9/14/2002: Live poultry

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by Bitman
Even if chickens could fly, the truck would still weigh 5 tons. Or was that the point?

Um...of course we don't really know how much the truck weighed, from the information given...just that the <b>chickens</b> weighed three tons and the bridge limit was two. The point of the joke was the belief of the driver that keeping the chickens stirred up actually made the truck lighter.

It's a management theory used in corporate America entirely too often. They try to keep the chickens stirred up enough that no one will realize how close to collapse the bridge is.

Going along with that story is the Calivin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin sees a "Weight Limit: 2 tons" sign and asks his dad how they figure out the limit. Dad tells him they keep driving heavier trucks across the bridge untill it collapses, and then build a new bridge exactly like the old one.