Rant Transplant

i had some free time at work today, so i paid a little visit to the fresno bee website. what a pile of festering excrement. who designed that thing, pablo picasso? finding anything on that site is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, if the haystack was made out of needles.

here's the story: there is a guy suing ralph's supermarkets because he was fired for wearing inappropriate pants. he alleges he was fired for taking his lunch break, and i have no idea if that's true or not, so i'm not passing judgment on whether he was fired justly or unjustly. he says he's worn the pants before and it's never been a problem. anyway, i'm not here to argue the merits of his case. i'm here to argue the absurdity of the following excerpt from his lawsuit. the plaintiff says that due to his being fired (for whatever reason) he "suffered and continues to suffer embarrassment, humiliation, emotional distress, mental anguish and severe shock to his nervous system, and thereby sustained serious injuries to his physical and mental health, strength and activity, causing him extreme physical and emotional pain." really? serious injuries? serious physical injuries? unless they ripped his pants off upon firing him, thereby forcing his undergarments deep into his nether regions, i see no possible way he could have suffered physical pain as a result of his firing. and the emotional injury argument is shaky at best. again, the only way i might believe he suffered embarrassment and mental anguish is if a certain cottony article of clothing was forcibly embedded into a certain sunless orifice. give me a break.

will someone please tell me what the following phrases mean? these are a few items i happened across during my job at the business school:

1. application evolution on a parallel path - increasing modularization

2. horizontal process integration requiring seamless application integration

3. national knowledge manager

the first two sound like techo-bureaucratic rabble. and the third...what in the name of bethany is a national knowledge manager? how do you manage knowledge? is it someone whose sole purpose is organizing and looking after an encyclopedia britannica?