Handbill Handout

I am notoriously bad at small talk. I have a business outing tonight that requires small talk. What do I do? I go to a co-worker who understands how bad I am at small talk and we go over topics. Me: “The weather’s a good place to start right?” Co-Worker: “Of course, especially now when it’s a news story.” Me: “Yeah, but I don’t want to go too far with that because then it could turn into a whole global warming thing and then it could go political and that’s awful.” CW: “It won’t go that way” Me: “I don’t know, I’m worried….” CW: “You could talk about sports then. “ Me: “Yeah, I watch enough ballgames I guess….” CW: “Derek Jeter’s 3000th hit, the guy that got the ball, should he have sold it or did he do the right thing?” Me: “That could go political” CW: “What?” Me: “There was a whole thing about the guy having to pay taxes on the gifts and then people start talking about taxes and then the debt ceiling and there’s no right answer there in a mixed crowd where you...

I am sitting in a Hell's Kitchen bar having a few pints with an old friend.  It is a place he has chosen and it is far enough west that we are nowhere near the tourist horde.  I am, as I often do, complaining about my job and the general stupidity of our industry.  Old friend had little patience for this.  "It's not like we work in a coal mine" he says "It's an intellectual coal mine" says I.  "BUT IT ISN'T AN ACTUAL COAL MINE!" He's right, you know.  Besides, what the hell is an intellectual coal mine?

I took a quarter out of my pocket and noticed that it was a Kansas quarter. The one with the buffalo on the back. What a wonderful, noble creature of the plains! I imagined the buffalo on my quarter roaming underneath endless Microsoft Word 2007-background-blue skies. Then I imprisoned him in the dark slot of a soda machine in exchange for a Yoo-Hoo. An ice-cold tasty Yoo-Hoo. Mmmmm.

Some winners have worked for me over my too-long tenure at my current employer. It’s only partly my fault, I mean sure I hired them but media research attracts a particularly pungent mélange of weirdoes, losers, obsessive-compulsives and, as a fellow sufferer put it, “nervous underachievers”. One of the younger ingredients in that stew of oddballs recently left my employ after a fairly short tenure and while nobody else in the department was particularly heartbroken to see her go (not that she was disliked, rather she simply opted to have as little interaction as possible with all other members of the department) we were all puzzled at one of the things she left behind: a red folder that she sat on every single day of her employment. I have no idea why she did it. She wasn’t a particularly healthy person to be sure – in the six months she worked for me she took about six or seven sick days and for many others she was a nonstop coughing machine –but if she thought having a folder under ...

This is the shortest work week of the year in my industry and therefore it is also one of the longest weeks of the year in my industry. What? Look, you know the difference between objective time and subjective time, don’t you? It can be mathematically expressed as an index for all you number nerds out there. Your numerator is how long each minute feels and your denominator is how many minutes are objectively in the week. Or you could use hours, days, whatever. In my industry we basically shut down around 1pm on Wednesday for the whole weekend which means objectively speaking I have a 2.5 day work week. However because of the combination of people wanting to jam things in before the holiday and the overwhelming longing for the weekend that 2.5 days feels like about, oh, I’d say ten days which gives you a subjective time index of 4. Or 4:1. However you want to express it. Anyway, it’s long. That longing for the weekend is a big factor in the equation. In a normal five day work week on Mo...

I stepped off the bus Monday morning onto the east side of 6 th avenue just north of the block where my usual coffee cart sits. Normally the bus stops at the corner a full block north of the cart and I cross the street there and then walk back one block south to get my coffee and bagel. Some mornings the crowd of buses on that section of 6 th is such that the driver will discharge all of us a block short of the stop rather than wait until the buses in front of him clear out. Monday was one such morning. The current coffee cart guy had gotten used to my routine and had on the occasions where I de -bused directly east of his cart and had to wait for the light to change before I traveled west to his cart he had my coffee and bagel bagged and waiting by the time I crossed the street. I found this really annoying because I sometimes order and extra-large coffee instead of a large and his spotting me and putting everything together before I even got to his cart destroyed any opportunit...

