muteDonkey.com probably had its genesis in 1991 when Mike and Bob ended up working for the same company. They didn’t realize it at the time, but over the years they got involved in the same projects and shared a lot of the same goals. As their careers progressed, they encouraged each other to try different things which led to some amazing outcomes.

One of the outcomes was world travel for Bob, eventually landing him in France for an SAP business system implementation. During that implementation, Bob would have a little fun with his peers and send them emails in French (translated from freetranslation.com). What Bob found in doing this is that an expression common to Mike’s vocabulary, translated as “âne muet” and when those words were translated back from French to English, the result was “mute donkey”.

The words stuck and became a code word for anything that we did that less than brilliant. “I am such a mute donkey” became the phrase when we couldn’t figure something out or we accidently sent an email that we really didn’t want the recipient to recieve. Over time, we found more and more applications for this phrase and in our work and travels, we have accumulated a large variety of stories that make us feel like muteDonkeys.

Over time, others joined the muteDonkey club and the volume of stories has grown at a much faster rate. Hopefully, you will see contributions from the following (the muteDonkey brigade):

Bob W. - Arizona
Chris T. - Florida
Ed E. - Long Island
Mick P. - Canada/Chicago
Mike S. - Arizona
Nathan B. - Chicago
Todd K. - Long Island
Without someplace to log these stories, they would certainly be lost, and that would only confirm that we are muteDonkeys. It wasn’t until 2007, when websites were cheap and easy to create that we decided to buy the domain and put some of our stories onto the web for all to share.

So these are our stories. Perhaps you have some of your own that you are willing to share?