This morning I had to pick up a document from finance which included information I needed to amend, take the document to The Most Boring Woman Who Ever Lived so that she could, in turn, present it to her boss for signature.
Now even though TMBWWEL’s office is just at the opposite end of the corridor from my own, if the matter hadn’t been extremely time sensitive, I would have sent that sucker via inter office mail, rather than have to go into the monster’s lair in person.
As I’ve pointed out before, she’s not a mean lady, or even an unpleasant one in the true sense of the word, it’s just that she really is the most boring woman who ever lived. There is no human being who is still living, who is more boring. I challenge you to find anyone else with the personality of Ambien.
Firstly, she scrutinized the form I gave her and pointed out the following:
“Where [boss’s] name is printed, that’s a ten point font. We usually use a twelve point font. You see, ten point font is hard to read if your eyes aren’t great. Unless you use ten point Courier which is a larger font. However, most people don’t use Courier as it’s old fashioned. But this is Arial. Ten point Arial is a little narrow and therefore smaller to read. Twelve point Arial however….”
At this point I picked up one of those electronic pencil sharpeners with the weighted bottoms and I smashed her head in.
Anyway, to get her off the subject of fonts and their comparative sizes, I noticed she’d had a big, metallic bulletin board installed on the wall on the back of her usually, personality-less office. It was covered in photos. It was then it happened.
Not having ingested any caffeine yet, or indeed, woken up properly, I made a fatal mistake. An error of judgment, which, at any other time of day I would have been alert enough to prevent. I pointed at one of the pictures on the board – a man with a stupendous and quite alarming mustache that curled up at the ends (obviously a circus performer or child molester) – and I said, “Who is that guy?”
I might as well have said, “Hey, how about picking up that phone directory and reading it to me?”
I then was treated to a run down of EVERY. SINGLE. GODDAMN. PERSON. ON. THAT. BOARD. (the child molesting trapeze artist was her grandfather)
“This is my mom and me. That’s my mom and dad in 1945, I think they were at a party. This is my ex and I in Vegas. That was a fun trip. [aside: for YOU maybe, bub, but the guy must've been like 'kill me now'] This is my ex-husband’s nephew and his twins, they’re five. When they were born they had problems with blah de blah de blah…”
Twenty fucking minutes I endured this and at the end of the tour my brain was dead as Phil Rizzuto. Holy cow!
I wasn’t back in my seat five minutes when her name appeared on my caller ID. I made that noise Marge Simpson makes when Homer’s sold the baby to gypsies again.
“It’s ok!” she said cheerfully. “[Boss] didn’t even mention the ten point font!”
“No shit!” I didn’t say, wondering if I could lure her into the fire escape and push her down the steps. I mean accidents happen all the time on stairs, am I wrong? All the time...
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
When Violence is the Only Answer
Our company owns a fleet of cars. Well - about four cars to be exact – maybe more of a “fleetito”. A mini fleet. Three of those cars are owned by one enormous ad team for their exclusive use and the fourth is generic, to be signed out by any employee who needs to use it for company business.
One of my teams use it a lot. We have a very big client out on Long Island so the car is useful and saves on things like car services that cost the same as a weekend in Cabo. All we have to do to reserve the car is call a guy down in the finance department who is in charge of such matters, pick up the keys and he logs it in a spreadsheet. You then go to the parking garage downstairs, which, given this is Manhattan, we pay as much to park the damn car per month as it costs for my entire rent and bills, and you drive the car away.
Or not as the case may be.
Today, one of my team needed the car to go to a client presentation. It was her first time using the car so she went down to the garage with the keys, checked in with the management down there and was told, “No you can not have the car. Not without a signed permission note from Lisa!”
“I need a signed permission slip from Lisa…” yelled Amy, my team member, into the phone, when she called me in a panic.
“Just who the fuck is Lisa?” I replied, bemused, “And how come we’ve never needed a permission slip the other 500 times we’ve used the car?”
“The guy won’t let me have it!” she yelled back frantically. “He says, no permission, no car.”
I put her on hold and called one of our heads of finance, Carlos, whose department deals with the use of the car.
“Who the fuck is Lisa?” he said, when I explained the situation. “You don’t need permission to take the car, just the fucking keys!”
Carlos swears a lot. It’s why we get along so well. “Tell her to tell them to give her the fucking car or have the fucker call me and I’ll fucking give them permission!” he snarled. I had the distinct feeling the permission Carlos would give might involve a baseball bat and a lot of anger.
I switched back to Amy and conveyed this delicate message. Some mumbling. Lots of arguing. “He still won’t let me have the car” she said feebly. “I’m already so late I’m going to be in real trouble. He still wants a note from Lisa.”
At this point my other line rings and I see Carlos' name on the caller ID. I put Amy on hold and pick up. “I found out who the fuck Lisa is!” he says. “She’s an admin on the other account! (the account who own the other three cars) She doesn’t have anything to do with our car so that fucker doesn’t need any fucking permission whatsofuckingever and certainly not from fucking Lisa.”
I tell Amy this and the douche still refuses to let her take the car. So I call this “Lisa” who is horrified and offers to go straight down there and beat someone’s ass. Or talk to them rationally, I don’t know which. I just know which I’d do.
Eventually, 45 minutes later, after a lot of cajoling and threats, Amy gets her car and Carlos is promising to go down there and “talk to people” probably in the same way the mob like to "talk" to people.
Me, I am ordering some popcorn, sitting back and watching the entertainment.
One of my teams use it a lot. We have a very big client out on Long Island so the car is useful and saves on things like car services that cost the same as a weekend in Cabo. All we have to do to reserve the car is call a guy down in the finance department who is in charge of such matters, pick up the keys and he logs it in a spreadsheet. You then go to the parking garage downstairs, which, given this is Manhattan, we pay as much to park the damn car per month as it costs for my entire rent and bills, and you drive the car away.
Or not as the case may be.
Today, one of my team needed the car to go to a client presentation. It was her first time using the car so she went down to the garage with the keys, checked in with the management down there and was told, “No you can not have the car. Not without a signed permission note from Lisa!”
“I need a signed permission slip from Lisa…” yelled Amy, my team member, into the phone, when she called me in a panic.
“Just who the fuck is Lisa?” I replied, bemused, “And how come we’ve never needed a permission slip the other 500 times we’ve used the car?”
“The guy won’t let me have it!” she yelled back frantically. “He says, no permission, no car.”
I put her on hold and called one of our heads of finance, Carlos, whose department deals with the use of the car.
“Who the fuck is Lisa?” he said, when I explained the situation. “You don’t need permission to take the car, just the fucking keys!”
Carlos swears a lot. It’s why we get along so well. “Tell her to tell them to give her the fucking car or have the fucker call me and I’ll fucking give them permission!” he snarled. I had the distinct feeling the permission Carlos would give might involve a baseball bat and a lot of anger.
I switched back to Amy and conveyed this delicate message. Some mumbling. Lots of arguing. “He still won’t let me have the car” she said feebly. “I’m already so late I’m going to be in real trouble. He still wants a note from Lisa.”
At this point my other line rings and I see Carlos' name on the caller ID. I put Amy on hold and pick up. “I found out who the fuck Lisa is!” he says. “She’s an admin on the other account! (the account who own the other three cars) She doesn’t have anything to do with our car so that fucker doesn’t need any fucking permission whatsofuckingever and certainly not from fucking Lisa.”
I tell Amy this and the douche still refuses to let her take the car. So I call this “Lisa” who is horrified and offers to go straight down there and beat someone’s ass. Or talk to them rationally, I don’t know which. I just know which I’d do.
Eventually, 45 minutes later, after a lot of cajoling and threats, Amy gets her car and Carlos is promising to go down there and “talk to people” probably in the same way the mob like to "talk" to people.
Me, I am ordering some popcorn, sitting back and watching the entertainment.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Do Not Feed The Admins
If there’s one thing the Guv’ner hates about a work day (actually there are many, but let’s focus here), it’s when the cafeteria promises one sort of nourishment for lunch and when you go to collect, provides something entirely different.
Like, for example, you’ve had a hard morning, typing, running around, calculating things (like best murder instrument in your desk drawer) and sticking push pins in a voodoo doll of an ex boss you still want dead, you want some comfort food. You know, some sustenance with a calorific value that would make Jenny Craig faint. So when your new spanky phone leaves you a computer generated voice mail with today’s cafeteria specials (this phone should be on the Enterprise, who else has a phone that tells them menu specials and emails them voice messages, huh!) and boasts “Macaroni Cheese” as the special main meal of the day, causing one to bounce up and down with cheerful anticipation, and drool on one’s clean shirt, it is not acceptable to provide this poor, hard-working individual with a green bean casserole instead. People in less civilized nations (like England) have been hung, drawn and quartered for less.
This switch does not make for a happy Guv’ner who had an egg salad sandwich with a dressing of spite just to make a protest.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, when has anything ever made for a happy Guv’ner? Well there was that one time at my last job where the mailroom guys arranged for a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge of the executive kitchen to be uh…how can I put it…enhanced with a much more alcoholically potent substance, providing many happy menial employees, one step closer to telling their boss where they could put their “monthly report”. Good times.
Like, for example, you’ve had a hard morning, typing, running around, calculating things (like best murder instrument in your desk drawer) and sticking push pins in a voodoo doll of an ex boss you still want dead, you want some comfort food. You know, some sustenance with a calorific value that would make Jenny Craig faint. So when your new spanky phone leaves you a computer generated voice mail with today’s cafeteria specials (this phone should be on the Enterprise, who else has a phone that tells them menu specials and emails them voice messages, huh!) and boasts “Macaroni Cheese” as the special main meal of the day, causing one to bounce up and down with cheerful anticipation, and drool on one’s clean shirt, it is not acceptable to provide this poor, hard-working individual with a green bean casserole instead. People in less civilized nations (like England) have been hung, drawn and quartered for less.
This switch does not make for a happy Guv’ner who had an egg salad sandwich with a dressing of spite just to make a protest.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, when has anything ever made for a happy Guv’ner? Well there was that one time at my last job where the mailroom guys arranged for a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge of the executive kitchen to be uh…how can I put it…enhanced with a much more alcoholically potent substance, providing many happy menial employees, one step closer to telling their boss where they could put their “monthly report”. Good times.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Guv'ner Phone Home
I had Friday off work due to our stellar Summer Friday program where we each get six Fridays during June, July and August off work, paid. Like extra vacation. Six extra long weekends. As you can imagine, the Guv'ner is very agreeable to such policies and equally enthusiastic about the week between Christmas and New Year where we also close down and it doesn't count as vacation time. I prefer to call these days off "Necessary Homicide Prevention Days" because it does somewhat allow me time to pop Xanax like candy in order to sleep for twelve hour periods at a time and in between fill my veins with Captain Morgan's Spiced rum and cheese (not at the same time, although really it depends on the amount of rum we're talking about here).
Today I arrived in my office to find that things were not as I left them on Thursday, despite the fact my office is kept locked. Hmmm. The reason I knew this? Well stuff had moved around my desk as though some invisible force were trying to find something. Then I turned around to dump my bag and I saw it. The. New. Phone.
Now you may be thinking, "Geez Guv, so effing what, it's a phone!" but you see, you clearly don't understand. My previous phone had the numbers etched in stone. It had a horn that you held up to your ear while you yelled and a lever you had to crank to get an operator who sounds like one of those ladies from a Pathé News reel. Ok, maybe it wasn't that bad but let's just say it probably was really, really cool in 1976. When you picked up the receiver, instead of a dial tone you got 1970s' "Starsky & Hutch" theme-type, funky porn music. Bow chica bow bow.
