Had to answer a very long questionnaire at work on Thursday. It was an EFQM (European Foundation of Quality Management) questionnaire, designed to tell you what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong within your organisation. One question read something along the lines of:
How do you recognise the people in your organisation who contribute the most to the concept of continuous improvement?
By now, I was getting bored, so I answered:
They all wear purple badges.
Pleased with my funny answer, I repeated it to a colleague.
"What purple badges?" she demanded to know. "Why haven't I got one?"
It's Darwin all the way down, you see... there are no purple badgers.
When I joined my current department, we had an away day, & during this we did a questionnaire to determine our position in the structure of the ward:
Mine, when totalled up, came out as "ward manager". Funnily enough, when the ward manager read them out, mine had mysteriously changed to "completer finisher!" (whetever that is!)
The words "rat" & "smell" sprung to mind!
Do you remember the line from the movie "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre"?
"Badgers? We don't gotta show nobody no steenking badgers" (said in a Mexican accent?)
I think that Slim Gaillard paraphrased it during the documentary on his life (Slim Gaillard's Civilization), on a meeting with the world famous Jazzbeaux.
Confused....?....you will be!
Julian Cope makes reference to the line in his eponymous song, Julian H Cope: "Badges? Badges? We don't need no stinking badges…"
One of my favourite puns (which I'm sure I must have used round here at some point) is "we don't need no stinking badgers".