Here are a few other favorites of mine:
The objective of all dedicated employees should be to:
Thoroughly analyze all situations...
Anticipate all problems prior to their occurrence...
Have answers for these problems...
And move swiftly to solve these problems when called upon.
However...
When you are up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to remind yourself that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.
The US standard railroad gauge (the width between the two rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads. But why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge in England, then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing. Okay! So why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if anyone tried to use any other spacing, their wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. Then who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, don't fret. It may just be that you are exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war-horses.
Now the twist to the story...
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site in Florida. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse's Ass!
man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?"
The man below says: "Yes you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."
"You must be an engineer," says the balloonist.
"I am" replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well" says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but it's of no use to anyone."
The man below says, "You must work in management."
"I do" replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well", says the man, "You don't know where you are, or where you're going, but you expect me to be able to help; and you're in the same position as you were before we met, but now it's my fault."
At a computer exposition (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1,000 miles per gallon of gas."
General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement, "Yes, but would you want your car to crash twice a day?"
Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would just accept this, restart and drive on. Occasionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail and you would have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you would accept this too. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT". But, then you would have to buy more seats.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast, twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads. The Macintosh car owners would get expensive Microsoft upgrades to their cars, which would make their cars run much slower. The oil, gas, and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
And last but not the least....
The airbag system would say, "Are you sure?" before going off.
:-)