The new phone though. It made me recoil in horror, my back against the wall, while I watched it cautiously in case it decided to evaporate me or give me orders. There are buttons and options up the wazoo. I'm still pretty sure there's an option for making coffee on there someplace... It's on a stand which makes it stand upright and it has a glowing, full color, TV-like screen display that can tell you exactly who is calling, their number and probably even what color underpants they're wearing, what they plan on ordering for lunch and maybe those dirty, nasty thoughts they're having about that new girl in planning. It also tracks calls rather blatantly, so no more calling "Boys Butts R Us" or 1-800-GUN-PLEASE during my lunch hour anymore. Shame.
Naturally, I have as much idea how to use this beast as I do the cockpit of an airplane so today should be interesting.
It sure looks purty though.
Today I arrived in my office to find that things were not as I left them on Thursday, despite the fact my office is kept locked. Hmmm. The reason I knew this? Well stuff had moved around my desk as though some invisible force were trying to find something. Then I turned around to dump my bag and I saw it. The. New. Phone.
Now you may be thinking, "Geez Guv, so effing what, it's a phone!" but you see, you clearly don't understand. My previous phone had the numbers etched in stone. It had a horn that you held up to your ear while you yelled and a lever you had to crank to get an operator who sounds like one of those ladies from a Pathé News reel. Ok, maybe it wasn't that bad but let's just say it probably was really, really cool in 1976. When you picked up the receiver, instead of a dial tone you got 1970s' "Starsky & Hutch" theme-type, funky porn music. Bow chica bow bow.
The new phone though. It made me recoil in horror, my back against the wall, while I watched it cautiously in case it decided to evaporate me or give me orders. There are buttons and options up the wazoo. I'm still pretty sure there's an option for making coffee on there someplace... It's on a stand which makes it stand upright and it has a glowing, full color, TV-like screen display that can tell you exactly who is calling, their number and probably even what color underpants they're wearing, what they plan on ordering for lunch and maybe those dirty, nasty thoughts they're having about that new girl in planning. It also tracks calls rather blatantly, so no more calling "Boys Butts R Us" or 1-800-GUN-PLEASE during my lunch hour anymore. Shame.
Naturally, I have as much idea how to use this beast as I do the cockpit of an airplane so today should be interesting.
It sure looks purty though.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Topical and Tropical
When it’s hectic and there’s paper strewn everywhere; when you can’t see my desk for pens and calculators and magazines and finance reports; when there are three half empty Diet Pepsi bottles littering my desktop and the occasional Kit Kat wrapper; when there are twelve things that need to be done now and all have priority... At moments like these I like to look at the wall by my monitor which is completely covered with a poster of a perfect blue tropical ocean beach with palm trees and I like to think that if I focus really hard, I can pretend that I’m there, on that beach, hearing the waves lap against the white sand and the palm fronds swooshing slightly in the breeze to the faraway lilt of steel drum melodies and the pleasing, wafting aroma of Malibu and pineapple...
And then the sound of frantic gurgling (because in this daydream I am also drowning my boss in the tide while screaming, “What do you mean can I stay late to prepare some binders for an early morning meeting, you sniveling shitmeister????”)
Every day I feel a little more of my sanity slipping away. Possibly to that beach. Possibly to eek out a 2 liter bottle of tequila to hide under my desk. Possibly to the nearest gun store to buy an AK47. It’s hard to tell.
All I know is my mood today is as fragile as a Minnesota bridge in rush hour.
And every bit as dangerous.
And then the sound of frantic gurgling (because in this daydream I am also drowning my boss in the tide while screaming, “What do you mean can I stay late to prepare some binders for an early morning meeting, you sniveling shitmeister????”)
Every day I feel a little more of my sanity slipping away. Possibly to that beach. Possibly to eek out a 2 liter bottle of tequila to hide under my desk. Possibly to the nearest gun store to buy an AK47. It’s hard to tell.
All I know is my mood today is as fragile as a Minnesota bridge in rush hour.
And every bit as dangerous.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The Case Against Machines
Remember that scene in “Office Space” where the three geeks steal the fax machine (printer?) and smash it to smithereens with a baseball bat, in the middle of a field? That’s like every day in my office. My fantasies consist of moments where I lasso the photocopier on our floor, forklift it to the nearest window and launch it eleven floors down to the street with a primal scream. Of course there are obvious reasons why I’d never actually do this…I mean come on people, I am human. I mean, how am I ever going to get a forklift in the elevator?
I’m not overly concerned with any passers by down below or anything, I think worse things fall on them in NYC every day and since there are approximately seven billion ways to die in New York City at any given moment, Xerox machines falling from the sky are just one of many unforeseen circumstances we put up with every day. If that were to happen, tourists would shriek and cover their horrified faces in terror at the vision of a giant, mangled copier with limbs splaying out from underneath, whereas New Yorkers would be like, “Can you please f*cking move, you’re getting your blood all over my shoe, asshole!”
Calm down, I’m kidding. New Yorkers would never say “please”.
Today one of my coworkers – one of the ones I like, fortunately, was photocopying a stack of materials, which, if placed out on the Avenue, one on top of the other, would rival the height of the building itself. This was practically a seamless job as far as our evil Copier from Hades is concerned. Or it just likes my lovely coworker so much better than I. I guess she doesn’t kick it and say, “You like that don’t you, you little whore!” like I do.
When she’d done and I was trying to copy my one measly expense report, the machine chewed it up and spat it out. Well half of it anyway. The other half was still wedged somewhere in its innards and well…following those little diagrams inside the door that tell you how to clear a jam? They’re worse than Ikea instructions. Trillions of green knobs and pulleys and stuff you yank out and things you press and little, hot, scaldy things you burn your digits on every time because there’s a law that says in order to have a paper jam inside the machine, rather than on the peripherals, the jammed paper must be next to a metal bar the exact temperature of an erupting volcano and since the copier doesn’t generally come with asbestos gloves you just have to agree to give up the skin on your hand.
It tells me the most useless crap too (a bit like this blog entry). It boasts “tray 1 is low on paper” even though I’m using tray 4 and could not give a shit about tray 1’s deficiencies. Shut up copier. Once you can make me an omelet and a margarita then you might be relevant.
I’m not overly concerned with any passers by down below or anything, I think worse things fall on them in NYC every day and since there are approximately seven billion ways to die in New York City at any given moment, Xerox machines falling from the sky are just one of many unforeseen circumstances we put up with every day. If that were to happen, tourists would shriek and cover their horrified faces in terror at the vision of a giant, mangled copier with limbs splaying out from underneath, whereas New Yorkers would be like, “Can you please f*cking move, you’re getting your blood all over my shoe, asshole!”
Calm down, I’m kidding. New Yorkers would never say “please”.
Today one of my coworkers – one of the ones I like, fortunately, was photocopying a stack of materials, which, if placed out on the Avenue, one on top of the other, would rival the height of the building itself. This was practically a seamless job as far as our evil Copier from Hades is concerned. Or it just likes my lovely coworker so much better than I. I guess she doesn’t kick it and say, “You like that don’t you, you little whore!” like I do.
When she’d done and I was trying to copy my one measly expense report, the machine chewed it up and spat it out. Well half of it anyway. The other half was still wedged somewhere in its innards and well…following those little diagrams inside the door that tell you how to clear a jam? They’re worse than Ikea instructions. Trillions of green knobs and pulleys and stuff you yank out and things you press and little, hot, scaldy things you burn your digits on every time because there’s a law that says in order to have a paper jam inside the machine, rather than on the peripherals, the jammed paper must be next to a metal bar the exact temperature of an erupting volcano and since the copier doesn’t generally come with asbestos gloves you just have to agree to give up the skin on your hand.
It tells me the most useless crap too (a bit like this blog entry). It boasts “tray 1 is low on paper” even though I’m using tray 4 and could not give a shit about tray 1’s deficiencies. Shut up copier. Once you can make me an omelet and a margarita then you might be relevant.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Opening the Old Oak Door To the Guv'ner's Brain Basement
The truly awesome Miss Katrocket Radio gave me this meme type of thingy to answer so I thought I'd deviate from the office for a moment to enlighten you on the Guv'ner's fascinating persona. I'm cross posting this to my Live Journal too because I'm a whore.
The rules: and here's the guidelines to include in your post:
If you care to participate, leave me a comment saying "Interview me." I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions. You will update your blog with a post containing your answers to the questions. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
The five:
1. You are given the opportunity to earn five million dollars for one year of work. The catch? You have to be a tour guide for the Precious Moments Museum, and you have to be NICE and say NICE and POSITIVE things about Precious Moments for that entire year. You may not utter a single negative thing (or write, record, blog anything negative), both on the job and after hours. Do you take the job or forfeit? Why or why not?
Well naturally only an imbecile of great standing would turn that job down. The key here is the five million bucks ensuring I never had to work for degenerate fucksticks ever again and quite frankly I'd stick my granny with a branding iron and sell her to an Arab for five million bucks. (It's ok, she'd be fine, she's not Jewish or anything.) However, given the job itself I would have a set of tactical plans in place because obviously the urge to lapse from the agreement would be intense. Plus I would have one of those insulin pens handy that people with The Diabeetus use when their blood sugar gets too high. I would have my friend C., who is an electronics genius, wire me up with a contraption that zapped me every time a swear word so much as formed in my brain or if it detected an oncoming bout of sarcasm. Secondly, I'd wire my jaws shut and not talk at all if things got really dire. I'd record a nice little ditty about the museum on tape, beforehand and hand it out to visitors so I didn't have to say a word. Thirdly, I would go home from work every night, in some sort of frightening zombie trance (as you'd imagine) and I'd drink Cuba Libres until I thought I was Dean Martin. Fourthly, I'd call in sick a lot. Fifthly (fifthly is a word?), at the end of my term I would unleash a sea of profanity so intense, entire continents would shake like Michael J. Fox at a Parkinson's convention. Then I might go pipebomb the museum. You know, after they paid me.
2. Your ‘24’ moment has arrived: There’s a bomb somewhere in your home that cannot be found or dismantled, and you have five minutes to pack up and leave before it explodes. What goes and what stays?
Hmmm...Well. My cats go that goes without saying. People are generally enormous shits but animals are good spirits, loyal and kind - even ones that routinely wake you up at 3am every night to feed them "breakfast" or else they trash the living room. Then I'm thinking my passport might be a decent idea and my green card because that fucker was harder to get than it is to persuade Jessica Simpson to grasp the basic concept of tuna. I would then immediately throw my Dalek cookie jar out on the fire escape ready for the escape (who wouldn't save the Dalek cookie jar, duh!?) and my photo albums. And that big bar of Cadbury's I have in the fridge. Let's get our priorities right immediately. Probably my iPod and laptop would come too, I mean all my friends live on my laptop after all. Oh yeah, then I might take my lovely boy El Codo. Depends on the mood I was in. I'm kidding, El C. I'd also escape butt naked therefore the thing I'd leave behind is my dignity. And my pants.
3. What’s your favourite scripture? Hahahahahahaha I’m totally kidding.
Thank the Lord. That gave me hives.
3. (for real this time) If your life is ever made into a made-for-TV movie, who would play you?
