. Plots are optional. Two people sitting in a room staring at each other is great material, as long as it is handled with plenty of adjectives and adverbs (see tip five).
16. Exclamation points! Exclamation points! Exclamation points!
17. Ellipses too…
18. Don’t sweat the order of the action. If the big football game needs to occur just after the prom, then that is when it should be.
19. Nothing beats a catch phrase! I call Snoogity Bottom.
20. Brothers are always very different and they always argue about everything. Never portray brothers who are similar and get along unless they are twins (except if one is an evil twin). If they are twins they must finish each other’s sentences and no one should be able to tell them apart.
21. Sisters must always steal each other’s boyfriends. Additionally, one sister must be outgoing and the other must be quiet and serious. This makes no difference to the boyfriend though, he’ll gladly dump either for the other.
22. Don’t start your novel with an interesting event. Take a few dozen pages to explain everything that would lead up to that interesting event. The reader will gladly hang around until you get to the point.
23. Don’t make your secondary characters interesting. It will just detract from the main characters. Lesser characters don’t need reasons for their actions. They are just there to keep the plot moving.
24. If the plot seems to slow down, give someone a gun or a knife and kill off one of those secondary characters you don’t care about anyway.
25. Writing a book about vampires? You probably don’t need any help making it bad, but you should definitely make sure you show how cool it is to be a vampire and make up your own rules for the way vampires can die or have sex.
26. If you are writing about sports, make it clear that sports always provide important life lessons. Make sure the novel has one obsessive and one downtrodden coach.
27. If you want to write a serious novel, make sure the main character is jaded and has lost interest in life. This anti-hero must view all other people as phonies, fakes or idiots. The character should experiment with drugs and sex. At some point the character should watch someone die or at least be assaulted. At no point should the anti-hero feel any real pleasure. Happy endings are strictly prohibited.
28. Writing a mystery? Make sure the clues are really obvious or really obscure. Either way, your hero will be the only person who can piece these things together. At some point they must accuse the wrong person and be ridiculed for it. In the end though, they should deliver a speech that explains exactly how everything happened.
29. Character conversations should always be used to explain what is happening and how people are feeling. It is perfectly natural to have a character explain to his office mate (whose brother is a bank president) that he used to be a safe cracker, but now he just wants to go straight.
30. Don’t forget to use italics when you want to emphasize something.
31. At the end of the book, you must have the main character reach an important and life-changing epiphany. Make that epiphany really obvious. Don’t worry about why they had one, just make sure they had it so the reader knows the book is ending.
32. Editing is just a waste of time. Spell check it and move on.

For more information:

• Writing Your Way Out of a Wet Paper Sack
• 10 Ways to Make Editors Hate You Before They Even Know You
• 40 Fabulous Faults of Freelance Failures
• Top 12 Signs that the Fantasy Novel You’re Working on has Gone Horribly Awry