PROJECT MANAGER HUMOR: The Dispatches Series, #6

Somewhere between the fourth "quick sync" of the day and the Gantt chart that stopped reflecting reality sometime around Tuesday, every project manager arrives at the same realization: the plan was never the hard part.

Project Manager Humor is a deadpan field guide to the space between what the job is supposed to be and what actually fills the day around it. Across twenty-eight illustrated dispatches — grouped into six unflinching sections on stand-ups and meetings that could've been emails, Gantt charts and scope creep, stakeholders and "just one more thing," tool wars between Jira, Asana, and Slack, resource allocation and the team that's also on three other projects, and risk registers, retros, and the post-mortem nobody reads — this book catalogs the recurring absurdities of the profession: the status report nobody reads but everyone demands, the buffer time that vanishes somewhere between layers of review, the executive sponsor who redirects everything once a quarter, and the resourcing spreadsheet that quietly contradicts itself.

Written in a dry, self-deprecating, observational voice — think The Office meets corporate reporting hell, now held with genuine respect for a genuinely demanding discipline — and paired with a flat-illustration companion image for every dispatch, this collection is funny because it's true, not because it's exaggerated. Each entry closes with its own deadpan "law": a small, hard-won piece of wisdom for anyone who has ever kept a status green for one more week through sheer force of will.

Whether you're a project manager, program manager, scrum master, or just someone who has ever sat through a meeting scheduled to plan the next meeting, Project Manager Humor is the book you'll read in one sitting, quote at your next retro, and forward to your team channel — no caption necessary.