If my life was ever made into a made-for-TV movie I'd be played by Bruce Willis. Sure he's a ton older than me and there's that business of him having a penis (I guess, I haven't looked) and no hair, but he would kick ass and might manage to make my life exciting, adding a few explosions here, a few terrorists there. Although he mightn't be all that convincing in a dress and I'm not sure I'd like to find out. Hahaha, that suggested I ever wear a dress. Ha ha ha.
4. What has given you the most pleasure in this past year (July 2006-July 2007)?
In all honesty, this past year has sucked donkey balls. It's been a never ending stream of poverty, frustration and I've had a friend die. Positives? A wealth of Irn Bru, a nice little sunny vacation at The Evil Queen's house in Florida, the discovery of "On the Border" margarita mix and hanging out in "Vegas" with my Live Journal buddy Tony Spunk. And maybe that time some hobo pinched my ass on the train (I appreciated the attention).
5. You often write about your horrific work experiences a world of corporate incompetence – as a kid, what was your idea of a dream job?
When I was really little, I wanted to be a sky muffin. I mean an air hostess. Stewardess. Flight attendant??? WTF do they call themselves? Anyway. One of those. You see, I loved planes, everything about them, their huge size, their majesty, the roar the engines made, the fact they were going to exotic places...like Luton. And Detroit. I used to spend days at the airport with my dad watching planes take off and land. I guess he liked planes too. Either that or he had a thing for airports, I don't know. So yeah. Then I got over the sky muffin phase and decided, why not start at the top so I wanted to be a pilot. This was going well until I realized that a) I sucked at most things mathematical. b) I sucked at science and c) I hate flying and need to be sedated before stepping onto a plane. Apparently airlines don't like their pilots tranquilized. Well unless you want to work for Aeroflot. After that I think I just wanted to be a rock star and a writer. I still kind of have the aspiration for the latter. The former is a matter for me and the bedroom mirror only.
The rules: and here's the guidelines to include in your post:
If you care to participate, leave me a comment saying "Interview me." I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions. You will update your blog with a post containing your answers to the questions. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.
The five:
1. You are given the opportunity to earn five million dollars for one year of work. The catch? You have to be a tour guide for the Precious Moments Museum, and you have to be NICE and say NICE and POSITIVE things about Precious Moments for that entire year. You may not utter a single negative thing (or write, record, blog anything negative), both on the job and after hours. Do you take the job or forfeit? Why or why not?
Well naturally only an imbecile of great standing would turn that job down. The key here is the five million bucks ensuring I never had to work for degenerate fucksticks ever again and quite frankly I'd stick my granny with a branding iron and sell her to an Arab for five million bucks. (It's ok, she'd be fine, she's not Jewish or anything.) However, given the job itself I would have a set of tactical plans in place because obviously the urge to lapse from the agreement would be intense. Plus I would have one of those insulin pens handy that people with The Diabeetus use when their blood sugar gets too high. I would have my friend C., who is an electronics genius, wire me up with a contraption that zapped me every time a swear word so much as formed in my brain or if it detected an oncoming bout of sarcasm. Secondly, I'd wire my jaws shut and not talk at all if things got really dire. I'd record a nice little ditty about the museum on tape, beforehand and hand it out to visitors so I didn't have to say a word. Thirdly, I would go home from work every night, in some sort of frightening zombie trance (as you'd imagine) and I'd drink Cuba Libres until I thought I was Dean Martin. Fourthly, I'd call in sick a lot. Fifthly (fifthly is a word?), at the end of my term I would unleash a sea of profanity so intense, entire continents would shake like Michael J. Fox at a Parkinson's convention. Then I might go pipebomb the museum. You know, after they paid me.
2. Your ‘24’ moment has arrived: There’s a bomb somewhere in your home that cannot be found or dismantled, and you have five minutes to pack up and leave before it explodes. What goes and what stays?
Hmmm...Well. My cats go that goes without saying. People are generally enormous shits but animals are good spirits, loyal and kind - even ones that routinely wake you up at 3am every night to feed them "breakfast" or else they trash the living room. Then I'm thinking my passport might be a decent idea and my green card because that fucker was harder to get than it is to persuade Jessica Simpson to grasp the basic concept of tuna. I would then immediately throw my Dalek cookie jar out on the fire escape ready for the escape (who wouldn't save the Dalek cookie jar, duh!?) and my photo albums. And that big bar of Cadbury's I have in the fridge. Let's get our priorities right immediately. Probably my iPod and laptop would come too, I mean all my friends live on my laptop after all. Oh yeah, then I might take my lovely boy El Codo. Depends on the mood I was in. I'm kidding, El C. I'd also escape butt naked therefore the thing I'd leave behind is my dignity. And my pants.
3. What’s your favourite scripture? Hahahahahahaha I’m totally kidding.
Thank the Lord. That gave me hives.
3. (for real this time) If your life is ever made into a made-for-TV movie, who would play you?
If my life was ever made into a made-for-TV movie I'd be played by Bruce Willis. Sure he's a ton older than me and there's that business of him having a penis (I guess, I haven't looked) and no hair, but he would kick ass and might manage to make my life exciting, adding a few explosions here, a few terrorists there. Although he mightn't be all that convincing in a dress and I'm not sure I'd like to find out. Hahaha, that suggested I ever wear a dress. Ha ha ha.
4. What has given you the most pleasure in this past year (July 2006-July 2007)?
In all honesty, this past year has sucked donkey balls. It's been a never ending stream of poverty, frustration and I've had a friend die. Positives? A wealth of Irn Bru, a nice little sunny vacation at The Evil Queen's house in Florida, the discovery of "On the Border" margarita mix and hanging out in "Vegas" with my Live Journal buddy Tony Spunk. And maybe that time some hobo pinched my ass on the train (I appreciated the attention).
5. You often write about your horrific work experiences a world of corporate incompetence – as a kid, what was your idea of a dream job?
When I was really little, I wanted to be a sky muffin. I mean an air hostess. Stewardess. Flight attendant??? WTF do they call themselves? Anyway. One of those. You see, I loved planes, everything about them, their huge size, their majesty, the roar the engines made, the fact they were going to exotic places...like Luton. And Detroit. I used to spend days at the airport with my dad watching planes take off and land. I guess he liked planes too. Either that or he had a thing for airports, I don't know. So yeah. Then I got over the sky muffin phase and decided, why not start at the top so I wanted to be a pilot. This was going well until I realized that a) I sucked at most things mathematical. b) I sucked at science and c) I hate flying and need to be sedated before stepping onto a plane. Apparently airlines don't like their pilots tranquilized. Well unless you want to work for Aeroflot. After that I think I just wanted to be a rock star and a writer. I still kind of have the aspiration for the latter. The former is a matter for me and the bedroom mirror only.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
I Like A Challenge
We “assistants” just adore having to do things at the last possible minute. It’s a sickness of ours. We thrive on it. Really. So what if you’ve known about that Defcon Red important creative presentation to the CEO and his team at the client for about ten weeks, the presentation is this afternoon so this morning we will do about three weeks necessary prep. in about two hours.
No, honestly, don’t apologize, there’s nothing we enjoy more than giving up our morning coffee, our entire lunch hour and what remains of our sanity so that you can have 50 color, bound copies of this 300 slide presentation that you need by 2 p.m. and that you’ve known about for all these weeks. Oh what’s that? You haven’t quite finished the presentation yet, you’re still making edits? No sweat. You’ll be done by around noon you say? Well that’s great, thank you so much. That gives me a whole hour to provide those 50 bound copies of 300 pages. Of course I can have it done. It’s not like there are 3,000 people in our company and anyone else is using the two color copiers we have on the premises.
Is there anything else I can do? Oh, there is? What a pleasant surprise! Can I make 20 CDs of the presentation as well? And you need them in a half hour? No problem at all. While I’m juggling the 50 copies of this novel I’m about to bind I’ll just use my special octopus extension arm to throw in a few CDs to burn. You know, I still have my feet free, do you need anything else?
Oh you need a car service to take you to the client? Of course I can do that. I can do that in my sleep, if need be. It has to be here in ten minutes? Lucky I am well rehearsed in pulling sedans out of my ass. Will that be all?
No, honestly, don’t apologize, there’s nothing we enjoy more than giving up our morning coffee, our entire lunch hour and what remains of our sanity so that you can have 50 color, bound copies of this 300 slide presentation that you need by 2 p.m. and that you’ve known about for all these weeks. Oh what’s that? You haven’t quite finished the presentation yet, you’re still making edits? No sweat. You’ll be done by around noon you say? Well that’s great, thank you so much. That gives me a whole hour to provide those 50 bound copies of 300 pages. Of course I can have it done. It’s not like there are 3,000 people in our company and anyone else is using the two color copiers we have on the premises.
Is there anything else I can do? Oh, there is? What a pleasant surprise! Can I make 20 CDs of the presentation as well? And you need them in a half hour? No problem at all. While I’m juggling the 50 copies of this novel I’m about to bind I’ll just use my special octopus extension arm to throw in a few CDs to burn. You know, I still have my feet free, do you need anything else?
Oh you need a car service to take you to the client? Of course I can do that. I can do that in my sleep, if need be. It has to be here in ten minutes? Lucky I am well rehearsed in pulling sedans out of my ass. Will that be all?
Monday, July 23, 2007
Do I Look Like a People Person?
While I’m in the midst of a whole plethora of posts about travel and travel cock-ups, I should point out a little something that happened this very day, in the midst of a busy work schedule that made me contemplate just super-gluing the phone receiver to my ear to save time.
There’s this crazy little chick who, while not part of one of my client teams, does work with this team on various projects, albeit in a different capacity. This little chick occasionally pops up to visit our neck of the woods to meet with our team, full of perky, loud opinions and a deafening chatter that sounds sort of like a million birds on amphetamines, magnified through a guitar pedal.
Today this same little chick calls me, on her cell phone, from San Diego, where she is on client business. The fact is, I have spoken to her maybe once ever, so why she is calling me is a mystery. Although, apparently it’s not going to be a mystery for long.
It seems that this Crazy Little Chick was about as confused as Anne Heche at a sexuality conference, because when she called she said, “I’m in San Diego airport but I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where the meeting is!”
Hmmm. Now it’s possible I’m being unfairly presumptuous here Little Chick, but, when partaking on a business trip, be it close to home or 3,000 miles away, one would assume that maybe taking vital information with you like, for example, where you are going once leaving the airport, might be a pretty useful idea.
As it happened I didn’t have that information either, since none of my team are involved in said trip. She was a touch annoyed at this, which bothered me about oh…not at all. She was going to go make some calls to get the information elsewhere.
Fast forward ten minutes. Phone rings and I see her cell number on my caller ID. I pick up with my utmost, polished professional corporate greeting of, “Yeeeeeeeesssssssssssss?”
“I got to the hotel!” Little Chick says, sounding a touch frantic. “But they won’t let me go to my room.”
“Are you wearing a jacket strapped with explosives?” I didn’t ask, although I wanted to.
“My reservation is there.” she said. “But apparently I need to pay for it in advance, with a credit card.”
“Yeeeeeessssssssss…” I said again, not quite sure what her point was. “They generally insist that you to pay for your stay.”
“And…I don’t have a credit card!” she said. “So they won’t let me in.”
“You don’t have a credit card.” I said flatly. “You don’t have a single credit card?”
