Life imitates "Office Space"

Last week I found myself the subject of an ethics complaint at work. I made a few comments in the hallway about wanting to kill our accounts payable coordinator because she hadn't processed any of my expense reports. At the time I had a $1300 corporate credit bill due and was owed more than $1500 by the company. We still follow an antiquated expense reporting process (all paper, nothing automated) and I had been waiting for reimbursement for more than a month.

Think back to how many times you've said you wanted to kill someone. Have you ever really meant it? (Little Faber notwithstanding.) So you can imagine my surprise when I got called into the office of our assistant general counsel a few days later. She was extremely pleasant and professional, and after confirming that I wasn't packing an Uzi and intending to make good on my threat, she dismissed the complaint immediately. She even confessed it was one of the "lamer" ethics complaints she's handled (most of them revolve around sexual harrassment or kiddie porn on computers.)

So my record is officially still clean, but my takeaway from the experience is to make threats that are more ambiguous in the future ("I would like some kind of nonspecific misfortune to befall our accounts payable coordinator.") Now I keep wondering: do I give off some kind of creepy he's-going-to-shoot-everyone vibe? Be honest.

Out of curiosity, where do all the little platitudes under the blog title come from? Is there some kind of random generator that puts them there, or is Beanie writing them all?