There is a stack of DayMinder brand desk calendars on a bookcase in my office. They rest partly obscured by the sprawling tendrils of a prayer plant that I grew from a cutting given to me by a co-worker almost ten years ago. The plant has some dead leaves that I really should cut but I don’t. It’s fall. I should have some dead vegetation in here to honor the season, shouldn’t I? The DayMinder brand desk calendars go back to 1999. On my desk I have a DayMinder brand desk calendar for 2009 open to the week of November 9, and underneath the dwindling stack of pages on the right hand side there is a DayMinder brand desk calendar for 2010. To the right of all of that is my rolodex. Rolodexes were on every desk when I started, now I would say the majority of desks on this floor do not. Progress. The age of electronic communications. Every Monday morning I come in and turn the page on my DayMinder brand desk calendar. There are four boxes on each page. On the left hand page there is a box sho...

Thanks to the fact that the HR area of my employer is primarily Southern California-based we’ve gotten more updates, e-mails and discussion about the swine flu outbreak than we did about September 11 and the Gulf Coast Hurricanes combined. I always suspected that those events never really happened to anyone who didn’t have roots or relatives or a sentimental attachment to the affected areas. This would seem to prove it. Fortunately they’ve reacted sensibly, dispensing five extra sick days to all employees which coupled with the elimination of overtime for hourly employees and the general morale malaise laying over corporate America did not result in junior level employees calling in “sick” on those nice, sunny mid-70 degree days over the last few weeks. Of course it didn’t. And then of course there was the genius maneuver of having Purell dispensers installed in the bathrooms right next to the sinks where you’re supposed to wash up after you pee and poo and whatever. ‘Cause that’s...

I am at war with the office cleaning lady. A week ago I received an item in a rectangular UPS box. The box measured roughly 18”x12”x4”. So it is not a huge box. It is not a heavy box. It is made of cardboard. Therefore, I believe it can be put into the paper recycling can. And there’s the problem. I have tried laying the box on top of my recycling can. I have tried jamming it into the recycling can. Each night I leave in the hope that the box will be taken away. Each morning I return and find the box on the floor next to the can. When it was on top, sure, maybe whoever emptied the trash put it aside to dump the paper out and forgot it. However once I put it in the can there was no mistaking my intent. It was my way of saying “This, dear blue-smocked lady of undetermined Eastern European descent, is paper garbage. You need to take this away to wherever you put all of our paper garbage. I am not a bad man, one of those idiots who tosses his empty soda cans into the blue pape...

Let’s face it. Every office has at least one. That guy who is always in the men’s room when you walk in. He’s not usually just using he facilities, typically he’s brushing his hair, retying his tie, brushing his teeth, or even shaving. You look at him as you hook the right turn toward the urinal and wonder how the guy ever gets any work done when he’s perpetually primping in the rest room. The most interesting thing about Mr. Hygiene is he’s not typically the best looking guy in the office. In fact he’s typically not even a good looking guy at all, not that I’m anyone to judge the appearance of a fellow human being. Still, he’s in there for what seems to be hours making himself look as attractive as possible. He even carries a full shower bag to work that he leaves on the mirror ledge or on the side of a sink on the rare occasion he actually IS disposing of some waste product. I don’t mean to be judgmental toward Mr. Hygiene. I actually don’t care if he participates in any of t...

This post got some reaction from folks (unfortunately only one of which was actually posted in the comment section). So, I figured it was a topic worth revisiting, especially on a Friday when I’m too wiped out to write any kind of other story. A word of warning however: In the words of the great Jean Shepherd “The following program is in very bad taste. Then again, life itself is often in very bad taste”. There are many, many men here at the office that enjoy a good read when they are in a bathroom stall. So much so that newspapers and magazines used to litter the floor by midday. The office manager came up with the elegant solution of installing those plastic, wall mounted mail bins (kinda like these but in black plastic and not wood) in each stall so people could just leave their reading material there instead of all over the floor. Of course, some people do leave their reading material on the floor, which brings up the first poll question: how many of you would pick up a news...

There’s a really long hallway around the corner from my office that leads to the bathrooms. There’s nothing in it but an exit to the freight elevators and then the exit to the passenger elevators right before you get to the bathrooms. The far end leads to another cube farm. It’s always awkward when I turn the corner and someone’s coming from the other end because how close to you get before you say “Hi” or “Good morning” or whatever? I always hope they’ll turn off into the bathroom or the lobby but once they pass those doors coming this way it’s almost too late to do anything but nod. Elevators are another danger zone. I used to hate that feeling you get when you have to have a conversation with someone and it peters out sometime before you where you’re going. I feel barely qualified to talk about even the weather with people I work with because you never know what the right answers are. Is it too hot for them? Too cold? I don’t really care much, but I know I’ ve gotten into t...