“Well yes, I have a credit card.” She said, “But it’s in NY. I didn’t bring it with me. I didn’t think I’d need it.”
Who the hell travels anywhere without taking a credit card and stays in hotels without a means to pay for them? I mean we can book the rooms but someone still has to pay for the damn thing. Tinkerbell doesn't just fly in on the breeze and sprinkle her magic invisibility sparkles on the bill.
“Maybe you could do some sexual favors for the Concierge?” I also didn't suggest although again, I wanted to.
Little Chick wants to know if my boss will let her use his credit card, however, he is not only currently in another state but hello… the card is with him. Unless you have one of those little devices that Captain Kirk used to beam stuff all over the place, I fail to see how this plan could ever succeed.
“What you need…” I started to explain helpfully, “Is an ATM. Because all hotels take cash.”
She liked that suggestion even less than she liked anything else I’d said all day.
“But, I don’t have much in my account.” She said. “I can’t afford to pay for a $200 room in cash.”
“Hence why one requires a credit card!” I said. “Seeing any light bulbs go on yet?”
OK I didn’t say that. But you know I was thinking it.
The whole time this was going on I was thinking, “Why the hell is she calling me? She doesn’t even know me. I don’t work for or with her. She has a fucking assistant she can talk to!”
Finally, another company member attending the same conference paid for her room on his credit card. Meanwhile, I spent an hour of my life I’m never getting back, running around trying to figure out her problems. Joy.
There’s this crazy little chick who, while not part of one of my client teams, does work with this team on various projects, albeit in a different capacity. This little chick occasionally pops up to visit our neck of the woods to meet with our team, full of perky, loud opinions and a deafening chatter that sounds sort of like a million birds on amphetamines, magnified through a guitar pedal.
Today this same little chick calls me, on her cell phone, from San Diego, where she is on client business. The fact is, I have spoken to her maybe once ever, so why she is calling me is a mystery. Although, apparently it’s not going to be a mystery for long.
It seems that this Crazy Little Chick was about as confused as Anne Heche at a sexuality conference, because when she called she said, “I’m in San Diego airport but I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where the meeting is!”
Hmmm. Now it’s possible I’m being unfairly presumptuous here Little Chick, but, when partaking on a business trip, be it close to home or 3,000 miles away, one would assume that maybe taking vital information with you like, for example, where you are going once leaving the airport, might be a pretty useful idea.
As it happened I didn’t have that information either, since none of my team are involved in said trip. She was a touch annoyed at this, which bothered me about oh…not at all. She was going to go make some calls to get the information elsewhere.
Fast forward ten minutes. Phone rings and I see her cell number on my caller ID. I pick up with my utmost, polished professional corporate greeting of, “Yeeeeeeeesssssssssssss?”
“I got to the hotel!” Little Chick says, sounding a touch frantic. “But they won’t let me go to my room.”
“Are you wearing a jacket strapped with explosives?” I didn’t ask, although I wanted to.
“My reservation is there.” she said. “But apparently I need to pay for it in advance, with a credit card.”
“Yeeeeeessssssssss…” I said again, not quite sure what her point was. “They generally insist that you to pay for your stay.”
“And…I don’t have a credit card!” she said. “So they won’t let me in.”
“You don’t have a credit card.” I said flatly. “You don’t have a single credit card?”
“Well yes, I have a credit card.” She said, “But it’s in NY. I didn’t bring it with me. I didn’t think I’d need it.”
Who the hell travels anywhere without taking a credit card and stays in hotels without a means to pay for them? I mean we can book the rooms but someone still has to pay for the damn thing. Tinkerbell doesn't just fly in on the breeze and sprinkle her magic invisibility sparkles on the bill.
“Maybe you could do some sexual favors for the Concierge?” I also didn't suggest although again, I wanted to.
Little Chick wants to know if my boss will let her use his credit card, however, he is not only currently in another state but hello… the card is with him. Unless you have one of those little devices that Captain Kirk used to beam stuff all over the place, I fail to see how this plan could ever succeed.
“What you need…” I started to explain helpfully, “Is an ATM. Because all hotels take cash.”
She liked that suggestion even less than she liked anything else I’d said all day.
“But, I don’t have much in my account.” She said. “I can’t afford to pay for a $200 room in cash.”
“Hence why one requires a credit card!” I said. “Seeing any light bulbs go on yet?”
OK I didn’t say that. But you know I was thinking it.
The whole time this was going on I was thinking, “Why the hell is she calling me? She doesn’t even know me. I don’t work for or with her. She has a fucking assistant she can talk to!”
Finally, another company member attending the same conference paid for her room on his credit card. Meanwhile, I spent an hour of my life I’m never getting back, running around trying to figure out her problems. Joy.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Weekends Exist To Keep The Homicide Rate Down
My bosses are all traveling this week, which is nice in one way, due to the wealth of downtime and alien things like “lunch hours”, yet they are hell in another, because the second they are all incommunicado, that is when disasters happen and when disasters happen in corporations, there is not enough caffeine on the planet that will make you wired enough to solve the situation without weeping, losing three quarters of your hair and threatening people with a letter opener. Luckily, so far, all is quiet.
Too quiet…
One boss, who has been an enormous pain in the rear lately, is in Florida. She has changed her travel plans so many times that even the airlines are confused as to her intent. I envision her name soon being scrawled on a “no fly” list alongside “Osama Hussein-Mohammad” and that dickwad from Oasis. She now wants to come back today one hour earlier than planned (waiting in the airport bar for an hour, chatting up the bartender while sucking down Manhattans wasn’t an option apparently). She’s flying from Miami to New York but I’m seriously considering routing her through Salt Lake City. And Chicago. Where she will be delayed until Tuesday by tornados and by which time her head will have exploded and my life will be 50% more bearable.
Still on the subject of travel, we have our own travel department here and someday soon I will come to work with an axe and murder one of our reps. This particular lady is a very nice person, friendly, jovial and totally, inconceivably incompetent. Not much frightens the Guv’ner, but she frightens me to my core.
Take, for example, the time I booked boss number one on some flights that would take him to a four day conference in Las Vegas. I call the travel department and get crazy travel rep. to make sure that the hotel we discussed for this conference is confirmed and she assures me that yes, he is all set. He is good to go. Commence launch sequence. Then the automated itinerary arrived via email and I quickly glanced at it to make sure nothing was amiss and, yes, she was absolutely correct, the hotel is booked and confirmed, just like she told me.
It’s also in Houston, Texas.
Much swearing and scurrying and threatening and changing of things ensued, while I contemplated how hard I’d have to connect with the plate glass partition in my office to actually put my head through it.
She will routinely give me flight options that don’t exist or omit ones that do.
She will swear blind we didn’t discuss something when I have notes proving we did.
She will tell me there is no way to do something in a certain time frame that another rep will not bat an eyelid at.
She will give me options for all three NY airports when I ask for flights “only to and from La Guardia” and end up booking irate boss on some flight back to Newark, despite telling me it was to La Guardia and when his car is waiting for him, peacefully, at La Guardia. I will naturally only find this out at the last minute and be scurrying around like a gerbil in Richard Gere’s back yard, trying to rectify this monumental cock-up.
It’s exhausting. And rage inducing.
But it’s Friday.
Too quiet…
One boss, who has been an enormous pain in the rear lately, is in Florida. She has changed her travel plans so many times that even the airlines are confused as to her intent. I envision her name soon being scrawled on a “no fly” list alongside “Osama Hussein-Mohammad” and that dickwad from Oasis. She now wants to come back today one hour earlier than planned (waiting in the airport bar for an hour, chatting up the bartender while sucking down Manhattans wasn’t an option apparently). She’s flying from Miami to New York but I’m seriously considering routing her through Salt Lake City. And Chicago. Where she will be delayed until Tuesday by tornados and by which time her head will have exploded and my life will be 50% more bearable.
Still on the subject of travel, we have our own travel department here and someday soon I will come to work with an axe and murder one of our reps. This particular lady is a very nice person, friendly, jovial and totally, inconceivably incompetent. Not much frightens the Guv’ner, but she frightens me to my core.
Take, for example, the time I booked boss number one on some flights that would take him to a four day conference in Las Vegas. I call the travel department and get crazy travel rep. to make sure that the hotel we discussed for this conference is confirmed and she assures me that yes, he is all set. He is good to go. Commence launch sequence. Then the automated itinerary arrived via email and I quickly glanced at it to make sure nothing was amiss and, yes, she was absolutely correct, the hotel is booked and confirmed, just like she told me.
It’s also in Houston, Texas.
Much swearing and scurrying and threatening and changing of things ensued, while I contemplated how hard I’d have to connect with the plate glass partition in my office to actually put my head through it.
She will routinely give me flight options that don’t exist or omit ones that do.
She will swear blind we didn’t discuss something when I have notes proving we did.
She will tell me there is no way to do something in a certain time frame that another rep will not bat an eyelid at.
She will give me options for all three NY airports when I ask for flights “only to and from La Guardia” and end up booking irate boss on some flight back to Newark, despite telling me it was to La Guardia and when his car is waiting for him, peacefully, at La Guardia. I will naturally only find this out at the last minute and be scurrying around like a gerbil in Richard Gere’s back yard, trying to rectify this monumental cock-up.
It’s exhausting. And rage inducing.
But it’s Friday.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Putting the "Ass" in "Assistant"
One of the few fun perks of being an Executive Assistant (and I do emphasize “few”) is we get to read a lot of illiterate emails and documents from other people meant for our bosses and some of those emails and documents make a person scratch their head in wonder at how the sender manages to dress themselves in the morning.
The most fun though are typos. You see some marvelous typos that make you lose all decorum while indulging in a big, fart-inducing guffaw.
There was one time, while in the midst of languishing away at the hands of Mr. Panty-Waist and his lackeys, when my good friend, The Evil Queen, received an email regarding internal client discussions, within our team, which she promptly forwarded to me with a triumphant snort. The reason for that snort? What the email actually inquired about was the possibility of conducting some, “interanal discussions”, which, seriously, I would have agreed to in a second because that sounds infinitely more interesting than discussing media plans and talking points.
The best part however, was when I emailed my other good friend and coworker, Timo, to share this hilarity. Now Timo is not such a great speller himself so he aptly retorted with an all caps, “Sheiks of delight!” at the typo. Now quite obviously, he meant to say “shrieks”. However, the result was so much more fabulous. Not surprisingly, the “Sheiks of Delight”, quite apart from being in the running for the name of my next band, amused me to the point of breathlessness.
Naturally, this being me, and me having the maturity level of Pauly Shore, I spent the rest of the morning giggling intensely and occasionally snorting to myself. If The Evil Queen asked me who had the latest client invoice I would reply with, “Gee I don’t know, maybe the SHEIKS OF DELIGHT took it?”
At some point in the proceedings the two daily amusements combined into the “Sheiks of Interanal Delight” which, in contrast, sounds quite horrifying and is possibly the name of a special ops gang of terror lords that Al Qaeda would consider using on prisoners.
Quite frankly, when you work in office land you take your infantile humor where you can find it.
The most fun though are typos. You see some marvelous typos that make you lose all decorum while indulging in a big, fart-inducing guffaw.
There was one time, while in the midst of languishing away at the hands of Mr. Panty-Waist and his lackeys, when my good friend, The Evil Queen, received an email regarding internal client discussions, within our team, which she promptly forwarded to me with a triumphant snort. The reason for that snort? What the email actually inquired about was the possibility of conducting some, “interanal discussions”, which, seriously, I would have agreed to in a second because that sounds infinitely more interesting than discussing media plans and talking points.
