Bite your tongue at work

LOCATION: Very serious and efficient places TIME: Never the right one EQUIPMENT: Yourself, your dirty mind

Either my colleagues were all particularly literal, or I've got a very dirty mind, but I had to bite my tongue a lot when I was working as a consultant.

#1: We were having a Lexis-Nexis training on advanced searches, and my friend Sadao raised his hand to ask about the LEN() string function. "Yeah, what I want to know is, where should I stick my LENGTH so that it works the best?" I snorted and tried to turn it into a cough, but the baffled silence around me and my coworkers' innocent stares only fed my giggles more, and I had to run into a bathroom stall to guffaw to myself.

#2: Out for a working dinner with some Jewish coworkers and some rather imposing, but sweet and polite, German businessmen. We were all quite drunk on expense account wine and the burliest German at the table started expounding on the differences between the business climate in the States and Germany. "You Americans are creative, you think out of the box, we cannot match it!" he declaimed, and described the typical image of the inventor in the garage, his voice louder with every word, face growing red. "But we Germans - we Germans - " here he began pounding on the table - "we Germans are good at EXECUTION!!!"