Good News / Bad News
A pastor got up one Sunday to preach and announced to his
congregation: "I have good news and bad news. The good news is, we
have enough money to pay for our new building program. The bad news
is, it's still out there in your pockets."
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"Emergency Flowers"
I stopped at a florist shop after work to pick up roses for my wife. As the clerk was putting the finishing touches on the bouquet, a young man burst through the door, breathlessly requesting a dozen red roses.
"I'm sorry," the clerk said. "This man just ordered our last bunch." The desperate customer turned to me and begged, "May I please have those roses?"
"What happened?" I asked. "Did you forget your wedding anniversary?"
"It's even worse than that," he confided. "I crashed my wife's hard drive!"
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CleanQuote
"Capitalism is man exploiting man. Socialism is the other way around."
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"Evidence"
Featured Illustration items are well suited for introducing or illuminating a point in a sermon, speech, or devotional. Funny, moving, or perhaps even graphic, the point of them is the point you make with them.
A man was stopped by a game warden in Northern Minnesota recently with two buckets of fish leaving a lake well known for its fishing. The game warden asked the man, "Do you have a license to catch those fish?"
The man replied to the game warden, "No, sir. These are my pet fish."
"Pet fish?!" the warden replied.
"Yes, sir. Every night I take these fish down to the lake and let them swim around for a while. I whistle and they jump back into their buckets, and I take em home."
"That's a bunch of hooey! Fish can't do that!"
The man looked at the game warden for a moment, and then said, "Here, I'll show you. It really works."
"O.K. I've GOT to see this!" the game warden replied.
The man poured the fish in to the water and stood and waited. After several minutes, the game warden turned to the man and said, "Well?"
"Well, what?" the man asked.
"When are you going to call them back?" the game warden prompted.
"Call who back?" the man asked.
"The FISH."
"What fish?" the man asked.
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A Mafia godfather finds out that his bookkeeper has cheated
him out of ten million bucks.
His bookkeeper is deaf.
That was the reason he got the job in the first place. It
was assumed that a deaf bookkeeper would not hear anything
that he might have to testify about in court.
When the godfather goes to confront the bookkeeper about his
missing $10 million, he brings along his attorney, who knows
sign language.
The godfather tells the lawyer, "Ask him where the 10
million bucks he embezzled from me is."
The attorney, using sign language, asks the bookkeeper where
the money is.
The bookkeeper signs back, "I don't know what you are
talking about."
The attorney tells the godfather, "He says he doesn't know
what you're talking about."
The godfather pulls out a pistol, puts it to the
bookkeeper's temple, and says, "Ask him again!"
The attorney signs to the bookkeeper, "He'll kill you if you
don't tell him!"
The bookkeeper signs back, "OK! You win! The money is in a
brown briefcase, buried behind the shed in my cousin Enzo's
backyard in Queens!"
The godfather asks the attorney, "Well, what'd he say?"
The attorney replies, "He says you don't have the guts to
pull the trigger."
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After telling the customs agent he had nothing in his bags but clothing,
Mark was alarmed when the official decided to open them up and check. In the
very first one she opened, cushioned between his socks was a bottle of
cognac.
"Nothing to declare but clothing, huh?"
"Right," Mark extemporized. "That, madam, is my nightcap."
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Things aren't working well for the shipping part of this manufacturing
company's ERP system, says a technician working there.
"The whole process for calculating and paying the carriers for freight was
not good," he says. "Our company makes motor oils and other fluids used in
cars and trucks. Since the products weigh a lot, shipping cost is a very
visible item the business is always trying to reduce."
And the ERP system should help keep those costs under control. But no such
luck. "We had an army of accountants trying to reconcile actual freight
invoices to what we had calculated," says the technician. "To make a long
story short, this was not working."
After several years of this, the company finally upgrades to a new freight
payment system. "This system would calculate the lowest-cost carrier for
each shipment," the tech explained. "It would know all starting and ending
points and the rates of all our carriers, and automatically pay the carrier
as soon as the load leaves our plants. This makes the carriers happy, and
they give us a better rate."
For the first month after the new system rolls out, there are no serious
problems. In fact, the system works very well at figuring out which shipper
will move the products at the lowest cost, based on the data it has.
"But in some cases the system may work too well," says the technician. "One
of our customers is FedEx. I suppose they use our products to service their
own fleet. Apparently not all the special discounts were entered in the
system, because it decided that UPS was the lowest-cost carrier for the
shipment to FedEx.
"I guess the FedEx people were not happy to see the brown UPS truck roll up
to their dock. Needless to say, account executives were called and the
customer-specific freight rates were updated."
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The worst thing about censorship is *******.