The best part however, was when I emailed my other good friend and coworker, Timo, to share this hilarity. Now Timo is not such a great speller himself so he aptly retorted with an all caps, “Sheiks of delight!” at the typo. Now quite obviously, he meant to say “shrieks”. However, the result was so much more fabulous. Not surprisingly, the “Sheiks of Delight”, quite apart from being in the running for the name of my next band, amused me to the point of breathlessness.
Naturally, this being me, and me having the maturity level of Pauly Shore, I spent the rest of the morning giggling intensely and occasionally snorting to myself. If The Evil Queen asked me who had the latest client invoice I would reply with, “Gee I don’t know, maybe the SHEIKS OF DELIGHT took it?”
At some point in the proceedings the two daily amusements combined into the “Sheiks of Interanal Delight” which, in contrast, sounds quite horrifying and is possibly the name of a special ops gang of terror lords that Al Qaeda would consider using on prisoners.
Quite frankly, when you work in office land you take your infantile humor where you can find it.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Small Tasks Mean Huge Brain Cell Suicide
Timeline of this afternoon that would induce a nun to buy a shotgun:
Do you think there’s a restaurant in midtown Manhattan that would deliver tequila, preferably in a keg, with a tube I can hook up to a vein?
- Boss is going to airport for flight to Washington.
- Boss gets roped into last minute morning meeting and asks to change flight from a 1:00 p.m. flight to a 3:25 p.m. flight to accommodate this new, important meeting.
- New flight acquired, I call the small, local, no-name car company we are using to pick him up from the airport and distribute him, hopefully limbs intact, at the facility where he is meeting the client, in Baltimore. I inform them that his flight will now not be arriving until 4:52 p.m. Small no-name car company apologizes profusely as they are fully booked later in the afternoon as they only have two cars and cannot therefore do the pick-up.
- I get the name of another local company, call them, they are also fully-booked, “such short notice, blah blah blah”
- I call Carey Limousine who are a global organization who can get you anywhere, anytime in any city, no matter how obscure or invisible on a map. Since Baltimore is quite obvious on most maps, they agree they can do the pick-up, even though it’s only four hours notice. I make a note to kiss the first Carey rep. who has the misfortune to cross my path.
- Boss calls from airport. Apparently, there is “weather” afoot. Weather sufficient enough to delay most flights leaving the NYC metropolitan area and his flight, surprise surprise, is among the delayed. It now will not be leaving until 6:45 p.m. and landing close to 8:30 p.m. Thinking this a touch ridiculous, my boss tries to do something constructive and manages to get himself on another flight, with the same airline, that is scheduled to leave at 5 p.m. and arrive at BWI at 6:35 p.m. – a whole two hours earlier than his original delayed flight would have him there. Sensible huh?
- I call Carey again to inform them that flights are delayed and would get him in way too late at 8:30 so he is now on an earlier flight arriving at 6:35 p.m. and to give them his new flight number.
- Carey birth an elephant. Apparently this is not allowed. Apparently now, we will have to pay them as though his original flight still stood. In other words, we will have to pay them as though he was still landing at 4:52 p.m. and we would have to pay hourly rates from then until his new flight arrived at 6:35 p.m. plus whatever his trip costs and gratuities. Therefore we will have to pay them for two hours we are not actually using the car. Hmmmm.
- I tell Carey to park their sedan up their own back yard, if you get my drift. Actually, no, I didn’t, but it was tempting. I told them to cancel the car altogether because we weren’t paying their huge rates for 2 hours we weren’t going to use the car. They inform me that they certainly will cancel but they’ll also charge us $164 for the privilege because it’s within 2 hours of his original landing time (what???). Fuck me. If it’s costing me almost $200 to not use the goddamn car, I might as well keep the reservation and pay for the 2 extra hours as it works out the same. “You know…” the Carey rep told me scoldingly, “If he’d stayed on that original flight it would only cost the original trip cost as we don’t charge for airline delays!” “But, he caught an earlier flight so you wouldn’t have to be waiting two extra hours!” I pointed out. “New flight, new reservation, new rules.” She said helpfully.
- “Fuck you very much, bitch!”.
- Bang head off desk for ten minutes and call stapler a motherfucker.
Do you think there’s a restaurant in midtown Manhattan that would deliver tequila, preferably in a keg, with a tube I can hook up to a vein?
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Pass The Collection Plate
Something myself and I am quite sure, most other administrative workers, tackle on a daily basis, are expense reports. Basically this means dealing with the reimbursing of dollars spent, to a bunch of people who are already richer than a hypothetical Bill Gates/Warren Buffet sandwich (now there’s a particularly repellant thought!).
Not that I am against people being paid the money they are owed – au contraire, mes amis! If you spend your own money in the process of conducting company business, the company should naturally reimburse those costs to you. It’s a great theory and one that seems quite straightforward and sensible but instead, seems to confuse people by its vast scope of possibility.
You see, I have noticed during my years slaving for mentally-scattered, workaholic people who are too important to deal with such things themselves, that the higher the title an executive holds, ultimately the more ridiculous the claims for compensation become.
For example, at my last job we often had a bunch of junior associates traveling on company business to clients’ offices to discuss plans and give new idea presentations and low level things like that. Most of them would return, exhausted and bleary-eyed, thrust a few grubby cab receipts and a hotel bill in my hand then slope off to sleep under their desks till lunchtime.
Now a similar scenario, only with someone of a much higher rank like say…a Vice President or Senior Associate, is quite different. They will present approximately one ton of expense receipts to you in an industrial sized wheelbarrow towed by a team of thirsty, grunting huskies. The receipts will be in no coherent order, either by type or date and they will have nothing to indicate exactly when the expense occurred, who it involved, where they were going or what indeed it was for. They will then get hostile and mutter and groan profusely when asked for this information, sort of like a normal person's reaction to being asked to lie in a pile of steaming horse manure.
In fact, there will be receipts for every penny that left the executive’s wallet, from the standard hotel room and taxi from the airport, right down to some gum they bought at the airport, the viewing of Busty Blondes Backdoor Bonanza they rented in their hotel room to "relax" and the beers they bought in the hotel bar as a nightcap. Maybe there will be a receipt in there for toiletries because Lord knows they couldn’t possibly bring their own toothpaste and deodorant from home, because the overload would crash the plane.
Then sometimes, as my boss did recently, they will consider it entirely reasonable to present a receipt for a sweater they purchased because it was, “chilly on the beach at the video shoot”. Gee, I would think that knowing you are doing a shoot, at night, on a beach, for several hours, in March, you might have considered packing something heavier than a tank-top, but that’s just me. And having forgotten to do this, I would presume, being in a major city you’d maybe…I don’t know…nip into The Gap to pick up a cheap hoodie or something instead of a designer store where you purchased a $200 cashmere. But then, I am obviously very naïve.
One of my ex-bosses, a young, thin, weaselly guy, with a predilection for striped seersucker suits in summer (try saying it three times fast!), used to present me with the stupidest receipts he demanded to be paid for. Instead of having me follow company protocol and rent him an Avis car for the trip (intermediate size, standard everything) he would go there in person and rent a sports convertible. He would routinely upgrade hotel rooms to suites (another thing we were not supposed to do, especially a comparatively junior executive like him). He would expense everything from a pen he bought when he needed to scribble something on a flight ($56), to a candy bar (89c). He once expensed a change of clothing, including a $100 tie, as he was staying more than two days. I was a little stunned that no one told him you could take clothes with you.
I see people routinely go for expensive lunches or dinners with friends then attempt to claim back the cost by claiming it was business oriented in some roundabout, far fetched way. I see people leave work at 5:30pm then present a cab receipt with a time on it of 2am with a note saying “cab home, working late” scribbled on the back. I see people present claims for every single little thing they spend money on during work hours no matter how absurd. I see people expense their $12,000 a year country club membership because they might one day entertain a client there..
Then suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks. I am the stupid one. This sort of over-the-top anal claiming of every penny is exactly why all these people are richer than a small nation while I'm using the pennies that collect in my office supplies drawer to buy a cup of coffee.
Not that I am against people being paid the money they are owed – au contraire, mes amis! If you spend your own money in the process of conducting company business, the company should naturally reimburse those costs to you. It’s a great theory and one that seems quite straightforward and sensible but instead, seems to confuse people by its vast scope of possibility.
You see, I have noticed during my years slaving for mentally-scattered, workaholic people who are too important to deal with such things themselves, that the higher the title an executive holds, ultimately the more ridiculous the claims for compensation become.
For example, at my last job we often had a bunch of junior associates traveling on company business to clients’ offices to discuss plans and give new idea presentations and low level things like that. Most of them would return, exhausted and bleary-eyed, thrust a few grubby cab receipts and a hotel bill in my hand then slope off to sleep under their desks till lunchtime.
Now a similar scenario, only with someone of a much higher rank like say…a Vice President or Senior Associate, is quite different. They will present approximately one ton of expense receipts to you in an industrial sized wheelbarrow towed by a team of thirsty, grunting huskies. The receipts will be in no coherent order, either by type or date and they will have nothing to indicate exactly when the expense occurred, who it involved, where they were going or what indeed it was for. They will then get hostile and mutter and groan profusely when asked for this information, sort of like a normal person's reaction to being asked to lie in a pile of steaming horse manure.
In fact, there will be receipts for every penny that left the executive’s wallet, from the standard hotel room and taxi from the airport, right down to some gum they bought at the airport, the viewing of Busty Blondes Backdoor Bonanza they rented in their hotel room to "relax" and the beers they bought in the hotel bar as a nightcap. Maybe there will be a receipt in there for toiletries because Lord knows they couldn’t possibly bring their own toothpaste and deodorant from home, because the overload would crash the plane.
Then sometimes, as my boss did recently, they will consider it entirely reasonable to present a receipt for a sweater they purchased because it was, “chilly on the beach at the video shoot”. Gee, I would think that knowing you are doing a shoot, at night, on a beach, for several hours, in March, you might have considered packing something heavier than a tank-top, but that’s just me. And having forgotten to do this, I would presume, being in a major city you’d maybe…I don’t know…nip into The Gap to pick up a cheap hoodie or something instead of a designer store where you purchased a $200 cashmere. But then, I am obviously very naïve.
One of my ex-bosses, a young, thin, weaselly guy, with a predilection for striped seersucker suits in summer (try saying it three times fast!), used to present me with the stupidest receipts he demanded to be paid for. Instead of having me follow company protocol and rent him an Avis car for the trip (intermediate size, standard everything) he would go there in person and rent a sports convertible. He would routinely upgrade hotel rooms to suites (another thing we were not supposed to do, especially a comparatively junior executive like him). He would expense everything from a pen he bought when he needed to scribble something on a flight ($56), to a candy bar (89c). He once expensed a change of clothing, including a $100 tie, as he was staying more than two days. I was a little stunned that no one told him you could take clothes with you.
I see people routinely go for expensive lunches or dinners with friends then attempt to claim back the cost by claiming it was business oriented in some roundabout, far fetched way. I see people leave work at 5:30pm then present a cab receipt with a time on it of 2am with a note saying “cab home, working late” scribbled on the back. I see people present claims for every single little thing they spend money on during work hours no matter how absurd. I see people expense their $12,000 a year country club membership because they might one day entertain a client there..
