You did what you were told or you didn't get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn't your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn't your fault, no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an Employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn't care.
Interpretation
The quote humorously critiques the indifference of a faceless corporate environment towards employees and their concerns.
In this quote, Terry Pratchett conveys the absurdity of corporate culture where employees feel undervalued and disrespected. The satire highlights how organizations often fail to recognize individual contributions, assigning blame elsewhere while feigning concern through superficial initiatives like 'Employee of the Month' programs, which contradict their actual disregard for the workforce.
In practice
During a presentation about workplace morale, this quote could illustrate the disconnect between management and staff.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.
Throughout my academic career, I'd given some pretty good talks. But being considered the best speaker in the computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs.
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.
I don't mind what people say about me as long as it's an opinion or the truth. If someone says, 'He's the worst comedian in the world,' that's fine. If someone says, 'His face makes me want to punch the TV,' that's fine. But if they say, 'Oh, and I know for a fact he hunts squirrels,' I go: no, no, no... that's a lie.
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