The Truth About Lying

The time has come for my full time employer, the power company, to initiate the very complicated, bureaucratic, and inefficient employee review process. It is a colossal waste of time, and I won't get into too many specifics, because you don't care, and you've got your own problems, I know.

Suffice to say that as long as you're not trying to sabotage your career and being a clueless knucklehead, your COLA raise is going to be what it is going to be, no matter what your review looks like or what nice things you say about yourself. Just give me my raise and let me get back to work.

Anyway, I digress.

One of the elements of the process requires the employee to pick out a couple of company-provided classes to attend in the next year. I'm pretty weak on Microsoft Access, so I ran a search through the course listings for "microsoft".

I did a triple-take on the #5 result: "How to Lie with Charts"

Really.  You can click the image above to see the bigger version, or just look at this next one:

So is this "lie" like deceive, or attempt procreation with? Like you, I couldn't tell. Let's investigate.

I opened the description. It is a very normal description about a course on making useful charts for presentations to help get your point across. Nothing in the description turned the title into a witty joke. At least it wasn't a primer on creating little chartlings, though this company has taught me to not be surprised by anything.

All I can figure is whoever made up the course had to give it a title and couldn't think of what to use at the moment, just slapping in how they really feel. And forgot to go back later.

It made it through all the pre-publication reviews. And there it is.

Awesome.