Then suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks. I am the stupid one. This sort of over-the-top anal claiming of every penny is exactly why all these people are richer than a small nation while I'm using the pennies that collect in my office supplies drawer to buy a cup of coffee.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Mr Panty Waist Takes a Trip
Mr. Panty-Waist once had to take a trip to Florida for a client. He didn’t often travel for work outside of the city and I had a strong suspicion that any sort of travel that involved making informed decisions at chaotic locations such as airports, were a little beyond his brain capacity.
Before the Florida trip he had only one request - that he fly on Delta. Now, as it turned out, he didn’t request this for a sensible reason such as he collected Delta air miles or they offered him preferential treatment or something of that nature. No, he requested it for some completely random reason he pulled out of his ass, like “Delta have the most number of planes older than a year and younger than eight years, with rear-mounted engines, one cabin toilet per twenty passengers and which serve meals on a 2:1 meat:chicken ratio.” Mr. Panty-Waist was a tad nervous when it came to his feet being 30,000 feet in the air. It’s kind of ironic really, because that’s where his head was most of the time…
Whatever his strange reason I just muttered “Whatever, dickwad!” in the silent but mean little voice that lives in my head and called our travel department.
Ten minutes later he was all set with a Delta flight, bang on his time frame and I was about to relax with a Cognac and a cigar (or a tepid Diet Pepsi, whatever.) Fast forward five minutes. The itinerary had arrived from the travel department and out stomped Mr. Panty-Waist scrutinizing it, eyes about two inches from the page.
He started to make sounds like a constipated baby, which is a sure sign that something is not going swimmingly.
“This…this flight…” he whined. “This is not…what I wanted.”
“You wanted to leave around 2pm?” I asked.
“Yes but…*sigh*…”
“And you wanted to leave around 2pm on Delta?”
Huge sigh. “Yes. But…This…This isn’t right. This is…This is Delta Song This is not DELTA. What I’m saying is…this is…discount!”
He whined the word "discount" as though he were about to vomit on his own foot. If it were a physical thing it would be a steaming turd, held out in front of him at arm’s length.
You see Delta Song are the low cost branch of Delta. They’re a no frills, one class, cheap fared airline that gets you from A to B in a normal, chaotic, busy fashion without stuffing half cold meals down your throat or plying you with alcohol. In other words, it’s like flying coach on any other airline. However, as Mr. Panty-Waist’s motto is, “No first class, no point” he was less than thrilled with this arrangement.
“It’s either Delta Song or you fly coach on another airline.” I told him firmly. He made a face like he’d just discovered a dead rat in his pants and gave a snort of indignation.
I managed to find a flight on American but he refused it because, “I don’t fly on Airbuses and I need the engines on the wing.”
Yes, he said that.
Have you ever tried asking a travel agency, “So, what airline is it? What time does it get in? Is it an Airbus or a Boeing and I’m just curious, where does it keep its engines?”
As it happened, Delta Song was the only airline that would get the grouchy man to Florida at the right time so we had to book it. And the next paragraph is blissfully, 100% true.
The flight ended up being fully booked. It was delayed one hour. It was held on the runway for two more hours. He not only arrived in Florida three hours late and missed the meeting, he had to catch his return flight almost immediately and never left the airport. For the whole flight home, his six foot four frame was sat in a middle seat while a “Japanese child” sitting behind him, hit him over the head with her doll for the whole flight. Naturally, this was entirely my fault. Obviously, I had seated this child myself. In all honesty, I wish I’d thought of it.
For the remainder of the time I worked for him, every time we booked any sort of travel he always reminded me, like it was a bona fide option on a booking form, “I don’t want a seat with a hyperactive Asian child nearby.” like I could ask the travel agent to confirm that. "Aisle seat, check! Special meal, check! No Asian four year olds, check!"
I always meant to look that kid up and hire her for future flights. There were very few perks to my job after all and that would have been up there with a lotto win.
Before the Florida trip he had only one request - that he fly on Delta. Now, as it turned out, he didn’t request this for a sensible reason such as he collected Delta air miles or they offered him preferential treatment or something of that nature. No, he requested it for some completely random reason he pulled out of his ass, like “Delta have the most number of planes older than a year and younger than eight years, with rear-mounted engines, one cabin toilet per twenty passengers and which serve meals on a 2:1 meat:chicken ratio.” Mr. Panty-Waist was a tad nervous when it came to his feet being 30,000 feet in the air. It’s kind of ironic really, because that’s where his head was most of the time…
Whatever his strange reason I just muttered “Whatever, dickwad!” in the silent but mean little voice that lives in my head and called our travel department.
Ten minutes later he was all set with a Delta flight, bang on his time frame and I was about to relax with a Cognac and a cigar (or a tepid Diet Pepsi, whatever.) Fast forward five minutes. The itinerary had arrived from the travel department and out stomped Mr. Panty-Waist scrutinizing it, eyes about two inches from the page.
He started to make sounds like a constipated baby, which is a sure sign that something is not going swimmingly.
“This…this flight…” he whined. “This is not…what I wanted.”
“You wanted to leave around 2pm?” I asked.
“Yes but…*sigh*…”
“And you wanted to leave around 2pm on Delta?”
Huge sigh. “Yes. But…This…This isn’t right. This is…This is Delta Song This is not DELTA. What I’m saying is…this is…discount!”
He whined the word "discount" as though he were about to vomit on his own foot. If it were a physical thing it would be a steaming turd, held out in front of him at arm’s length.
You see Delta Song are the low cost branch of Delta. They’re a no frills, one class, cheap fared airline that gets you from A to B in a normal, chaotic, busy fashion without stuffing half cold meals down your throat or plying you with alcohol. In other words, it’s like flying coach on any other airline. However, as Mr. Panty-Waist’s motto is, “No first class, no point” he was less than thrilled with this arrangement.
“It’s either Delta Song or you fly coach on another airline.” I told him firmly. He made a face like he’d just discovered a dead rat in his pants and gave a snort of indignation.
I managed to find a flight on American but he refused it because, “I don’t fly on Airbuses and I need the engines on the wing.”
Yes, he said that.
Have you ever tried asking a travel agency, “So, what airline is it? What time does it get in? Is it an Airbus or a Boeing and I’m just curious, where does it keep its engines?”
As it happened, Delta Song was the only airline that would get the grouchy man to Florida at the right time so we had to book it. And the next paragraph is blissfully, 100% true.
The flight ended up being fully booked. It was delayed one hour. It was held on the runway for two more hours. He not only arrived in Florida three hours late and missed the meeting, he had to catch his return flight almost immediately and never left the airport. For the whole flight home, his six foot four frame was sat in a middle seat while a “Japanese child” sitting behind him, hit him over the head with her doll for the whole flight. Naturally, this was entirely my fault. Obviously, I had seated this child myself. In all honesty, I wish I’d thought of it.
For the remainder of the time I worked for him, every time we booked any sort of travel he always reminded me, like it was a bona fide option on a booking form, “I don’t want a seat with a hyperactive Asian child nearby.” like I could ask the travel agent to confirm that. "Aisle seat, check! Special meal, check! No Asian four year olds, check!"
I always meant to look that kid up and hire her for future flights. There were very few perks to my job after all and that would have been up there with a lotto win.
Last Flight to Sanity Now Boarding
There’s an unspoken law among “admins” as my boss likes to call us crazy people who keep real important folks like him afloat by filing their expenses and typing their correspondence, and that rule is, “never be complacent because complacency will bite you on the ass”.
For example, if there is a day, pretty much like today, when all is quiet, things are slow, people are on vacation and everything is winding down, don’t go and say something stupid to a coworker like, “Boy, today is dead, isn’t it? Today is the most boring day that ever lived!”
You see, on that day, the one detailed above, the clock will tick slowly around to 4:30 p.m. as you're counting down that last 45 minutes to the end of the day and you and your sanity will notice every last second of it, until suddenly…a monumental avalanche of last minute chaos will cascade down upon your stupid head at the speed of a parachutist whose chute failed because the lines were cut by an ex lover with a grudge...
Ahem...
Suddenly, everyone will want something. Everyone will have to be somewhere, Monday and you’re out Friday and so it will have to be done tonight and it’s now 4:30 and you’re supposed to be leaving this damn joint, yet you know, as sure as there’s corn in a turd, that you’re going to be seeing 7 p.m. on that same clock you’ve been growling at all day and you’re going to grind your teeth down to gnarly stumps with frustration and annoyance because you are going to spend the next three hours in a hell known as “making travel arrangements for people who don’t know their ass from their elbow.” Not only will you make travel plans, these people will change said plans several times within the span of an hour and they will want to visit various cities in an order which, if you were to plot them on a grid, would look like a six year old epileptic got a pencil stuck in their fist during a seizure. Naturally, none of it will be straightforward and you will spend the good part of a decade trying to track down a hotel in Indianapolis that serves “fresh baby sea turtle steaks” on a golden platter with a side of “holy anguish” and a hearty helping of “kill me now” and the rest of that decade slamming your head between the door and the frame.
And there will be no direct flight to Indianapolis in the three hour window he needs – he will need to go to Chicago then Tampa and really, does that make sense to anybody?
And there will be no room at the Queen of Apathy hotel.
And there will be no aisle seats on the flight to Tampa and he will be offered a middle seat between a pregnant lady with gas and a fat man with a hygiene problem.
And his car won’t show up.
And his flight back to New York will be canceled.
And he will cry like a little child and be tortured by Democrats. And boy, does he hate Democrats.
That last one was wishful thinking, sorry.
Finally, seven o’clock will roll around and you’ll go home and fantasize about French Fries knowing that in a matter of hours, you’ll check your work email, because you’re responsible like that, to find that everything has changed again and you’ll have to spend half your day off redoing everything.
Happy July 4th week!
For example, if there is a day, pretty much like today, when all is quiet, things are slow, people are on vacation and everything is winding down, don’t go and say something stupid to a coworker like, “Boy, today is dead, isn’t it? Today is the most boring day that ever lived!”
You see, on that day, the one detailed above, the clock will tick slowly around to 4:30 p.m. as you're counting down that last 45 minutes to the end of the day and you and your sanity will notice every last second of it, until suddenly…a monumental avalanche of last minute chaos will cascade down upon your stupid head at the speed of a parachutist whose chute failed because the lines were cut by an ex lover with a grudge...
Ahem...
Suddenly, everyone will want something. Everyone will have to be somewhere, Monday and you’re out Friday and so it will have to be done tonight and it’s now 4:30 and you’re supposed to be leaving this damn joint, yet you know, as sure as there’s corn in a turd, that you’re going to be seeing 7 p.m. on that same clock you’ve been growling at all day and you’re going to grind your teeth down to gnarly stumps with frustration and annoyance because you are going to spend the next three hours in a hell known as “making travel arrangements for people who don’t know their ass from their elbow.” Not only will you make travel plans, these people will change said plans several times within the span of an hour and they will want to visit various cities in an order which, if you were to plot them on a grid, would look like a six year old epileptic got a pencil stuck in their fist during a seizure. Naturally, none of it will be straightforward and you will spend the good part of a decade trying to track down a hotel in Indianapolis that serves “fresh baby sea turtle steaks” on a golden platter with a side of “holy anguish” and a hearty helping of “kill me now” and the rest of that decade slamming your head between the door and the frame.
And there will be no direct flight to Indianapolis in the three hour window he needs – he will need to go to Chicago then Tampa and really, does that make sense to anybody?
