How about not stabbing ourselves in the leg with a rusty fork?

Corporations are funny things. Many things no reasonable person would do on their own are done every day in thousands of business conglomerates around the world. With pride even. Let us consider as an arbitrary example a corporation where every day is started by employees stabbing themselves in the leg with a rusty fork. This is (I hope) not actually done for real, but there could be a company out there where this is the daily routine.

If you think that such a thing could possibly never happen, congratulations on having never worked in a big corporation. Stick with that if you can!

When faced with this kind of pointless and harmful routine, one might suggest not doing it any more or replacing it with some other, more useful procedure. This does not succeed, of course, but that is not the point. The reasons you get back are the interesting thing, because they will tell you what kind of manager and coworkers you are dealing with. Here are some possible options, can you think of more?

The survivor fallacist

This is a multi-billion dollar company. If stabbing oneself in the leg was bad, as you seem to claim, we could not have succeeded.

The minimum energy spender

It would take too much work to get this changed. Just bite the bullet and do it every morning. You're better off this way.

The blame shifter

This is mandated by our head office, we can't do anything about this even if we wanted to.

The metric optimizer

Our next year's bonus metric will measure the number of leg stabbings reduced that year. We must get as many of them in this year as we possibly can.

The traditionalist

We have always done this. We must always do it.

The cornered animal

How dare you! Do you have any idea how much work it is to get pre-rusted forks? They are all made of stainless steel nowadays. Your derogatory insinuations are a slap on the face of all people working to keep this system running!

The folklorist

This is a commonly accepted best practice in software companies, thus we should do it also.

The brainwashee

This is actually a great invention. Getting a nice jolt of adrenaline first thing in the morning really wakes you up and gives you focus for the entire day. Try it for a month or two! You'll see.

The control freak messiah

This procedure was put in place by the founder/CEO. You do not challenge his choices if you know what is good for you.

The team spiritist

If you don't stab yourself in the leg, you are setting up a very bad example that demoralizes everybody else who do their part diligently.

And finally the (sadly) most common one

Our product is special.