February 13, 2009

During these tough economic times, corporations are looking for new and creative ways to cut costs or at least using the economic downturn as an excuse to tighten up on employee benefits to increase profits. Unfortunately, Amalgamated Humor is no exception and will immediately implement the following money-saving measures:

- Coffee will no longer be available free of charge in the break room. Instead, we will be leasing the space to an outside company to set up a small coffee shop there.

- The lawn service company hired to cut the grass around the office will no longer be used. Instead, weekly BYOF (bring your own food) employee picnics will be held on Saturdays, including fun, old-fashioned push-mower races.

- The company will stop spending lots of money on traditional advertising venues like TV commercials and focus instead on viral marketing. We will attempt to create weirdo advertising stunts that are innocuous, but will be stupidly misconstrued as terrorist activity, scoring free news coverage.

- Expensive plug-in style electric desk lights will be removed from employee's desktops and replaced with more eco-friendly and less energy-consuming hand-crank models.

- Air-conditioning will be phased out this summer. Don't sweat it - we don't plan on shutting off the air-conditioning the moment the weather gets warm, instead, we'll simply raise the degree we set the conditioning to by one degree each week until we don't use it at all. You won't even notice the change, much like a frog slowly boiling in a pot of water!

- Company executives will have to stop using diamond-encrusted lug nuts on their corporate luxury cars, instead switching to the more modest gold-plated option.

- We will cease giving gold parachutes to retiring negligent or criminal executives. Apparently this is just a figure of speech anyway for the generous stock-options and severance packages we also give them, and not meant to be a literal gold parachute. This would probably explain the untimely skydiving death of former CFO Ted Mangley (note to PR: send his wife a condolence card).

- The current employee health care program will be replaced with the whimsical and informative "Self-Diagnosis for Dummies" books.