And there will be no room at the Queen of Apathy hotel.
And there will be no aisle seats on the flight to Tampa and he will be offered a middle seat between a pregnant lady with gas and a fat man with a hygiene problem.
And his car won’t show up.
And his flight back to New York will be canceled.
And he will cry like a little child and be tortured by Democrats. And boy, does he hate Democrats.
That last one was wishful thinking, sorry.
Finally, seven o’clock will roll around and you’ll go home and fantasize about French Fries knowing that in a matter of hours, you’ll check your work email, because you’re responsible like that, to find that everything has changed again and you’ll have to spend half your day off redoing everything.
Happy July 4th week!
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Mr. Panty-Waist Creates a Black Hole of Suck
Mr. Panty-Waist had more annoying habits than a fat nun. Somewhere, in the dictionary, under "irritant" is a large, beaming photo of Mr. Panty-Waist, probably dressed in those terrifying khaki manpris and boat shoes he showed up in one summer Friday, bringing the whole of corporate America to a grinding halt and causing the Dow to drop two hundred points.
One of his more obvious deficiencies occurred every time he opened his mouth. Not only did he have a monotone that made David Duchovny sound like a perky cheerleader, but he liked to repeat himself over and over again until you could no longer suppress the enticing fantasy of battering him repeatedly on his unusually large noggin with a ball-peen hammer while screaming "DIE STINKING SHIT-MEISTER", until his blood covered him, you, the walls and the whole of America.
One thing he liked a lot was to mention the name of the person he was talking to, approximately seventy times per ten minute conversation. I'm not sure if it was to remind himself who he was talking to since most of his thoughts concerned his own giant ego and he lost track easily, or if it was the teachings of some "Get the Best Out of Your Discussions" seminar, but whatever the reason, it was annoying as all hell.
He had phrases he would regurgitate ad nauseum, his most common being "In other words....", "Am I making myself clear?" and "What I'm saying is...". You could expect to hear those several trillion times during a conversation on the phone, sprinkled around liberally like pepper. He also liked to drop in official PR jargon in a manner that made you want to jump through the phone, clutch him by the throat and threaten to pull his entrails out of his nose.
This is the sort of conversation he would have. Try to strap your arms down to the chair before reading it because the urge to pound on something till it breaks will be unbearable.
Mr. Panty-Waist: So what I'm saying, Steve, is...we have to give this article some color, some color do you know what I'm saying? Am I making myself clear? What I'm saying is color is the feature we need to concentrate most on here Steve. In other words, Steve, there isn't enough color and we need more of it, am I being clear? And if we are going to appeal to those stay-at-home-moms we need a new strategy Steve, because, quite frankly, the current strategy is...what I'm saying is...well it's inadequate Steve and we need color, am I making myself clear on this point? A colorful strategy will make this whole campaign shine, am I making myself clear? In other words color? It's what we need most. Steve, color will bring this alive. What I'm saying is without color, this strategy is just another strategy Steve, am I being clear on this?"
I always had visions of the party on the other end of the phone putting him on mute and shooting things as he spoke. Smack mainly. Maybe themselves in the kneecaps just to prove to themselves that they are still alive.
One of his more obvious deficiencies occurred every time he opened his mouth. Not only did he have a monotone that made David Duchovny sound like a perky cheerleader, but he liked to repeat himself over and over again until you could no longer suppress the enticing fantasy of battering him repeatedly on his unusually large noggin with a ball-peen hammer while screaming "DIE STINKING SHIT-MEISTER", until his blood covered him, you, the walls and the whole of America.
One thing he liked a lot was to mention the name of the person he was talking to, approximately seventy times per ten minute conversation. I'm not sure if it was to remind himself who he was talking to since most of his thoughts concerned his own giant ego and he lost track easily, or if it was the teachings of some "Get the Best Out of Your Discussions" seminar, but whatever the reason, it was annoying as all hell.
He had phrases he would regurgitate ad nauseum, his most common being "In other words....", "Am I making myself clear?" and "What I'm saying is...". You could expect to hear those several trillion times during a conversation on the phone, sprinkled around liberally like pepper. He also liked to drop in official PR jargon in a manner that made you want to jump through the phone, clutch him by the throat and threaten to pull his entrails out of his nose.
This is the sort of conversation he would have. Try to strap your arms down to the chair before reading it because the urge to pound on something till it breaks will be unbearable.
Mr. Panty-Waist: So what I'm saying, Steve, is...we have to give this article some color, some color do you know what I'm saying? Am I making myself clear? What I'm saying is color is the feature we need to concentrate most on here Steve. In other words, Steve, there isn't enough color and we need more of it, am I being clear? And if we are going to appeal to those stay-at-home-moms we need a new strategy Steve, because, quite frankly, the current strategy is...what I'm saying is...well it's inadequate Steve and we need color, am I making myself clear on this point? A colorful strategy will make this whole campaign shine, am I making myself clear? In other words color? It's what we need most. Steve, color will bring this alive. What I'm saying is without color, this strategy is just another strategy Steve, am I being clear on this?"
I always had visions of the party on the other end of the phone putting him on mute and shooting things as he spoke. Smack mainly. Maybe themselves in the kneecaps just to prove to themselves that they are still alive.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Today's Random Thought
How come, in any office, anywhere, people manage to get through enough paper to render a tropical rainforest obsolete in about an hour? Companies are obsessed with paper. It’s as if their whole reputation is being judged solely on the amount of paper it generates. People in offices will pretty much utilize paper for everything from scribbling random phone numbers to photocopying their buttocks. In the age of technology is it really necessary to have hard copies of everything? Seriously, I’m drowning in a sea of paper, most of it unnecessary or useless and I can’t find the things I do need.
You require paper for some things. It’s fairly hard, for example, to wipe your ass with a CD, although feel perfectly free to correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve tried this method and it works for you.
And I concede, you need to print documents for meetings sometimes or the world will stop spinning and topple off its axis.
Also, if you’re me, you need to write in a notebook because you forget things five seconds after hearing them. This is all fine and considered legitimate by me.
However…
My boss is fairly old school about some things. He likes files of the paper variety and everything we do is kept in these files. Mainly tons of paper no one will ever need or look at ever again. Me? I like to keep electronic copies and if I didn’t generate the document myself, then I’ll scan it and keep it on my hard drive. It’s easy to find, fast and it’s paper free. I don’t need space to keep it and I don’t have to spend 30 minutes digging through mountains of archive files, getting paper cuts on my extremities, in order to track it down later. Paper files are, by and large, unnecessary in the numbers they are generated. He’s also a little techno-incompetent and will mis-print a 110 page document, not realize he can stop the print job and let it run its course, producing 110 pages of alien hieroglyphics.
We have a Xerox room on my floor. The room has a wall that is stacked floor to ceiling high with reams of paper. In the course of maybe two days this stack will deplete to about a quarter of its original stock. There are maybe 55 people on the floor tops. Which begs the question, what are people doing with all that paper? Are they having paper airplane swap meets? Are they running origami classes no one told me about? Maybe they are experimenting with papier macher? Who knows? I just know it disappears faster than Paris Hilton at a spelling bee.
I just think that more could be done to conserve resources like paper in the mass quantities we consume it in offices. Maybe more recycling?
I’m now going to go hug a tree.
You require paper for some things. It’s fairly hard, for example, to wipe your ass with a CD, although feel perfectly free to correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve tried this method and it works for you.
And I concede, you need to print documents for meetings sometimes or the world will stop spinning and topple off its axis.
Also, if you’re me, you need to write in a notebook because you forget things five seconds after hearing them. This is all fine and considered legitimate by me.
However…
My boss is fairly old school about some things. He likes files of the paper variety and everything we do is kept in these files. Mainly tons of paper no one will ever need or look at ever again. Me? I like to keep electronic copies and if I didn’t generate the document myself, then I’ll scan it and keep it on my hard drive. It’s easy to find, fast and it’s paper free. I don’t need space to keep it and I don’t have to spend 30 minutes digging through mountains of archive files, getting paper cuts on my extremities, in order to track it down later. Paper files are, by and large, unnecessary in the numbers they are generated. He’s also a little techno-incompetent and will mis-print a 110 page document, not realize he can stop the print job and let it run its course, producing 110 pages of alien hieroglyphics.
We have a Xerox room on my floor. The room has a wall that is stacked floor to ceiling high with reams of paper. In the course of maybe two days this stack will deplete to about a quarter of its original stock. There are maybe 55 people on the floor tops. Which begs the question, what are people doing with all that paper? Are they having paper airplane swap meets? Are they running origami classes no one told me about? Maybe they are experimenting with papier macher? Who knows? I just know it disappears faster than Paris Hilton at a spelling bee.
I just think that more could be done to conserve resources like paper in the mass quantities we consume it in offices. Maybe more recycling?
I’m now going to go hug a tree.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Socialites In Training
There is nothing gets on the collective tits of administrative assistants quite like people who don't do their homework properly before giving them a job to do.
Case in point, the boss who asks an assistant to get them a set of flight options from City A to City B, which will have them landing in City B at or before 10 a.m., and a return flight, the same day, that will have their pampered, indecisive little butt back in City A by 7 p.m. so they can spend some quality time with their demanding spouse and precocious 2 year old. They also tell you to go ahead and make these reservations and let them know when it's done. Now at first glance that’s a simple little request that is easy to fulfill because it is specific and concise.
You find the relevant information – Flight A will have you in City B thirty minutes before your deadline, leaving ample room for delays or airport congestion, with no faffing around with plane changes or being routed through some backwoods time warp like say…Omaha (sorry Omaha but really…) and Flight B will have you back in City A in perfect time to placate your soaped-up, screaming toddler who wants to know why mommy thinks work is more important than her bath-time. Voila! Itinerary complete.
When said flight reservations are passed along to boss, they are sent back immediately with a note that says, “Is there nothing returning later than this at all, like say a 9 p.m. flight?” like they’d inquired, or even hinted about later flights even once. I mean what part of, “I must be back home by 7 p.m.” implied you might like a much later flight? Nothing, that’s what, you degenerate, brainless shrew.
And so you rearrange the flights, complete with new 9 p.m. departure (sheesh!) and all the accompanying paperwork, just to be told, “Oh. It’s on American. Wasn’t there anything on Continental? Even if it’s much earlier?”
Then you look up the number for Office Management to see if you can borrow a crowbar to bash her head in until she is dead.
Case in point, the boss who asks an assistant to get them a set of flight options from City A to City B, which will have them landing in City B at or before 10 a.m., and a return flight, the same day, that will have their pampered, indecisive little butt back in City A by 7 p.m. so they can spend some quality time with their demanding spouse and precocious 2 year old. They also tell you to go ahead and make these reservations and let them know when it's done. Now at first glance that’s a simple little request that is easy to fulfill because it is specific and concise.
You find the relevant information – Flight A will have you in City B thirty minutes before your deadline, leaving ample room for delays or airport congestion, with no faffing around with plane changes or being routed through some backwoods time warp like say…Omaha (sorry Omaha but really…) and Flight B will have you back in City A in perfect time to placate your soaped-up, screaming toddler who wants to know why mommy thinks work is more important than her bath-time. Voila! Itinerary complete.
When said flight reservations are passed along to boss, they are sent back immediately with a note that says, “Is there nothing returning later than this at all, like say a 9 p.m. flight?” like they’d inquired, or even hinted about later flights even once. I mean what part of, “I must be back home by 7 p.m.” implied you might like a much later flight? Nothing, that’s what, you degenerate, brainless shrew.
