When You're Up to Your Ass in Alligators: More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire

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Wayne State University Press, 1987 - Humor - 271 pages

Office copier folklore that regularly circulate in office buildings everywhere--is the subject of this innovative study.

Office copier folklore--those tattered sheets of cartoons, mottoes, zany poems, defiant sayings, parodies, and crude jokes that regularly circulate in office buildings everywhere--is the subject of this innovative study. this type of folklore represents a major form of tradition in modern America, and the authors have compiled this raw data for scholarship--and entertainment. These creations of the Paperwork Empire comment on topics and problems that concern all urban Americans. No one and nothing escapes their raunchy wit and sarcasm. Bosses, ethnic groups, minorities, the sexes, alternative lifestyles, politics, welfare, government workers, the law, bureaucracy, and even "The Night Before Christmas" all come under fire to form a biting, and hilarious, commentary on modern American society.

 

Contents

Preface
11
Abbreviations
19
Wild Cards
45
The Three Most Overrated Things in the World
56
How Do You Keep a Polack Occupied for a Year?
63
Notices Mottoes and Awards
90
Getting Things Done around Here
103
If You Cant Dazzle Them
104
How to Tell Republicans from Democrats
132
Hows Your Brain? 132
134
The Punctuation Test
135
Do You Know Your Baseball?
136
Wordplay
139
Twelve Hidden Books of the New Testament
142
Message to Hotel Clerk
143
How to Control the Birthrate
145

Know You Believe You Understand
105
The Boss Is Always Right
106
Dont Wait for the Shrimp Boats
107
No Problem Is So Big
109
A Neat Desk
110
Thimk Plan Ahead and Acurracy
111
Attaboy Certificate
113
Raffle for a Dog
115
Baggage Ticket
117
Instructions and Tests
118
Compendium of Ground Rules for Laboratory Workers
119
Itemized Bill
121
First Aid Howlers
123
The Halloween Party
125
Regulation on the Sale of Cabbages
126
How You Can Tell When Its Going to Be a Rotten Day
128
Life after Forty
130
Aptitude Test
149
There Are Five Houses
150
Situation Adaptability Evaluation for Management Personnel
153
Cartoons
162
The Mushroom
171
Fly United
178
Old Lady Hitchhiker
186
Italian Polish Calculator
192
Polish Maternity Ward
199
A Round Tuit
205
Now I Are One
212
Parity for Parody
234
The Night before Christmas
250
The Modern Little Red
258
New Classes in Continuing Education
266
Copyright

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Personalentwicklung
Oswald Neuberger
No preview available - 1994

About the author (1987)

Anthropologist and folklorist Alan Dundes was born in 1934 in New York City. He received his BA in English in 1955 and his MAT in English in 1958, both from Yale University. He received his Ph.D in Folklore from Indiana University in 1962 and in 1963 he joined the teaching staff at the University of California, Berkley. He wrote over 250 journal articles and12 books and co-wrote more than 20 other books. In 1993, he became the first American to win the Pitre Prize's Sigillo d'Oro, which is an international life-time achievement award in folklore and ethnography. He died of a heart attack on March 30, 2004 at the age of 70.

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