And so you rearrange the flights, complete with new 9 p.m. departure (sheesh!) and all the accompanying paperwork, just to be told, “Oh. It’s on American. Wasn’t there anything on Continental? Even if it’s much earlier?”
Then you look up the number for Office Management to see if you can borrow a crowbar to bash her head in until she is dead.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Remembering Nellie
When I was still working as a floating assistant within the company of absolute hell that housed Mr. Panty-Waist, SBAS and Cruella, I did stints as assistant to pretty much every ne’er do well the place contained. One guy was a youngish, extremely highly strung man who would turn the color of a ripe, red raddish when he got agitated, which averaged about ten times an hour. The most inane and absurd things would irritate him into apoplexy. Someone talking too loudly outside his office; a client not calling him back about five seconds after he placed a call; anyone having a differing opinion from him. It could be anything. One time the Evil Queen and myself, knowing his predilection for the Boston Red Sox, snuck into his office while he was out at a client’s and stuck Yankees posters and cards all over his bulletin board which sat behind his desk. It was a full half day before he noticed them, at which time he got all hot and bothered because he’d had two meetings in his office since we’d placed the offending items there, so someone might have seen the enemy colors, radiating from behind his giant, soon-to-spontaneously-combust head.
The man had several very real nervous breakdowns during the time I was with the company, one of which caused him to shave off all his hair and don a huge pair of Coke-bottle spectacles that turned his image instantly from “smart company executive” into “nervous, sweating pedophile”. Coupled with the fact his cheeks were generally the same shade as a baby’s bottom if that baby had chronic diaper rash, he was quite a worrying sight.
He worked hard however, which was more than could be said for Mr. Panty-Waist and his ilk. Nervous Nellie would work 78 hours a day if it were possible and then spend another day checking everything twice. He was a big favorite of the beastly Anti-Christ Cruella de Ville, who summoned him most days to her lair to discuss his taking care of her dastardly deeds. He would emerge an hour later, scarlet as a stop sign and exhausted from sticking his tongue down the back of her Prada pants, to bark urgent commands at his meager team of writers, while mopping his brow with a handkerchief.
He could be humorous and cordial if you met him in the corridor or he could be a fire-breathing, foul-breathed dragon from the bowels of hell. It was like pot luck which you got. Luckily, it was easily decipherable by the hue of his face. If a giant, glowing, red moon was facing you from the other end of the corridor it might be wise to change your route immediately.
I heard Nervous Nellie left the Company of Absolute Hell recently for greener pastures and moved to another state. It only remains to be seen if he finds serenity or destruction there.
The man had several very real nervous breakdowns during the time I was with the company, one of which caused him to shave off all his hair and don a huge pair of Coke-bottle spectacles that turned his image instantly from “smart company executive” into “nervous, sweating pedophile”. Coupled with the fact his cheeks were generally the same shade as a baby’s bottom if that baby had chronic diaper rash, he was quite a worrying sight.
He worked hard however, which was more than could be said for Mr. Panty-Waist and his ilk. Nervous Nellie would work 78 hours a day if it were possible and then spend another day checking everything twice. He was a big favorite of the beastly Anti-Christ Cruella de Ville, who summoned him most days to her lair to discuss his taking care of her dastardly deeds. He would emerge an hour later, scarlet as a stop sign and exhausted from sticking his tongue down the back of her Prada pants, to bark urgent commands at his meager team of writers, while mopping his brow with a handkerchief.
He could be humorous and cordial if you met him in the corridor or he could be a fire-breathing, foul-breathed dragon from the bowels of hell. It was like pot luck which you got. Luckily, it was easily decipherable by the hue of his face. If a giant, glowing, red moon was facing you from the other end of the corridor it might be wise to change your route immediately.
I heard Nervous Nellie left the Company of Absolute Hell recently for greener pastures and moved to another state. It only remains to be seen if he finds serenity or destruction there.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Trials and Tribulations
Mr. Panty-Waist was truly a wonder of humanity. In fact, if there was a zoo full of human exhibits he would be right there, tucked into the corner of a darkened enclosure, a dumb, befuddled look up on his face, under a plaque that read, “The Human Sloth”.
One of his more murder-invoking qualities involved his sloth-induced tardiness for just about everything. I would wager that his mother was probably in labor for a full three months before he slid slowly and grudgingly down the birth canal into that infuriatingly large, people-filled sphere known as “the World”. Even then, odds are fairly good that he tried to crawl back in. (It’s probably also the last time he was that closely involved with a vagina, but I digress.)
In a full work year I counted maybe five occasions that Mr. PW was in the office before 9:30 a.m. Those were times where he’d missed some deadline and a client was burning his ear canals with threats of dropping in at 10 a.m. to review work that didn’t exist or the one occasion his already fragile psyche was being tested by his kid who had a toothache and was throwing a tantrum that had the Richter Scale people concerned. If there’s one thing that Mr. PW couldn’t abide it was kids throwing tantrums. Or indeed kids at all! Not that he fared any better with adults, but with children he was truly out of sorts. To see him talk to a child was painful and not just for the child. Imagine Patrick Swayze reciting Shakespeare and you’ll get sort of close, though.
His tardiness was legendary in the company. He believed everybody assumed he was at the client’s and indeed that was the myth he liked to perpetuate. He’d call me at about 10:30 a.m. sounding like he’d just awoken from a winter’s hibernation and say, “I’ll be in around noon, I’m uh…at the client…reviewing…” and I’d hear some shrieking pre-schoolers in the background screaming some sort of ancient war cries and think, “You took the kids to the client, huh?” In my final year with the company, the phones were upgraded and I got caller ID, a fact that constantly eluded Mr. PW as he still called each morning, still half in a coma, claiming he was currently entrenched in the plush offices of our client, whereas my caller ID rudely contradicted this by scrolling his home phone number across the screen, like one of those ticker strips at Times Square.
Not that I cared where the hell he was. Wherever he was, he was somewhere that I wasn’t and that was always a positive. However, on many occasions he would stroll in around 4:30 p.m. and want to start working on some “urgent” document. So urgent you can’t get your ass in to the office till the end of the day, huh big guy? Bear in mind I worked till six and had spent the day until then, doing nothing at all due to the lack of boss. So he’d stroll in, read the Wall Street Journal and scratch his large, wooden head frantically for ten minutes, then decide he wanted a 50 slide PowerPoint presentation, with full graphics input and probably including several pie charts, graphs and other things that are patently useless but can make a page look snazzy with some effort and of course it HAD to be done tonight. Naturally, that would mean me staying late to do it as Mr. PW himself, as we established many entries ago, was not born of the technical gene. He was as likely to open and create a PowerPoint slide show as I was to break-dance naked on the conference room table at the next company meeting.
These nights always ended horribly, with me wishing for death – usually for him and involving some heinously painful impaling instrument, but often for myself to just make the pain end. I would create the document and print it and he would edit it by scribbling changes all over it so it looked like some four year old had gotten hold of a Sharpie and used it for drawing practice. I would make the edits on computer and reprint it and the whole thing would happen over and over again until my eyes would scoot around my cubicle looking for a power outlet that I could slip my fingers into.
On the worst occasion, I was still in the office at 11:10 p.m. putting the finishing touches to some giant Word document full of crappy PR jargon that we’d been working on all night. As soon as he gave me the last edit, he left, leaving me to make the changes then fax it to the client. Naturally he gave me the wrong fax number and it took me an hour tracking down the right one and I finally arrived home at 12:45 after I’d briefly considered a detour uptown to pipe-bomb his apartment. Sadly, this sort of thing was commonplace. Working late for something that could’ve been done in office hours - not pipe-bombing his apartment, although I wouldn’t place any bets that someone hasn’t tried at least once.
One of his more murder-invoking qualities involved his sloth-induced tardiness for just about everything. I would wager that his mother was probably in labor for a full three months before he slid slowly and grudgingly down the birth canal into that infuriatingly large, people-filled sphere known as “the World”. Even then, odds are fairly good that he tried to crawl back in. (It’s probably also the last time he was that closely involved with a vagina, but I digress.)
In a full work year I counted maybe five occasions that Mr. PW was in the office before 9:30 a.m. Those were times where he’d missed some deadline and a client was burning his ear canals with threats of dropping in at 10 a.m. to review work that didn’t exist or the one occasion his already fragile psyche was being tested by his kid who had a toothache and was throwing a tantrum that had the Richter Scale people concerned. If there’s one thing that Mr. PW couldn’t abide it was kids throwing tantrums. Or indeed kids at all! Not that he fared any better with adults, but with children he was truly out of sorts. To see him talk to a child was painful and not just for the child. Imagine Patrick Swayze reciting Shakespeare and you’ll get sort of close, though.
His tardiness was legendary in the company. He believed everybody assumed he was at the client’s and indeed that was the myth he liked to perpetuate. He’d call me at about 10:30 a.m. sounding like he’d just awoken from a winter’s hibernation and say, “I’ll be in around noon, I’m uh…at the client…reviewing…” and I’d hear some shrieking pre-schoolers in the background screaming some sort of ancient war cries and think, “You took the kids to the client, huh?” In my final year with the company, the phones were upgraded and I got caller ID, a fact that constantly eluded Mr. PW as he still called each morning, still half in a coma, claiming he was currently entrenched in the plush offices of our client, whereas my caller ID rudely contradicted this by scrolling his home phone number across the screen, like one of those ticker strips at Times Square.
Not that I cared where the hell he was. Wherever he was, he was somewhere that I wasn’t and that was always a positive. However, on many occasions he would stroll in around 4:30 p.m. and want to start working on some “urgent” document. So urgent you can’t get your ass in to the office till the end of the day, huh big guy? Bear in mind I worked till six and had spent the day until then, doing nothing at all due to the lack of boss. So he’d stroll in, read the Wall Street Journal and scratch his large, wooden head frantically for ten minutes, then decide he wanted a 50 slide PowerPoint presentation, with full graphics input and probably including several pie charts, graphs and other things that are patently useless but can make a page look snazzy with some effort and of course it HAD to be done tonight. Naturally, that would mean me staying late to do it as Mr. PW himself, as we established many entries ago, was not born of the technical gene. He was as likely to open and create a PowerPoint slide show as I was to break-dance naked on the conference room table at the next company meeting.
These nights always ended horribly, with me wishing for death – usually for him and involving some heinously painful impaling instrument, but often for myself to just make the pain end. I would create the document and print it and he would edit it by scribbling changes all over it so it looked like some four year old had gotten hold of a Sharpie and used it for drawing practice. I would make the edits on computer and reprint it and the whole thing would happen over and over again until my eyes would scoot around my cubicle looking for a power outlet that I could slip my fingers into.
On the worst occasion, I was still in the office at 11:10 p.m. putting the finishing touches to some giant Word document full of crappy PR jargon that we’d been working on all night. As soon as he gave me the last edit, he left, leaving me to make the changes then fax it to the client. Naturally he gave me the wrong fax number and it took me an hour tracking down the right one and I finally arrived home at 12:45 after I’d briefly considered a detour uptown to pipe-bomb his apartment. Sadly, this sort of thing was commonplace. Working late for something that could’ve been done in office hours - not pipe-bombing his apartment, although I wouldn’t place any bets that someone hasn’t tried at least once.
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